Bobby Jindal Wants the Nation to Be Like Louisiana:
Last night, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal looked for all the world like the winner of the "Most Likely To Be Quickly Raped in Prison" award. That poor bastard would be some neo-Nazi's punk within an hour, and he'd be glad for the protection that accompanies all the sodomizing. What we witnessed was the end of Jindal's presidential ambitions and thus the end of the future of the Republican party. For while Barack Obama was busy at the Capital dancing on Ronald Reagan's grave, Jindal was desperately trying to hand job the Gipper's corpse to life. But those bones are dead, man, so very dead.

Seriously, if you're the governor of a state that has an income tax, a lottery, and a tax on food and clothes and your state is still at or near the bottom on nearly every way in which states are measured (except in those things where being at or near the top sucks balls, like "Most Polluted"), in child health care, overall health of its citizens, education, pollution, and more, you probably ought to realize that you've fucked up and need the federal government. Desperately.

Not only was Jindal seemingly talking about some fantasy speech that the GOP expected Obama to give - at times, Jindal criticized things that Obama had directly addressed, like openness in government, personal responsibility in education, etc.- but he was giving a response that could have been lifted from Peggy Noonan's crate of unused words (it's right next to her shrine to Reagan's diapers). Speaking about government needing to get out of the way of "the American people," Jindal was at his most out-of-touch. You just wanted to stare at his dead, doll-like eyes and say, "Um, who the fuck is gonna get us out of this if it ain't the government? And didn't we kinda try your way for the last 30 years? And didn't it end up fucking us over completely and totally like we were sad old gay man thinking that the hot young dude that just fucked us meant it when he said he just needed to borrow some money for a little while?"

Jindal's analysis of the meaning of Hurricane Katrina seems to be at odds with the fact that Republicans were running the country - the Presidency and the Congress - at the time. Crassly using that tragedy like Bush used 9/11, Jindal squeaked, "We're grateful for the support we've received from across the nation for our ongoing recovery efforts. This spirit got Louisiana through the hurricanes, and this spirit will get our nation through the storms we face today." Where the fuck does Jindal think all that money came from? And, sorry, wasn't it the lack of the federal government's agencies being funded properly that didn't allow them to their jobs, thus leading to the catastrophe? It's almost mind-boggling.

Of course, the most idiotic line of Jindal's speech was his pointing with pride to cutting taxes in Louisiana: "Since I became governor, we cut more than 250 earmarks from our state budget. To create jobs for our citizens, we cut taxes six times, including the largest income tax cut in the history of our state. We passed those tax cuts with bipartisan majorities." One wonders that if all that money wasn't cut, Louisiana might have risen to the mid-40s in state rankings.

While Barack Obama once again elucidated liberal ideas in a way that made them sound new and achievable, while he undercut arguments against his agenda in an incisive way that should have Republicans shitting themselves, Jindal simply said that the future is the past. "Americans can do anything" was the line he returned to, the title of his wee little speech.

He's right. The fact of the matter is that we did something already, back in November. Now we wanna see where it leads. Luckily, Jindal is such a small man in so many ways that he'll be easy to roll right over.