Bunning Blocks The Plate, Part 3

Jim Bunning's still at it.  Kevin Drum calls it what it is:  nihilism.

A lot of liberals have taken lately to calling the GOP nihilistic, and I've never bought it. Opportunistic? Sure. Brutally partisan? Sure. Vacuously unwilling to address the country's most serious problems? Sure. Ideologically frozen in the past? Sure. But nihilistic? On the contrary, they seemed driven by a brute cunning that I might even approve of if it were my own side doing it.

But then along comes Bunning, ranting against a temporary extenstion to unemployment benefits just for the sake of.....well, no one quite knows. For the sake of whatever demons are running around in his head, I guess. It's the kind of situation where a non-nihilistic party would finally step up and agree to rein the guy in. But that hasn't happened. The Republican leadership has, by all accounts, done nothing, and the rest of the caucus — or enough of it, anyway — has actually rallied around Bunning. Rallied around him! They know perfectly well he's a crackpot; they know perfectly well this is a bipartisan bill designed to provide working-class relief in the middle of a massive recession. But for guys like Bob Corker and Jeff Sessions and John Kyl it's more important to demonstrate solidarity with a crackpot than it is to help a few people out. "I admire the courage of the junior senator from Kentucky," said John Cornyn, apparently speaking for many.

Nihilism is probably still the wrong word for this. But I guess it's close enough for government work. Whatever it is, it's a very deep rot in the soul of the Republican Party.

Here's the best part:  Democrats won't calling Bunning out.  Well, one of them at least will:  Joe Biden.  The Lexington Herald-Leader let him have it, as well as the Republicans trying to succeed him in November.

To those who know him, it's not surprising that Bunning answered a Democratic colleague's complaint with a crude profanity. Or that he joked about missing a basketball game while pushing some unemployed Kentuckians into homelessness or bankruptcy.

What is surprising is that Trey Grayson and Rand Paul, the leading Republicans to succeed Bunning, jumped on his one-man band wagon.

Both of them applauded Bunning's actions. Paul's campaign even announced that it will hold a rally supporting Bunning's blockade of aid to the unemployed.

Maybe Grayson and Paul think this plays well with the conservatives who vote in Republican primaries, though Republicans also lose jobs in a bad economy.

It doesn't say much for Grayson's and Paul's judgment, however. Voters could justifiably conclude that they too would be prone to ideological grandstanding, something of which Washington already has far too much.

Got a valid point.  Grayson and Paul need to pay a price too.