Wil S. Hylton writes in GQ about the war against government waste being waged—nearly single-handedly, and of course more or less in vain—by Senator Tom “Death Penalty for Abortionists” Coburn, R-OK.

The story could be subtitled “Everything you always wanted to know about Tom Coburn, but didn’t get to hear because the only thing you ever hear is that ‘death penalty for abortionists’ line.” But that might be a little long.

It turns out, according to Hylton, that Coburn does have very conservative social views, but he’s surprisingly even-handed about it:

“I’m not going to be critical of the people who are pro-abortion. They have a different set of values than me. I can see their position, and I won’t demean it. I counsel lots of women—and I love them to death—who have been through abortion. I’ve done two abortions myself, to save the lives of women. When you talk about abortion, emotion gets into it. But you can understand the position of the other side.”

Understand the position of the other side?!? Where did this guy come from?

Coburn’s real fight is against pork, and he fights his own party as aggressively as he does the Democrats, though he’s particularly “impressed” with the Democrats:

“The Democrats are amazing,” said one of Coburn’s senior staff. “If just one more of them had changed votes, we would have won, and then they could have claimed it [removing billions in earmarks from a emergency relief bill] as a victory. But they’re so in love with spending money, they’ll fall on their swords to protect a Republican earmark.”

It’s obviously difficult to ignore some of the more insane comments Coburn has made—the abortionists thing, the vast gay conspiracy thing—but this is also hard to ignore:

That’s what Tom Coburn wants you to know. That the members of the United States Congress will spend your money just because they can. That they’ll do it even when they can’t. That every year, they borrow the extra $500 billion from China, raising their own credit limit each time they reach it and then raising it again the next year, for a total of $9 trillion in debt so far. That’s right, nine trillion dollars, a figure so enormous that even if the fifty richest people on earth—including Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Michael Dell, along with the richest men in Saudi Arabia and Russia and Hong Kong—got together and sold everything they owned, right down to the last buttons on their last embroidered shirts, and then they donated all their money to the U.S. national debt, they still couldn’t afford to pay a single year of interest at 10 percent.