Jindal Update

by digby

Our pal Bobbby has come in for some scrutiny after his bizarre performance the other night. It turns out that he “embellished” and misrepresented his story about the rescue boats during the hurricane. It’s pretty clear that the line “Congressman Jindal says you can arrest him too!” never happened because the best anyone can come up with is that Jindal and his chief of staff overheard the sheriff telling the bureaucrat story on the phone days later. Oh what a tangled web we weave.

But hey, he was just illustrating a point with a colorful anecdote and the problem isn’t the anecdote. The problem is that essentially he was saying that if the big bad government hadn’t stuck its nose in where it wasn’t wanted, Louisiana residents could have handled the hurricane just fine. And when you think about it, it makes sense to dittoheads: after all, the government is always the problem, never the solution.

But this is just amazing:

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 president’s economic stimulus package that Gov. Bobby Jindal criticized as unnecessary pork on national television Tuesday night.

The high-speed rail line, a topic of discussion for years, would require $110 million to upgrade existing freight lines and terminals to handle a passenger train operation, said Mark Lambert, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.

Jindal on Tuesday delivered the official Republican Party response to President Barack Obama’s address to Congress. He criticized the stimulus package passed by the Democratic-majority in Congress and the president and noted examples of projects that he found objectionable.

“While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending,” Jindal said. “It includes … $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a ‘magnetic levitation’ line from Las Vegas to Disneyland.”

He says he will refuse money to extend unemployment benefits. He claims that rail projects like this are wasteful spending. He seems to actually believe that any government involvement is worse for his citizens than losing everything. I wonder if they agree?

H/t to BB
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