Jindal's Last Stand; Fighting to the Last Drop of Someone Else's Blood

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Well, the economic stimulus has passed, despite the loud opposition of prominent Republicans. But they're not giving up.

In fact, it seems that some Republican governors like Louisiana's Bobby Jindal are making noises about actually turning down the money coming from the government.

According to the online journal Human Events, which styles itself "the Headquarters of the Conservative Underground" (no, really, and I think they're serious): "State governors -- looking down the gun barrel of long-term spending forced on them by the Obama 'stimulus' plan -- are saying they will refuse to take the money. This is a constitutional confrontation between the federal government and the states unlike any in our time."

Wow! When you put it that way, it sounds pretty epic. I mean, it's almost like that film "300":

VOICEOVER: A messenger came to my governor one day. An emissary from Obama, whom some called a god-king.

MESSENGER: Oh, hi, Governor. My name is Elmer Hadley, and I'm from Washington. I'm here to deliver your stimulus check?

JINDAL: Choose your next words carefully, Washingtonian. They may be your last!

MESSENGER: What? Oh. Ha-ha! What a kidder. Funniest darn thing. We mailed the stimulus check and some guy sent it back all torn up. So President Obama thought he'd have me bring it personally.

JINDAL: Take this message back to your master, Washingtonian!

MESSENGER: Message, Governor? I'd be glad to, but I could just give you the e-mail address for the president's BlackBerry. ... Hey, are you guys going to a costume party or something? What's with all the capes and leather underwear? And are those real spears?

JINDAL: Tell him this! Let all America and all the world know that brave men stood this day against tyranny!

MESSENGER Tyranny? Um, sir, are you feeling OK? This is money to help prop up your unemployment insurance program, build roads, put people back to work! Refusing it would be ... well, it would be madness!

JINDAL: Madness!? THIS ... IS ... LOUISIANA! (KICKS MESSENGER DOWN THE STAIRS)

MESSENGER: Hey! Ow! That hurt!

VOICEOVER: And so it was, my governor and 300 loyal political advisers marched from Baton Rouge and assembled at the border, to face the combined might of Obama's forces. They were joined by some citizens from the state's other cities...

CITIZEN 1: Hey, Governor? Some of the fellows wanted me to talk to you about turnin' down this stimulus money.

JINDAL: Speak, then, citizen.

CITIZEN 1: Well, we were wonderin' if this is such a good idea, what with the economy bein' in the dumper an' all. I mean, we all voted for you. We're all Republicans.

JINDAL (pointing at a man in the crowd behind): You there! What is your profession?

CITIZEN 2: I drive an asphalt truck.

JINDAL (pointing at another): And you! What do you do?

CITIZEN 3: I'm a bricklayer.

JINDAL, turning back to his advisers: Advisers! What is your profession!?

ADVISERS, waving "Jindal/Palin 2012" banners: AAA-OOH! AAA-OOH! AAA-OOOH!

JINDAL: See, citizen, I have more good Republicans than you.

CITIZEN 1: What?

VOICEOVER: My governor stood firm and waited for the onslaught of the tyrant. Would he bring archers who would wrap stimulus money around arrows and fire them into Louisiana? Catapults to throw it into the state over the heads of the men? They waited ... and waited ... and waited. ...

ADVISER: Governor, it's been weeks. Maybe they aren't coming.

JINDAL: Nonsense! It's obviously some trick by the tyrant. They're waiting for us to lower our guard, and then when we least expect it, we'll wake up to find ourselves solvent. Tell the men to stand firm.

ADVISER: Yeah, about that ...

JINDAL: Wait, where are my troops?

ADVISER: Most of them packed up and moved to California. Said something about jobs there.

JINDAL: Treasonous dogs!

ADVISER: Hey, look at the bright side. You reduced your unemployment rate!

JINDAL: That's right!

ADVISER: Of course, that’s ‘cause they all moved where jobs were…

JINDAL: Don't trouble me with details! I'm a genius!

ADVISER: Yes, sir. Oh, I have a letter for you. It's from Governor Schwarzenegger.

JINDAL: Read it to me!

