Bobby Jindal: The Republican Who Would Be Obama

I don’t write about politics much. For one thing, I don’t find it that interesting. More importantly, politics is well covered already by people who have a lot more talent and energy for it than I do. They do a great job, no one needs my two-cents to help them understand politics. I prefer to keep to topics that I feel strongly about.

Today I discovered that I feel strongly about Bobby Jindal. Just having read about him, and reading a couple of quotes, I was already leaning against him. Like his recent posturing over, and rejection of, Louisiana’s share of the bail-out money for unemployment insurance. I thought that was cruel, partisan and stupid, like cutting off other people’s noses to spite someone’s face. Today I actually saw him deliver an important speech, and it became official on the spot, I fucking hate him.

It was the Republican “response” to President Obama’s faux State of the Union speech. After a bad start he just wasted a lot of time and air on discredited Republican talking-points, self-serving autobiography and outright lies. Jindal’s no great public speaker, that’s for sure. I could give him a run for his money myself, and that’s my definition of “slightly above mediocre.”

Never under-estimating the gullibility of their electorate, these Republicans keep repeating that they are the party of limited government, personal responsibility and conservative fiscal policy. Mr. Governor Jindal used these actual words, like they were cut in stone somewhere. Sure, make that limited government authority over corporations, as in “states rights,” the “right to work,” “Internet responsibility,” and “limited regulation;” and let’s have some personal responsibility, as in you’re on your own, you get sick after working for thirty years at something and the heck with you, go ask somebody at the church if your kids are hungry, and just forget that operation right now, and no, you can’t sleep on that park bench.

That any Republican can still have the unmitigated gall to even mention the words “fiscal” and “conservative” in the same sentence defies credence. Return with me now to those days of recent yore, when a Republican president and a Republican congress squandered a running budget surplus, shamelessly channeled potential government tax revenues and no-bid contracts to their friends and contributors, started an un-necessary and disastrous trillion-dollar-plus war on false pretenses, and enabled our banking professionals to give up their fiduciary duties and turn to outright piracy. We all watched it happen, and we remember it all, and we all know who did it, and why.

Bobby Jindal was around for all of that, and he remembers it just fine. He was even in congress for some of it, before he ran back to the briar patch, I mean bayou patch. Today he was just speechifying, spin-doctoring. Rush Limbo’s audience numbers convince these guys that it’s all still working, that somebody still believes them. Don’t forget, lots of us listen to Rush to laugh at how pompous and stupid he is, and especially to consider how stupid you’d have to be to think he was right.

Governor Bobby delivered all of this crap in a reedy little voice with a stupid grin on his face. He delivered this authorized version of the usual pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain bullshit in the condescending manner of a fellow whose time in the Little Pond has convinced him that he is a Big Fish. Like a semi-talented high school debater who has yet to face really talented opposition.

The absolutely worst moments:

1. When he repeated that meme about “sending our children the bill” for the stimulus package. All Republicans have done since Reagan was to take the money for themselves and their friends and send the bill to our children. They have shamelessly inflated the national debt at every opportunity, blaming it on “Communism,” or “9-11,” all the while making sure that the money-rain falls on the right people, the right industries, the right “class.” Just look at any national debt chart if you don’t believe me. Christ-on-a-crutch, just look at the last eight years.

2. When he went on and on about how Louisiana had gotten over that Katrina mess on its own, by self-help, without a big government welfare bailout. “Private citizens with their own little boats . . . Bobby Jindal’s here! Let’s go rescue people!” We watch TV, Bobby, Louisiana got lots of federal money. Like it could be otherwise! How could the fed’s not help out in a case like that? Is Bobby saying that he wishes America were a country where your little corner of the place could get hit by some act of God like Hurricane Katrina, or a huge earthquake, or an explosion of Mt. Saint Helen, and the federal government could just say, go on dudes, do your thing, we admire your courage and self-reliance?

Bobby Jindal is ugly, he dresses funny, he’s a horrible speaker, and if he believes half of the things that he says about government and religion he’s borderline insane. He’s a no-talent who is being humored by the Republican party strictly because of his brown skin and his (apparent) lack of ethics (criminal) convictions.

Good luck, boys and girls. With rising stars like Jindal and Sarah Palin, a front man like Limbo, and nothing but the same old crazy ideas . . . well, you figure it out.