Bobby Jindal: Still an Idiot

I live in Louisiana, and if there’s one thing all Louisianans know, it’s that you shouldn’t ride your alligator to work unless you bring your own meat lick. But if there’s another thing we know, it’s that Bobby Jindal (seen here wearing a deliciously minty tie) is an idiot. Or, at the very least, he does a wonderful job pretending to be an idiot. How else can you explain the fact that a Rhodes scholar would describe creationism as “the very best science”? And since many Republicans appear to believe that flaunting scientific idiocy is cooler than the Fonz, Jindal’s dimwittedness could just be a hacky way to make nice with the in crowd. Case in point: his delivery of the official GOP response to Barack Obama’s national address earlier this week. Obama tried to make the case for his gargantuan stimulus package, and Jindal fired back with a patronizingly sing-song diatribe about wasteful spending. Only he didn’t so much point out the wasteful parts as he did the necessary and important ones. Jindal poo-pooed a $140 million appropriation for volcano monitoring as if America all of a sudden thinks volcanoes are a bunch of whiney, pork-guzzling pricks. But of course, volcanoes exist near places where Americans live. And sometimes they spew forth ash and lava that can kill said Americans. The only way to know when this is going to happen is to monitor them, which requires paying scientists and purchasing equipment that costs money to maintain. You might even call volcano monitoring natural disaster prevention, which is the kind of thing that could have come in handy before Hurricane Katrina washed away many of the rational voters who would have kept Jindal out of the Louisiana governor’s mansion. Also, the $140 million will go toward the U.S. Geological Survey, which will spend only a fraction of it on volcano monitoring. So, Jindal is not only ignorant about science, he’s also ignorant about the facts he uses to support his ignorance about science. Several scientists have spoken out against Jindal’s idiocy, but I’m not sure whether any of this will deter people from referring to him as “the next Ronald Reagan”. If anything, Jindal is more advanced than Reagan, as his brain seems to have decayed much earlier in life. More details here.