When Uruguay striker Luis Suarez raised his hands to block a sure goal from the opposing Ghana side, he committed a foul and paid the penalty — but Uruguay won the game and Ghana’s World Cup team packed its bags.

Suarez got a red card that removed him from the game and suspended him from the semifinal that Uruguay got to play thanks to his unsportsmanlike conduct. There is no goaltending rule in soccer, and Ghana failed to make the ensuing penalty kick and then lost the overtime penalty shootout.

Suarez and Uruguay earned universal opprobrium, but, hey, all the rules were applied and they won the game. “Truth is, it was worth it,” a grinning Suarez said after the game.

In thwarting the extension of unemployment benefits, Senate Republicans are playing with Uruguayan tactics, manipulating the rules in a brazenly unsportsmanlike attempt to win the game at any cost.
AM Report: Jobless benefits spark fierce debate

Jobless benefits are leading to a fierce debate: Do they prompt jobless workers to be pickier in their searches? Or is employment insurance a prudent response to the worst recession in decades?

Using the pernicious filibuster rule, the minority party is breaking with a long tradition of automatically providing federal support in times of high unemployment, imposing further hardships on thousands of families.

It is bad politics, bad economics, and just plain nasty, but Republicans are clearly intent on sabotaging the Obama administration no matter what the cost to individual Americans.

The Republican objections about not wanting to extend unemployment unless it is “funded” because they don’t want enlarge the federal deficit are bogus and hypocritical. They never hesitated to add to the deficit when it was a question of tax cuts for the wealthy, estimated to have cost $2 trillion over six years. The $35.5 billion for the unemployment benefits is negligible compared to that figure.

Sacrificing such a relatively small expenditure on the altar of fiscal rectitude really does turn deficit hawks into deficit terrorists, to use economist Bill Mitchell’s phrase. To insist on this sacrifice when unemployment is at nearly 10% and Treasury yields are at historic lows is truly foul play.

No less an authority than Mark Zandi, the Moody’s economist who was one of John McCain’s economic advisers during his presidential campaign, said it is vital to extend the benefits regardless of the deficit. The risk of a double-dip recession by not extending them more than outweighs any harm done through a short-term blip in the deficit, Zandi said in congressional testimony last week.

The denial of unemployment benefits to hard-pressed Americans is just the latest tactic in the Republican’s scorched earth strategy.

“Paying for it…should not be a precondition for Congress to provide more financial help to unemployed workers, strapped states and municipalities, and small businesses looking to expand,” Zandi told the House Budget Committee. “A larger near-term federal deficit is not an economic problem.”

Congress can offset the expenditure a couple of years from now, “when the economy is in full swing,” said this economist, whom no one has ever accused of pandering to the left.

But the unprecedented denial of unemployment benefits to hard-pressed Americans — make no mistake, children are going hungry as a result — is just the latest tactic in Republicans’ scorched earth strategy designed to maximize their political gain in the November midterm elections.

It’s a cruel and cynical strategy that could well backfire, even though it victimizes some of the weakest and most disenfranchised sectors of the electorate.

The Republicans are evidently counting on the rage of voters hurt by the economy to be targeted at the Democratic majority, but people aren’t that stupid. They know that the Senate Republicans — and the unfathomable Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson — are the ones who blocked the aid.

Matthew Kaminski of The Wall Street Journal cited the Suarez incident as well as some of the big refereeing gaffes in the World Cup competition as the reason why Americans don’t like soccer — it violates our sense of fair play.

And yet the Republican strategy of winning at any cost — any cost to the American people, any cost to the common weal — is a much greater violation of any sense of fair play, with much graver consequences.

The Netherlands handily defeated Uruguay in the semifinal and his red card was the last action Suarez saw in the contest. If the American sense of fair play kicks in this November, a number of Republicans may be looking at their own red cards