"(Extending unemployment benefits) doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work. I'm sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can't argue that it's a job enhancer. If anything, as I said, it's a disincentive. And the same thing with the COBRA extension and the other extensions here."
-- Republican Senator Jon Kyl of ArizonaYou know, I was going to try to put together something funny and clever based around the fact that colossal asshole
Jim Bunning was continuing his one-man-stand against extending unemployment benefits to more than a million Americans still out of work and on the verge of losing their weekly check. (For the record, around 14 million are still without a job throughout the United States.) I was giving it serious thought -- and then Jon Kyl opened his mouth and made it abundantly clear that the notion of a highly-paid and federally insured Washington fat-cat having the sociopathic nerve to block aid to people desperate for any dollar they can get to feed their families wasn't strictly the realm of a clearly senile buffoon like Bunning.
And I realized that there's nothing at all funny about any of this.
I mean, Bunning has an excuse: He's insane. Kyl on the other hand, if he truly believes what he said, just tipped his cards to a dirty little secret held deep in the heart of the Republican worldview: The GOP lays at least part of the blame for being unemployed at the feet of those who are unemployed. This is sickening for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that eight years of Republican overspending, mismanagement and deregulation went a long way in creating the massive economic clusterfuck we're all now suffering through. Yet not only does the GOP leadership continually refuse to take responsibility for its role in putting millions on the unemployment line; it blames those people for not having the gumption to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get
off the unemployment line.
Bunning's argument is that extending unemployment benefits to Americans trying to get by on a mere fraction of their former paychecks will add ten billion dollars to the deficit, and that of course is unacceptable (or at least it is now; it wasn't when that money was going to pay for the war in Iraq). This is classic, almost literal, stepping-over-dollars-to-pick-up-pennies thinking: If the millions who are currently unemployed can't work and can't take care of themselves, they sure as hell can't stimulate the economy to get us out of this recession. As for arguing that we should try to squeeze the money for the extension out of the stimulus bill -- let's just say that it's both unwise and inarguably immoral to make a political stand on the backs of the unemployed, once again,
especially when you're a fat old guy with a cushy government job.
But that's really what this comes down to: Immorality.
This is what today's Republican party is content to let itself be about. It spent years fostering an environment where it was never the robber baron's fault; it was always the little guy who took out an easy loan he should've known would be trouble; the pensioner who didn't understand the concept of credit default swaps and had no idea that he or she was being bet
against by Wall Street; and now, the poor schmuck who just couldn't figure out a way to hold on to his job when everything went south.
I always thought it was a given that you don't blame the victim in a rape.
I guess I was wrong.
