Jindal Bells:Taking sides in the GOP stupidity crises

Bobby Jindal, a potential Republican presidential  candidate in 2016, thinks his party should stop being stupid. That's what  he told the slamfest of the Republican Natiional Committee meeting in Charlotte. "We've got to stop being the stupid party,"  is what he asserted to his stupid audience as the keynote speaker.

His words so stupified some of the stupid committeemen that a couple of them met later over  pitchers  of empowering Gatorade and declared Jindal as being stupid for calling them stupid in his stupid  version of Jindal Bells.

Indeed, one of the members' wives, who tagged along to carry her stupid husband's luggage, even thought it was inappropriate for the stupid Louisiana governor to ruin a nice break from the routine to take some stupid tours of Charlotte - all underwritten by the host city.

One delegate even confronted Jindal, eyeball to eyeball, and blurted:  "You're stupid!'

To which Jindal replied, "No, sir, you're stupid!"

"No,  you're stupid, governor!"

That playground exchange lasted a good 20 minutes  before they thought it would help if they took a break from the hostilities to  slip over to the Gatorade bar for a stupid nightcap. (Real men actually need Gatorade as a cheap high for their testosterone.)

Frankly, we don't know what the fuss is all about.  Two of the party's deepest thinkers tried to rally them with good news.  George Will , who is best remembered for his stupid TV prediction that Romney would win in a landslide, assured stupid Republicans that President Obama's inaugural speech was nothing more than stupid "rhetorical cotton candy - sugary and mostly air''. Conservatism, he argued,. is alive and well - no matter the polls that show Obama and Americans aligned on major issues.

Paul Ryan, the stupid vice presidential loser, was once again upbeat, scrubbing pots and pans that had already been scrubbed, and  declaring that if given half a chance, stupid Republicans will show they can govern despite the stupid outcome of the November election.

When last seen, all of the stupid  committeemen went out and cracked open another keg of Gatorade.

Even Mitt Romney stupidly declared elsewhere that he will be back.

Moral:  Stupid is as stupid does.  Did we really need   Bobby Jindal to tell us that?



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Meet Bobby Jindal, the volcanic gun-slinger.

(Sixth in a series)

THAT'S BOBBY JINDAL over there on the far right. (Remember him?)

Jindal says it's OK to carry guns into churches. The Republican governor even signed a law creating the latest freedom of weaponry. You may recall that it is the same Bobby Jindal who damned a Federal grant to the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor volcanos, presumably because Mt. St. Helens is in the state of Washington , not Louisiana. As for gun-packing congregants, the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops says it is not OK in a "place of sanctuary." So the bishops have issued a ban on guns in Catholic churches. Unfortunately, their reach could not embrace a ban on Bobby Jindal, too.

Bobby Jindal: Do as I rant, not as I do

SO THERE WAS Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal , his arms outstretched in a cruciform moment, on the front page of Saturday's New York Times. The governor is again letting it be known that he doesn't think much of the feds' response to the oil spill. He says so every day , perhaps with a lingering memory of how he flopped in a TV response to President Obama in what seems like eons ago. If so, it's a quirky way of rehabbing your political image outside of Louisiana when a lot of folks doubtless remember walking away from the TV set from his unwashed voyage into la-la politics.

Problem is, he seems to have nobody to blame except his own hyperventilating response to the spill. As CBS news has pointed out, Jindal asked for federal (ich!) help and received word from the Oval Office that the state would receive a helluva lot of support paid by BP. He was authorized to deploy 6,000 National Guardsmen two months ago. So far, he's only come through with 1,053 of the 6,000 available.

The Republican governors in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi are doing even worse. There's a certain amount of speculation in those states that the sight of guardsmen on the beaches and elsewhere would scare off tourists. Alas, it used to be only worrisome hurricanes and alligators.

On political non sequiturs, Saxby Chambliss et al

MIDWEEK ROUNDUP:

Non sequiturs are not uncommon in politics, even fashionable, but there was one that stood out for me following the report by a New Orleans newspaper that Gov. Bobby Jindal flies off to church on most Sundays in a state helicopter. A Hindu who converted to Catholicism, Jindal appears to be concentrating on extremely conservative churches in northern Louisiana while avoiding New Orleans for his Sunday "worship". Critics accuse him of politicking at taxpayer expense. And one national church leader, the Rev. Dr. Welton Gaddy, the president of the Interfaith Alliance, has challenged him to stop "politicizing" churches and to return the $45,000 taxpayer costs of his helicopter tours. But a Jindal aide countered the critics by noting that they are for same-sex marriage! Huh? Is that also a valid argument against the infield fly rule?

While we are rooting around down South, there arrives a warning from Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia that President Obama should be "humble" in his speech to Congress tonight. Chambliss, a right-wing Republican, has a way with words. Did he mean that a president with dark skin should not be uppity? Coming from a pol with Chambliss' deeply cultivated roots, the answer must be YES. Remember that this Medicare-eligible white southerner who vigorously opposes Obams' s health care plan, managed to worm into the Senate in 2002 by defeating incumbent Democrat Max Cleland, a decorated triple amputee Vietnam veteran by charging that Cleland was soft on homeland security.(Like so many of the uber-congressional hawks today, Chambliss managed to avoid military service, in his case, with a "bad knee".) Will the Civil War never end? Maybe Chambliss is trying to get a free shoeshine from Obama.

