Goodbye, Mr. Bond

Last year, Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO) told reporters that there is “a far Left-wing fringe group that wants to disclose all our vulnerabilities. I don’t know what their motives are but I think they are very dangerous to our security.”

More hating on Wikileaks?  No, Senator Bond was actually talking about the Federation of American Scientists, after we disclosed the inadvertent publication on the Government Printing Office website of a draft declaration on U.S. nuclear facilities.

Needless to say, we did not recognize ourselves in any part of Senator Bond’s confused comment.  But he reminds us that much of what passes for political discourse is little more than pigeonholing of others into friends and enemies, heroes and villains.  It is hard to learn much that way.

Somehow it comes as no surprise to discover that Senator Bond is the last Senator to have been “slugged” on the Senate floor, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out on Tuesday. It is maybe a little surprising that the person whom he drove to violence was none other than the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

In his farewell remarks to the Senate, Sen. Bond briefly discussed the “little scuffle I had with Pat Moynihan. I never talked about it. We never said anything publicly until now. Later on, as we became fast friends, he used to  tease me about setting up boxing matches so we could raise money for charity. But when I looked at his height and his reach, I didn’t take him up on that.”