How convenient that seemingly everyone in
the liberal blogosphere, and even at many points to the right, got to
use Jim Bunning as a scapegoat. The venom of the attacks suggests that
the maverick Republican senator from Kentucky provided a welcome
alternative to the real villains: bankers much closer to the centers of
power. As if Bunning's denial of unanimous consent to a stopgap
extension of unemployment insurance-easily overcome, as was
demonstrated Tuesday night-is at the root of our economic crisis.
It isn't, and it is vicious nonsense to
transform Bunning, who has a long record of opposition to the
bipartisan policies that caused America's financial mess, into a poster
boy for economic heartlessness. The issue was not one of extending aid
for another month to those whose benefits had run out but rather
holding the government accountable for the means of payment.
Bunning's action was a sideshow, a
boneheaded symbolic gesture that backfired with slight consequences.
Yet the senator was made to look the dangerous fool in media accounts
while many of those who enabled the financial catastrophe continue to
be treated as reasonable experts after being rewarded for their folly
with the highest posts in both the Bush and Obama administrations.
The real issue here is the banking
bailout, a bipartisan swindle that Bunning opposed and that has led to
a dangerously spiraling deficit without providing relief to ordinary
folk. It is the same issue that carried Texas Gov. Rick Perry to
victory Tuesday in his state's Republican gubernatorial primary, in
which he defeated U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in part because of her
support of the bank bailout.
As with the January defeat of the
Democratic candidate in the Massachusetts election for a U.S. Senate
seat, the message from voters is loud and clear: The political
establishment cares only about the fat cats and not the people who are
hurting. Bunning's gesture was not intended, as his critics insisted,
to increase that pain but rather to hold the government accountable for
the money it is spending. He has consistently blasted the bailout as a
shameless gift to the Wall Street hustlers and urged that the money
being wasted on them instead be spent to aid homeowners and other
victims of their greed.
This is not the first time that Bunning has stood alone in Congress. He
was the sole member of the Senate to vote against the nomination of Ben
Bernanke to be head of the Federal Reserve. That appointment came from
Republican President George W. Bush, and yet it was Republican Sen.
Bunning who warned that Bernanke as a Fed governor had been allied with
then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan in his disastrous policymaking.
That was four years ago, when Greenspan
was still being lionized by most Democratic and Republican politicians
as well as by much of the media. On Jan. 28 of this year, Bunning once
again rose in the Senate to challenge Bernanke, this time after
President Barack Obama had nominated him for a second term:
"Chairman Bernanke ... bowed to the
political pressure of the Bush and Obama administrations and turned the
Fed into an arm of the Treasury. ... Instead of taking that money and
lending to consumers and cleaning up their balance sheets, the banks
started to pocket record profits and pay out billions of dollars in
bonuses. ... So if you like those bailouts, by all means vote for
Chairman Bernanke. But if you want to put an end to bailouts and send
a message to Wall Street, this vote is your choice."
He is right to point out that enormous
sums always seem to exist to aid Wall Street but that assistance to
average Americans has consistently been only an afterthought. And he
does have a point in noting that if the latest spending extension was
felt to be so important, why wasn't it funded in a timely manner or in
an orderly procedure by his congressional colleagues from both parties
who are now trouncing him?
The money is always there when they want
it, as we have witnessed throughout the banking bailout when enormous
sums have suddenly been made available to those who least need it. The
Treasury Department managed to find $200 billion last week to deposit
with the Fed to increase the purchase of toxic mortgages to $1.25
trillion to make the bankers whole.
But the level of vituperation unleashed
against this senator is so disproportionate to his role in the economic
catastrophe as to raise questions of motive. The overreaction to
Bunning's protest was never anything more than a ploy for Democratic
and Republican leaders to profess great sorrow for the folks on Main
Street while they continue to coddle Wall Street.