More GOP hypocrisy. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will not be receiving unemployment checks, at least in the short term, and thousands more will find themselves without health insurance coverage — all because Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky, is having a temper tantrum on the national stage.

Bunning says he opposes extending benefits to the unemployed during an economic crisis he helped create on principle.

“If we can’t find $10 billion to pay for something that we all support, we will never pay for anything on the floor of this U.S. Senate,” he said…

“We cannot keep adding to the debt,” he said. “It’s over $14 trillion and going up fast.”

But that is a lie.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid fired back, pointing out that Bunning voted against passing pay-go rules requiring the Senate to offset costs of legislation with revenue raising provisions or tax cuts.

Bunning, said Reid, also raised no objections to passing the Bush tax cuts and authorizing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without paying for the provisions.

“We don’t need lectures here on debt,” said Reid.

“The Republicans in the Senate are standing between these families and the help they need while these benefits expire and expired,” he added. “It might work under the Senate rules they can do that, but it certainly doesn’t work for working families.”

As the scandal unfolded over the weekend, Bunnning showed his true overly entitled, elitist colors on video when a reporter tried to question him as he entered an elevator in a Senate building, shouting, “Get off my yard!” Wait, no, sorry, it was actually: “Excuse me, this is a senator-only elevator!”

Bunning’s bizarre behavior over the years has contributed to rumors that he has Alzheimer’s. For example, during his 2004 reelection campaign, he required a teleprompter in order to debate his Democratic opponent. (The fact that this demand was okayed is still puzzling.)

Last February, Bunning made news when he predicted that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was being treated for cancer, only had nine months to live — and then when his staff issued a faint-hearted apology for this callousness, they misspelled the justice’s name twice.

Bunning is retiring this year, in part because of pitifully low polling back home and equally dismal fundraising. It also didn’t help when he called the Senate minority leader, and fellow Kentuckian, Mitch McConnell, a “control freak” last year, telling reporters, “If Mitch McConnell doesn’t endorse me, that may be the best thing that could happen to me in Kentucky.” McConnell is the most popular politician in Kentucky.

If Bunning is suffering from Alzheimer’s, it is tragic that the people close to him haven’t stepped in to protect him from this sort of self-inflicted damage — especially in an instance like this when his unprincipled obstinance risks inflicting serious damage on innocent families.

If he is not ill, then he is reinforcing his party’s reputation for apathy about the plight of regular Americans, which, in a just world, would trash his tattered legacy once and for all and cause blowback on Republicans among voters in the fall.