Saturday, February 28, 2009
"This is liberal blogger B.S. The story is clear."
Yesterday,
I questioned Bobby Jindal's decision to go on vacation and let Timmy Teepell and Melissa Sellers handle the fallout and intensifying controversy surrounding the Governor's disasterous prime-time address to the nation on Mardi Gras.
And true to form, the Teepell/Sellers tag-team is mucking things up royally.
Ryan at the Daily Kingfish has the goods: a WWL news report about Jindal's speech preparation, and a fine presentation of TPM's wonderful recap of the evolving "Harry Lee" story. One of the reasons why I like Ryan's post so much is that he probably gives Your Right Hand Thief too much credit. Thank you, sir!
And, not to toot my own horn too much, but it does look like I zeroed in on a glaring weak spot in Melissa Sellers initial "clarification" of Jindal's story about Sheriff Harry Lee. That is, if Jindal was merely observing Lee "recount" an experience during a telephone interview, as she said he was, why did Lee he get so steaming mad and yell into the phone
"Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!"? Surely such a reaction and statement wouldn't occur during an interview.
Now, when you read
TPM's recap of this saga
as presented in the Politico, you learn that Timmy has now changed or corrected Sellers' initial (problematic) story
[Politico's Ben Smith] soon posted an update explaining that he had misunderstood Sellers earlier. According to Teepell, Smith now wrote, rescue efforts were in fact still underway when Jindal met with Lee. And Jindal overheard Lee yelling on the phone to justify a decision he had previously made, not giving an interview about the episode, as Sellers' earlier version had had it.
In fact, that whole thing about Jindal overhearing Lee giving an interview? It's now gone from Smith's post (though, thanks to the dangers of syndication, it remains here) as if Jindal's office never said it.
Why did Sellers' problematic and perhaps damning explanation suddenly "disappear" from a published news report?
Timmy Teepell, whose homeschool curriculum apparently didn't include the first rule of holes, decided to keep digging. Instead of doing a competent job for his vacationing boss, he thought it was important to contact Ben Smith one last time and describe the whole kerfuffle thusly:
This is liberal blogger B.S. The story is clear.
The story is far from "clear", and I don't think lashing out at liberal bloggers is going to help matters.
It seems probable to me that Jindal's Harry Lee anecdote was artfully massaged and embellished. Whatever. Pols do it all the time. But more interesting is the dumb lesson that Jindal drew from it, and the dumb, simplistic argument Jindal made throughout the most important speech of his political career.
Even the
Times Picayune decided to catalogue the mystifying examples of "waste" which our whiz kid Governor cited throughout his address.
Jindal... criticized a $140 million portion of Obama's stimulus bill for volcano monitoring when much of the money would be used for U.S. Geological Survey equipment to gauge rising river waters and storm surges, which would have applications for coastal Louisiana.
...
Louisiana's transportation department plans to request federal dollars for a New Orleans-to-Baton Rouge passenger rail service from the same pot of railroad money in the economic stimulus package that Jindal criticized as unnecessary pork.
The administration's
response?
Asked for comment Friday about the Jindal stance on the federal rail money, the governor's Chief of Staff Timmy Teepell said he does not think the Las Vegas to Anaheim line is a good use of taxpayer money. He did not address the Louisiana proposal.
Apparently, Jindal would scuttle USGS funds to help us monitor storm surges and protect our coast because monitoring volcanoes is laughably wasteful. Further, Jindal thinks the potentiality of a train connecting Las Vegas to Anaheim is reason enough to kill funds for rail service between Red Stick and New Orleans.
===
Update: Jeffrey distills it better than me:
On Tuesday Jindal whines about the irresponsible gubmint trying to build a "train to Disneyland" By the end of the week, Jindal is 1) asking to build a train and 2) in Disneyworld.
===
Americans can do anything, but Politicians like Jindal can force themselves to BELIEVE anything.
Labels: Cons, Jindal, Pelicans, Teepell, YRHT
7 Comments:
I still don't buy the idea that Jindal has forced himself to believe any of his bullshit. It's just not necessary to my understanding of PBJ's phoniness.
It's simpler to say that he just doesn't care... or isn't really interested in anything other than his own advancement.
I think you're right; he probably knows that volcano monitoring and other stuff is probably a pretty useful thing, so I should have saved that concluding locution for another topic, like Jindal's anti-science views. I used to think he was "pandering" on the evolution thing, but now I'm of the opinion that he really believes this. (It's amazing that I've not heard him "slip" on this, and no backchannel hearsay to the contrary).