ADVISER: "Dear Bobby. Thanks for the extra cash. We sure could use it. P.S. I still look better in a leather loincloth than you, you little girly-man."

JINDAL: Curses!

Seriously, though. I'm sure the people of Louisiana will appreciate that not getting stimulus money will be better for them, or that it won't really work, or whatever this week's justification is.

This is an ideological battle, after all, and some of Louisiana's citizens are just going to have to keep suffering like good conscript soldiers for the Right, and to burnish Gov. Jindal's political reputation.

But I'm sure that last part's just a coincidence.

Good Question, Jack

From The Cafferty File: 

In the Republican response to President Obama’s speech last night, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal called the stimulus package “irresponsible”. He said it will grow government, increase taxes in the future and saddle future generations with debt.

“Who among us would ask our children for a loan, so we could spend money we do not have, on things we do not need? That is precisely what the Democrats in Congress just did,” said Jindal.

Interesting, after the last 8 years, it would seem that Republicans are hardly in a position to lecture anyone about fiscal responsibility. When President Bush took office in 2000, the national debt was about $5.7 trillion dollars, which after two wars and lots of other spending, is now approaching $11 trillion. President Bush ran up more debt for this country than all previous presidents combined.

Jindal acknowledged last night that in recent years, “our party got away from its principles.” No kidding.

Keep in mind, Jindal — who some see as a possible contender for his party’s presidential nominee in 2012 — is one of the Republican governors talking about rejecting stimulus funding for his state. Jindal says he plans to turn down $100 million because it would require his state to change its unemployment laws. I guess when you’re a wealthy state like Louisiana you don’t need no stinking stimulus money.

Here’s my question to you: Are the Republicans in any position to lecture President Obama on fiscal responsibility?

Obviously, Jack Cafferty is filled with nothing but hate and malice towards the poor innocent Republicans. How dare he try to silence Governor Jindal! Clearly, liberals are attempting to stifle dissent by the fiendish tactic of questioning the GOP. The liberals are the true fascists. 

Out of the Mainstream, Out of Their Minds

Remember when the worst thing you could say about an allegedly "liberal" political opponent was to charge that they were "out of the mainstream"?

msnbc.com:

WASHINGTON - Large majorities of Americans support President Barack Obama's plans to revive the economy and his efforts to work across party lines, according to a pair of public opinion polls released Monday.

One month into his presidency, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found 68 percent of Americans approve of Obama's job performance.

Sixty-four percent of respondents supported the administration's $787 billion economic stimulus package and the same percentage backed his proposal to prevent housing foreclosures, the Washington Post reported.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll, Obama has a 63 percent job approval rating and more than 75 percent of Americans are optimistic about the next four years with him as president.

But it seems that some Republicans are now the ones out of the mainstream:

State governors -- looking down the gun barrel of long-term spending forced on them by the Obama “stimulus” plan -- are saying they will refuse to take the money. This is a Constitutional confrontation between the federal government and the states unlike any in our time.

In the first five weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has acted so rashly that at least 11 states have decided that his brand of “hope” equates to an intolerable expansion of the federal government’s authority over the states. These states -- "Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California...Georgia," South Carolina, and Texas -- "have all introduced bills and resolutions" reminding Obama that the 10th Amendment protects the rights of the states, which are the rights of the people, by limiting the power of the federal government. These resolutions call on Obama to “cease and desist” from his reckless government expansion and also indicate that federal laws and regulations implemented in violation of the 10th Amendment can be nullified by the states.


Yeah, you do that. I'm sure your citizens will appreciate their state not getting any stimulus money. And they'll understand that it's for their own good, or it won't do them any good anyway, or whatever the justification is this week. This is an ideological battle, after all, and some of your state's citizens are just going to have to keep suffering like good conscript soldiers for the Right. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice some of your own people for ideological purity.

Republicans: Those Elitist Socialist Country-Destroying Commie Terrorist Lovers Aren't Being Bipartisan Enough.

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Poor Eric Cantor. Poor Honorable John McCain. Poor Lindsey Graham. It seems those awful Democrats aren't being nice enough to them.

Cantor, the House minority whip, recently released a statement expressing his disappointment that those big old meanies in the Democratic Congress weren't playing nice.

