Our Jimbo Jones

If you remember the old "Police Squad!" TV show, you must recall the scene when detectives were talking with a woman who had just lost her husband in a staged bank robbery. They asked him if he had any enemies, and she said, "Well, the Democrats didn't like him!"

That was a funny TV show. Now it's for real that 2,000 federal employees have been placed on unpaid furloughs, jobless benefits are in jeopardy for millions and more than 40 highway projects have been halted. And it's all because of one man, the estimable Republican senator from the great state of Kentucky, the most-unliked man on Capitol Hill, the least effective legislator in the Congress today, the man whom even his fellow Republicans find prickly...ladies and gentlemen, say howdy to Senator Jim Bunning, who once again graces our pages because he and he alone has decided to stick his thumb in the machinery that makes the nation work.

Here we see the measure of the man:



In other news involving Jim Bunning's fingers, he gave the middle one to an ABC reporter who had the nerve to ask him what he was up to, holding up a $10 million spending bill "just 'cause I felt like it."



"I think the older he gets, the more cantankerous he becomes," said Kentucky Republican Larry Forgy, a two-time losing candidate for governor and a big fan of the former major league pitcher . "He's as tough as a pine knot. He doesn't care what they say about him." If you read that more than once, you realize that the honorable Mr Forgy is congratulating Bunning for being cantankerous!



See, this is what you get when you send a pine knot to do an adult's job as your senator. You get a guy who had to apologize after he predicted Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, would be "dead within a year."

The last time he won reelection, in 2004, he almost lost, and here's what he had to say about his Democratic opponent — Daniel Mongiardo, who is of Italian descent...that he looked "like one of Saddam Hussein's sons." Another apology from good old Funning Bunning.

This country needs a lot of things right now. I wholeheartedly support Jimbo's decision to retire. Let's hope he just goes back to ole' Kaintuck' and does a heap o' sittin', spittin' and whittlin', while a real grownup gets elected this fall to come to DC and do a real grownup's job.