Usually the simplest explanation is preferable and more charitable in situations like these, but we're talking about an ambitious young man who decided to publish his "observations" about battling a demon in a scholarly journal, so fairly weird explanations about his political behavior are not as implausible as they might seem.
Ah, but you've preserved and observed it well, Erster.
I've been saying all along that he's got the blank eyes of a True Believer, has shut himself off from the "reality-based community" in order to hold to his batshit-crazy "ideals," be they cult-generated or otherwise. Remember how they told us what a "wunderkind" that Dumbya was, about how HE WENT TO YAAAALLE, how his brains looked so different from that simian countenance? Same hard sell, same lack of substance to back it up. Money can buy a lot of things in this world, and if you're connected properly, it can buy you ALL things.
A former friend, who works in the Lege, used to tell me what a "good woman" that Bobby's mama was, all of her years as a gubmint employee, etc., but y'know, I still don't buy it. "Good people" don't delight in genocides, and they don't do absofuckinglutely ANYTHING to institute caste systems.
I might not have been there when it happened, but I could tell from here that the non-response/genocide of Katrina was no "accident", no "will of gawd" incident. Destroy New Orleans, and Bobby can FINALLY get "elected"! Sounds trite, but it really does seem to apply. Teh republicunts have invested a helluva lot in this boy, from day one; he's been raised-up to be The Second Coming Of Dumbya, the next legacy tool/puppet to tend the will of the richest 1%. Hell, a girl I went to LSU with, waaayyy back in the day, went to high school with Piyush, and at first, shallowly defended his "academic record," but had nary an answer for his batshit behavior. She knew he was a creepy little bastid from day one.
Lastly, a friend in England is hysterical with shock that I had predicted that Piyush would fall flat on his face, and that he DID. Not quite a Tory, that one, but close enough to smell like one. I may not have a political science degree, but I can see how patterns repeat, and where they're going from here.
It'll be interesting to see which fork in the road that Nero will take from DisneyWorld, whilst Rome burns... yes, he could very well use all of this to his advantage, and Timmy thinks that HE is smart enough to pull that spin-job off. It's that other fork that's going to be funny as hell, though. And try as he might, Home-Schooled Poster-Boy is NOT Karl Rove. The only relief is that even Karl Rove isn't Karl Rove anymore... and I indeed look forward to being the first to spit upon his bug-eyed corpse after he's hung for treason and war crimes.
It's juts another made-up anecdote by the right to crap on the world's largest elected democracy. His final statement about how government is the source of all problems . . . in a way he totally crapped on the only organization that actually did an amazing job after Katrina: the US Coast Guard. Instead of giving them due credit, he tries to say that it was hillbillies in unregistered boats who were the true heroes.
He tried to assign heroism to hillbillies with unregistered boats instead of the FEDERAL US COAST GUARD simply to pander to the 20% of the country that sill buys this "Drown the Guv-Mint" bull crap.
Jindal told the Harry Lee story to the National Press Club on 5/2/08:
"I was literally in a sheriff's office and he was spitting nails. I said, "Sheriff, what's got you so mad?" He was on the phone yelling at somebody saying, "I'm the sheriff and if you don't like this, you can come arrest me." I said, "Sheriff, what's the matter?" Literally, there were people in the water. He'd gotten on the radio, they had people going out there in boats to rescue people, and he said, "I went on the radio and he asked for people to come help and rescue people out of the water." Well, the volunteer showed up. We live in a great country. Volunteers, recreational boaters, showed up with their boats. Sheriff's deputies from all over showed up with their boats ready to go. Some bureaucrat -- and he literally, what he told them was go to the causeway interstate exchange and that became a boat launch.
I mean, you could just go to the interstate and launch your boat directly in the water, go out there and pick up people off their rooftops. He didn't have enough deputies to do it. Some bureaucrat showed up and said to the boaters, "You're not allowed to go in the water unless you have proof of registration and insurance." People are about to die and they're worried about paperwork. I told the sheriff -- I told the good sheriff, "Sheriff I agree with you. That's ridiculous." Before you know it, he's back on the phone, and I hear him say, "I got Congressman Jindal here. You can come arrest us both if you don't like it ." I said, "Wait a minute. I don't remember volunteering for that, Sheriff." (Laughter.) I said, "Who are you talking to?" He was all, "Aw just the radio stations. Don't worry about it." (Laughter.) But it wasn't just in the rescue efforts. Many people think, "Well, look, the rescue efforts were over, things got immediately better in the recovery efforts as well.""
In this version, Lee tells Jindal that he was speaking to a radio station, not a "faceless government bureaucrat." This could be the "interview" reference that magically disappeared from Ben Smith's piece.
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