"President Obama promised to put an end to the petty politics that have come to dominate Washington," Cantor sniveled. "Yet today, that message is threatened as the White House and their allies are making political threats rather than crafting a bipartisan economic stimulus plan." (You'd think a guy with a cool title like "Whip" wouldn't be so petulant.)

Honorable John was even more dismayed: "It was a bad beginning because it wasn't what we promised the American people, what President Obama promised the American people, that we would sit down together." Graham, who's on the Senate Banking Committee, whined to ABC News that those bad old Democrats "rammed [the stimulus bill] through the House" after starting out "with the idea, 'We won, we write the bill.'"

I suppose I can understand their pique. After all, during hearings over the stimulus plan, a Democratic committee chairman actually closed down debate by shutting off Republicans' microphones, walking off the podium, and turning the lights off in the hearing room.

Then there was the hearing where the Democratic chairman actually called the Capitol police to have the Republicans removed from the hearing room. And who can forget the snide and condescending statement by the Democratic Rules Committee chairman that the "Republicans are just crying because they're losing on policy debates about job creation"?

Oh, wait. Did I say all those things were done by Democrats? Silly me. Those were actually stunts pulled by the Republican leadership back in the days when the Republicans were in the majority. How soon they forget. Or maybe they think we're so dumb that we'll forget.

Actually, the more you look at it, "hope the American people are so dumb they'll forget the last eight years" seems to be exactly the current Republican strategy. How else can you explain the Republican "plan" to resurrect the economy, which is basically nothing but tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts?

They're apparently hoping and praying that nobody will ask the question, "If tax cuts alone will save the economy, how'd we get into this mess after eight years of Bush tax cuts?" Or maybe they think we're so dumb we'll blame two years of a Democratic-controlled Congress and ignore the fact that that Congress didn't repeal those tax cuts that were supposed to be so great for the economy.

It would also explain the Republican glorification of ignorance and amateurism, which finds its most common expression in bitter denunciations of anyone who shows any sign of being informed or intelligent as an "elitist" and a rhetorical style that consists mainly of variations on "you think you're pretty smart, don't you?"

Rep. Cantor still insists that the Republicans are "committed to working with President Obama to find real economic solutions." Oh, really? You mean the way the Republicans demanded concessions in the stimulus bill, the Democrats agreed to them, and every single one of the Republicans in the House voted against the bill anyway?

You mean the way President Obama came to Capitol Hill to confer with Republicans on the bill, and Minority leader John Boehner announced before he'd even gotten there that he'd instructed the Republican caucus to vote against it?

You mean the way Republican Sen. Judd Gregg claimed he'd be interested in the job of commerce secretary, got a commitment that the Democratic governor of New Hampshire would appoint only a Republican in his place, then withdrew his nomination like a jerky high school kid yanking away an offered handshake and yelling "PSYCH!" That's your idea of "commitment to working with President Obama"? This is like saying Lucy is committed to working with Charlie Brown to kick the football.

Despite it all, President Obama has said he intends to keep working on the whole bipartisanship thing. "The president is always going to reach out to people of both parties," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the Washington Post. "That's what he's always wanted. He wants a lot of ideas."

So it looks like this will be Obama's pattern for a while: Reach out a hand, get it slapped aside, get his agenda passed anyway, then have the Republicans whine and cry about being left out. Personally, I think it makes Obama look like he's being played for a chump. But then, I'm willing to admit the possibility that a black guy with an Arab-sounding name who managed to confound the conventional wisdom, beat the presumptive nominee of his party and go on to get elected president may just be smarter than me.

And unlike the Republicans, I don't see that as a downside.

"I’m Not Entirely Sure Where the GOP is Buying Its Drugs These Days...."

John Scalzi delivers the smackdown on the Republican talking point that Obama's "off to a bad start."

And lest you think this is just the work of some partisan, check out this great piece by Scalzi. Heck, check out the whole blog, and, of course, his books. He's always worth reading.

More Like This, Please

The Fix:

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, had harsh words for some of former President Bush's closest advisers during an interview with the Post's Lois Romano yesterday...

