The Republican march toward oblivion

[dcsmart]

Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History, a socialist analysis of the Democratic Party, and editor of The Struggle for Palestine, a collection of essays by leading solidarity activists. He is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review.

PERHAPS ALL we need to know about modern conservatism and its party, the Republicans, was captured in Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's nationally televised response to President Barack Obama's February 24 address to a joint session of Congress.

While Obama made one of the most forceful appeals in generations for government action to address economic crisis and declining working-class living standards, Jindal centered his response on a folksy story about government bungling during the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005.

As he told the story, he and Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee bravely risked arrest to back down boneheaded government bureaucrats who were refusing permission for private-citizen boaters to rescue hurricane survivors.

It only took a day or two for liberal bloggers, and then the mainstream media, to show that Jindal's story was not only inaccurate, but most likely a fish story. Later, his press office had to admit that the incident he described never really happened. Every subsequent attempt that Jindal's office made to explain away the governor's tall tale just ended up making him look like an even bigger putz than he did during the speech itself.

It's hard to figure what Jindal was thinking when, in the age of Google, it would take only five minutes of clicking to discover that his story was phony. But it also illustrated the through-the-looking glass take on the world that conservatives have today.

David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, scathingly reviewed the content of Jindal's speech on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: "To come up in this moment in history with a stale, 'Government is the problem, you can't trust the federal government,' is just a disaster for the Republican Party. It's not where the country is, it's not where the future of the country is."
Text

FULL ARTICLE
http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/05/republican-march-to-oblivion

[liberal N proud]

1. Couldn't happen fast enough

:popcorn:

[Demeter]

2. Oblivion is Too Good for The GOP

They really need a Nuremburg Trial equivalent. Never Forget!