Who's off message?

Mitch McConnell says: "There's no debate in the Senate about whether we should pass a bill -- everyone agrees that we should." And John Boehner says: "The president knows that Republicans support extending unemployment insurance." They just want it to be "fiscally responsible" and "deficit-neutral" (though not by - horrors! - getting rid of tax cuts on the wealthy, money which doesn't go right back into the economy like spending money for the out-of-work does, but that's a different post).

But if they want anybody to buy that, they need to muzzle some other prominent Republicans. Like, say, Senator John Kyl: "[C]ontinuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work."

Or Senator Richard Burr: "The wrong thing to do is to automatically today extend unemployment for 12 months. I think that's a discouragement to individuals that are out there to actually go out and go through the interviews."

Or Senator Judd Gregg: "Because you're out of the recession, you're starting to see growth and you're clearly going to dampen the capacity of that growth if you basically keep an economy that encourages people to, rather than go out and look for work, to stay on unemployment."

Or Governor Tom Corbett: "People don't want to come back to work while they still have unemployment. They're literally telling [employers] 'I'll come back to work when the employment runs out.' That's becoming a problem ... The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there."

Or Tom Delay: "[T]here is an argument to be made that these extensions of these unemployment benefits keeps people from going and finding jobs."

Or Ben Stein (not elected, but a powerful voice): "The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities."

Or candidate Sharron Angle: "you can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job, but it doesn’t pay as much." (Does she know what unemployment is in, say, Mississippi? Or Pennsylvania?)

Or candidate Ron Johnson: "When you continue to extend unemployment benefits, people really don't have the incentive to go take other jobs. They'll just wait the system out until their benefits run out, then they'll go out and take, probably not as high paying jobs as they'd like to take, but that's really how you have to get back to work. You have to take the work that's available at the wage rates that's available." (And if there isn't any work available, Mr Johnson? What then?)

Anyway, I'm not saying that the official position of the Republican party, or even the unofficial position of most Republicans, is that if you're out of work, you deserve it and should lose your house and then starve. I'm just saying that a lot of them certainly do talk like it is.