Bobby Jindal: Demon Hunter

With all the attention John McCain is focusing on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as a possible vice presidential candidate (McCain apparently believes running alongside a brown man will make him seem less like the flake-faced Caucazoid zombie he is), it's no wonder that Jindal's batshit insane past is coming to light. As a resident of Louisiana, I've known about Jindal's participation in the allegedly cancer-curing exorcism of a college friend for years. He wrote about the bizarre ritual in an essay for the New Oxford Review in 1994. You may be wondering why this kind of barbaric psychosis wasn't an issue in Jindal's congressional campaign, but if you are, then you've probably never lived in Louisiana. Jindal's craziness should have knocked him out of the running for governor, however, if Hurricane Katrina hadn't apparently washed away most Louisianans with critical thinking skills. Now that Jindal's ugly past is being splayed out on a national stage, I'm surprised that none of the stories I've read about his demon-conquering adventures speculate on what I've long suspected--that Jindal made the whole story up as a sort of road to Damascus revelation in his life. After all, Jindal was a Hindu until he converted to Catholicism as a teenager. And there's nothing the right-wing Christians of my great state hate more than a religion different from (yet equally absurd as) their own. More details here.