Praying for Theistic Murder

This came out yesterday; I first saw it at Balloon Juice. It has since been picked up by Mock, paper, Scissors and Brilliant at Breakfast, as well as a few others. The back story is this: On Monday, Sentator Coburn called on his faithful followers to pray for the death or incapacitation of Robert Byrd, so as to prevent the dems from having the requisite 60 votes to move health reform forward. Byrd showed up... But Senator Imhofe, a Republican, didn't. What we have below appears to be a caller who is tearfully afraid that his prayer session may have backfired, killing Imhofe by mistake.

It didn't occur to me that this might be a hoax, a bit of performance art. No one seems to know whether this is "real" or not, though presumably, someone does. Since this has popped up in quite a few other places, I had more or less decided not to post it myself. However, I think Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast makes a very, very important point:

If it ISN'T a joke, but a serious caller, than we are in more trouble than we realized. And even if it is a joke, Barrasso's reaction, or rather, non-reaction, to the idea of praying for someone to die, means we are in more trouble than we realized.