Time For Jim Bunning To Get "The Hook"

(Note: Baseball parlance for relieving a pitcher from the game, for the uninitiated.)

So let’s review the most recent antics of Senator “High And Tight,” shall we?

Bunning’s mental competency was questioned here in 2004 in his Senate campaign against Daniel Mongiardo, in which Bunning used a teleprompter during a debate (hmmm, criticizing a politician for using a teleprompter…sound familiar?), criticized Mongiardo’s campaign for an alleged attack on Bunning’s wife that never took place, and also compared Mongiardo's appearance to one of Saddam Hussein's sons.

And oh yes, this references the famous “civil liberties don’t mean much when you’re dead” quote (though other wingnuts have spoken those words also, it should be noted).

Also, he opposed naming R. David Paulison as head of FEMA after Katrina (post-Mike Brown) here because the agency hadn’t yet developed “a suitable appeals process for property owners whose flood insurance claims are rejected” (ummm…and wouldn’t it be easier to do that with someone actually heading up the agency?).

He also voted to extend amnesty to Iraqis who murdered our troops (one of 19 Repug senators to do so, noted here).

He was also the only Senator not to bother to vote one way or the other on health care reform here (one of the 21 votes Bunning missed for that month).

And now, I give you Bunning’s latest embarrassment (here – h/t Atrios)…

Jim Bunning, a Republican from Kentucky, is single-handedly blocking Senate action needed to prevent an estimated 1.2 million American workers from prematurely losing their unemployment benefits next month.

As Democratic senators asked again and again for unanimous consent for a vote on a 30-day extension Thursday night, Bunning refused to go along.

And when Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) begged him to drop his objection, Politico reports, Bunning replied: "Tough shit."

And as a symptom of our corporate political-media-industrial complex’s almost fetishistic preoccupation with deficit reduction, it should be noted that Bunning supposedly doesn’t object to the extension, but only that it might add to the deficit unless it is paid for with stimulus funds.

(The next time I hear the Bucks County Courier Times Op-Ed page or any other conservative house organ yapping about how deficit reduction is supposedly more important than putting people back to work, I’m going to remember this episode.)

And as Politico/HuffPo report, the Senate has adjourned without acting on the extension.

At this moment, it is harder for me to contemplate a more worthless group of human beings than the U.S. Senate, I must tell you.

And Bunning wanted everyone to know that it was vitally important to him that proceedings end so he can watch a TV sports event.

This senile old fossil would be doing his constituents, to say nothing of the rest of this country, a favor if, after he returned home to watch his precious college basketball game, he decided to stay there and never come back to Washington.

He’s already not running for another term (not that he’d have a snowball’s chance of winning re-election anyway). Find a speck of decency and just quit right now, will you, Senator?