Circle the calendar: Sept. 26. That's the day Bud Norris, the mayor of Mt. Vernon, Wash, has designated as "Glenn Beck Day," complete with a key to the city. Beck is a native son, but fortunately for the city and the nation, they're not all like that. Beck, in case you have not been paying attention, has lost a pile of sponsors on Fox after describing President Obama as a racist who hates all white Americans. Protests has already occured against the mayor - with some signs urging the city to "change the locks." Six of the city's seven councilmen have opposed the idea and city business people are worried that Mt. Vernon will draw negative attention to it. Times have changed since we identified Mt. Vernon solely with the father of the country.

Saving the best for last: The washout of the so-called "reform" ticket in Tuesday's primary election in Akron prompts me to offer a slightly altered bit of hackneyed wisdom:

You can fool some of the people some of the time, but sometimes, not that many...

She was against it before she was for it

THE CLEAR WINNER in mountainous competition for another Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy (GALL) award is Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who rose before her Alaskan state legislature to warn of the dangers of volcanos, particular the one that is quite active in her backyard. She declared:

"And I can assure you, Mr. President, that monitoring volcanos is critically important to the nation, to the world, and particularly to Alaska right now where we are being held hostage to a volcano. " 

Right. Except Murkowski, like Gov.  Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who criticized spending money on volcano monitoring,  voted AGAINST the stimulus package that contained money for that very purpose.       What am I missing here?  

Jindal silent until the dust clears

I'M BEGINNING to feel a tinge of sympathy for the GOP's would-be Stupor Star, Bobby Jindal. After flubbing his TV audition in response to the Obama's address to the Congress, he is now having to again explain his aversion to volcano monitoring, an odd  thought that he slipped into his maiden national address.  You may recall that he was critical of $160 million in the stimulus package  for scientific monitoring of things that can go bang at any time, like volcanos. 

Enter Mount Redoubt, a restless volcano 100 miles south of Anchorage , Alaska, that is currently rocketing ash and dust 12 miles into the atmosphere and forcing some of Sarah Palin's constituents to wear dust masks while creating a health hazard to anything else exposed to its eruptive menace.    

The Louisiana governor must be fretting about  the timing of nature these days.  His office isn't returning phone calls from the national media.      

GOP: A party in need of a party

ALTHOUGH THE national polls told us that President Obama's first address to the joint session of congress  was a grand slam, one needed only to look last night at the Republican faces on the cadaverous side of the aisle to see how those who now represent the  other 30 pct. were living these days. The party's leaders, Sen. Mitch  McConnell and Rep. John Boehner, were gloweringly  stone-faced. And Sen. McCain, who wants to be the GOP's pater familias,  offered us nothing more than a fleeting simpering smile.  On windy days, there is more action on the sculpted  faces of Mt. Rushmore.  

As Mike Maslansky, the CEO of a conservative research group, said:  "The Democrats loved almost everything Obama had to say.  The Republicans hated almost everything that Obama had to say." Sorry, guys and gals on the Hill:  Obama may be around longer than some of you who face reelection in 2010.  So get on the bus and lend a new idea, if possible.

To make matters worse, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the Republicans' latest heart throb to fill the vacuum left by Sarah Palin, laid a dinosaur egg in his response to Obama.  Democrats probably didn't regard it important enough to seriously evaluate it,  but conservative analysts were clearly troubled by the emptiness of Jindal's message. David Brooks grumbled, "I thought it (Jindal's speech) was poorly drafted  - but to come up at this point in history with a stale 'government is the problem...we can't trust government'...It's just a disaster for the Republican Party.  The country is in a  panic now."  Brooks said Jindal laid out a plan that was "a form of nihilism" and added that the current direction of the Republican Party toward a deeper ideological trench was "insane."  

There's more:  Brit Hume, the Fox News guru-emeritus, lamented that it was not "Jindal's greatest oratorical moment."    Others referred to Jindal's remarks as "simplistic"...."almost childish." Who is in charge of the GOP's central casting office anyway?  

Meanwhile, back on the Hill, McCain has accused the Republican National Committee of choosing a song for a presidential campaign ad, without his knowledge,  that is now in court for copyright infringement. And there are reprisals being mentioned by a  prominent member of the Bush family  against Florida Republican Gov. Charlie Crist for aupporting the stimulus. And Sen. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky Republican who has been in trouble before, is threatening to sue the Republican National Committee, accusing it of trying to recruit another candidate to oppose Bunning in the primary.  Sen. John Cornyn , Texas Republican and chairman of the RNC's Senatorial Committee, denies it.  But listen to Bunning: "I don't believe anything that Cornyn says." 

Might it be time for the Republican Party to declare bankruptcy and start all over again with a whole new cast of characters?