Has anybody here seen my old friend, Vivek Murthy? Can you tell me where he's gone?

The next time you hear some media hack bemoaning the fact that the nation does not have a surgeon general you should light a votive candle for NRA President Jim Porter and cut a check to his organization. Yes, the reason Vivek Murthy is not embarrassing the country in the public media is because Porter announced the vote for his nomination would be scored on each senator's NRA rating. No arm twisting, just a subtle reminder to the senators that he would be taking names, was all Porter had to do to ice the career of the founder of Doctors for Obama.
There are two groups in Washington that politicians know they can only cross once; Right to Life and the NRA and when Obama attempted to reward a subservient lackey with a public platform that reality hit home. Harry Reid changed the Senate rule on the filibuster just so ideologues like Murthy could be confirmed without a single Republican vote. So why confirmation vote? It could be that Harry Reid values his own "B" lifetime NRA rating but more likely because it would further endanger the endangered careers of Senators Begich, Hagan, Landrieu, Pryor, Shaheen and Udall.
When the Senate begins work on next year's budget Republicans might consider that if the nation could survive an Ebola outbreak without a surgeon general it may be a that the position is a colossal waste of tax dollars that add to the nation's indebtedness with no tangible benefit to the population. Hats off to Jim Porter and the NRA for not burdening cable television viewers with one more ideologue prating inanities. It is because the Senate has allowed the administration to populate itself with political operatives that the federal government is neither competent nor credible. This is partisan gridlock; not bipartisan gridlock. Harry Reid and the Democrats own this failure but it is a harsh reflection on a president so bereft of vision and political talent that he would nominate a candidate his own party would not support.