Idiot Of The Week: Senator Jim Bunning

by Nathan Walpow

I don’t go to that many baseball games. When I was a kid there’d probably be three or four Yankee games a year; then there was a stretch of ten years where there wasn’t a team nearby; and in the thirty years I’ve been in L.A. I’ve probably averaged two a year. But I’ve been pretty lucky in catching momentous ballpark events. I saw Bob Gibson’s 3000th strikeout. And I’ve seen three no-hitters—two of them perfect games. The more recent was Dennis Martinez’s against the Dodgers in 1991.

The other was on Father’s Day in 1964. Fittingly enough, I was with my father. The game was at Shea Stadium, where the Phillies, unaware that they were about to suffer one of the worst pennant-race collapses in major league history, muffled the Mets, 6-0. The Phils’ pitcher was Jim Bunning.

So I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Bunning, even after he left baseball and moved into politics and became, according to the National Journal, the second-most conservative member of the Senate. I tried to overlook his bizarre behavior during the 2004 Senate race, where he used a teleprompter during a debate, and called his opponent "limp wristed" and said he looked like one of Saddam Hussein’s sons.

But I will cut Bunning no more breaks. His assholitude has gone over the line. On Saturday, talking about his support for conservative judges, he said Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has "bad cancer. The kind that you don’t get better from," then continued with, "Even though she was operated on, usually, nine months is the longest that anybody would live" with pancreatic cancer.

This is the kind of thing you say in your living room to your idiotic buddies. Not at a Lincoln Day dinner. What a putz.

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