Another day, another stupid from Sharrrrron Angle.
Sitting down with conservative radio talk show host Heidi Harris, Angle once again addressed a topic that brought her a bit of political heat -- including a hard-hitting ad from her opponent Harry Reid-- not too long ago.
"People don't want to be unemployed," she explained. "They want to have real, full-time, permanent jobs with a future. That's what they want, and we need to create that climate in Washington, D.C. that encourages businesses to create those full-time, permanent jobs with a future, and all [Rep.] Shelley Berkeley and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid want to do is put a band-aid on this by extending unemployment, which really doesn't benefit anyone. What happens is of course that your skills stagnate. You become demoralized yourself, you know, feeling that I can't ever get a job, and these are not the solutions to the problem. We have real solutions, but they won't look at the real solutions."
Nevada has the highest unemployment rate in the country, at 14 percent. Insulting 14 percent of your voters isn't the way to get votes, Sharron. But aside from the bad politics, there's a deeper meaning to this, as Benen notes:
As for the larger partisan context, for most of the summer, Republicans insisted that they really do care about employment benefits and jobless Americans, they just don't want extended aid to be added to the deficit. The GOP's opposition isn't about callousness -- heaven forbid -- it's about fiscal responsibility.
But we continue to see just how dishonest this talking point is. Nevada's Angle believes unemployment benefits don't help anyone; Alaska's Joe Miller believes unemployment benefits are unconstitutional; Kentucky's Rand Paul thinks it's time to cut the jobless off before we're worse than Europe; and a wide variety of Republican lawmakers have said the aid to the unemployed is encouraging laziness.
It's ironic, in a way. Unemployment will very likely cost Democrats their congressional majority, but it's Republicans who seem to actively, personally dislike those who've lost their jobs.
Need additional evidence of this callousness? Tax cuts for the rich don't need to be offset, because the deficit is, well, irrelevant when giving away the farm to the wealthiest.
It used to be that Republicans hid these tendencies from voters, but no longer. It's all out in the open. And while voters may be too demoralized or angry at Democrats to care in 2010, and while Democrats are too panicked at the moment to fight back effectively, eventually, this isn't a battle they're gonna win in the long term.