Before Senator Jim Bunning was adding to his legacy of questionable quips on Wednesday when he commented that Yankees owner was "smart to die in 2010" before the Death Tax is allowed to be reinstated, he was the focus of an interesting observation by the Huffington Post's Arthur Delaney, who points out that Jim Bunning's once maligned stance on paying for the extension of unemployment benefits has now been adopted by his fellow GOP Senators:
The press lambasted Bunning and members of his own party begged him to back off as he jeopardized benefits for thousands of people.
Since then, almost the entire Republican party has taken up the retiring senator's argument that deficit reduction is more important than jobless aid, and extended benefits have been in limbo since the beginning of June, affecting 2.1 million people. The press has shed some its previous sympathy for the unemployed and now wonders, as many members of Congress do, if the extended benefits don't actually make them lazy.
For the GOP and Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson, it turns out, Jim Bunning wasn't a pariah after all -- he was a fiscal visionary.