But, Axelrod saved his strongest condemnation for the man who held his job in the Bush White House: Karl Rove. Of Rove's criticism of Obama's economic stimulus plan, Axelrod said: "The last thing that I think we are looking for at this juncture is advice on fiscal integrity or ethics from Karl Rove -- anyone who's read the newspapers for the last eight years would laugh at that."

And this needs to be the answer to every Republican and every Republican stooge in the media who's carping and griping about the stimulus or about any Obama policy: "Considering where we ended up after the last eight years of Republican policy-making, we should take advice from YOU? HAHAHAHAAAAAAA!"

Don't Be a Flounder, Mr. Obama

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You may remember the classic 1978 frat-house comedy "Animal House."

In one scene, the new pledge nicknamed "Flounder" has been persuaded by his new fraternity to allow them to take his brother's car on a road trip, in which the car is severely damaged. One of the instigators, known as Otter (played by Tim Matheson) tries to put things in perspective. "Flounder," Otter says, "you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You messed up! You trusted us!"

(He doesn't say "messed" up in the movie, of course; think of this as the network TV version.)

Some days, I can't help but think that Otter grew up to be a Republican pundit. The "Otter Defense," as I've come to call it, has become entrenched as a Republican talking point.

It started during the Iraq war. When it became apparent that the frantic assertions by the Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq immediately if not sooner because Iraq had WMDs turned out to be dodgy at best, the Republicans were quick to point out that Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, had voted for the war too.

Of course, they conveniently forgot that a large part of the reason for the vote was the cherry-picked intelligence that the administration had fed to them, and to us. Remember Colin Powell with his pictures of real honest-to-gosh chemical weapons bunkers? Remember Dick Cheney's assertion that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction"?

Then, when no WMDs turned up and it began coming out for the first time that there were indeed serious doubts raised about the intelligence, doubts that were never shared with the Congress or with us, the Otter Defense was born: "It's your fault! You believed what we told you!"

And now, as the "bailout" of the financial services industry proves to be something of a dog's breakfast, with reports of CEOs of bailed out companies buying thousand-dollar wastebaskets and executives taking junkets to Vegas and lavish bonuses while running their companies into the ground, the Otter Defense reappears once again.

I have never been any big fan of the Wall Street bailout package. You can look it up. See, for example, my columns of Sept. 28 and Oct. 5. I was, if you remember, concerned about the lack of oversight and skeptical of the claims of companies that said they needed money immediately -- but not if it came with too many strings attached.

I think we're going to get more economic stimulus out of money spent to actually build or repair things. I think we're going to see more bang for bucks that are spent on bricks and mortar and the guys who put one on top of the other than we're ever going to get by buying up complicated and shady "mortgage-backed securities."

But both sides still supported the Wall Street bailout, largely because Bush and his treasury secretary were frantically telling all of us that if Congress didn't vote for this money to be spent right that second, there'd be an immediate financial collapse of Road Warrior proportions.

Now, however, a plan hastily conceived by that same president and treasury secretary and sold to Congress under the threat of imminent financial Armageddon is somehow entirely the fault of the president who inherited it.

And why? He messed up! He trusted Bush! When he called the bailout an "outrage," then said, "But we have no choice. We must act now. Because now that we're in this situation, your jobs, your life savings and the stability of our entire economy are at risk," he was buying into the Bush line. And he was wrong to do so. After all, as Dubbya used to say, "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."

So, Mr. President, my advice to you is this: Stop believing the Republicans. From now on, when they say something isn't going to work, remember that these are some of the same people who said the Wall Street bailout would. When they demand concessions, remember that these are the same people who got concessions on the House version of the stimulus package, then voted against the package anyway.

Bipartisanship is nice, but it requires that the other side act in good faith, and these people have showed no signs of doing so. Instead, they've fallen into lockstep behind Rush Limbaugh, who openly says he wants you to fail, and Joe the Plumber, a modern-day Jethro Bodine who's a war correspondent one day and a Republican economic adviser the next. (We look forward to Joe's next gig as a Double Naught Spy, going up to Langley to hold a press conference on intelligence policy.)

Don't be a Flounder, Mr. President. Or someday soon the Republican Otters will be saying once again: "You messed up! You trusted us!"

Puzzling Questions, Part II

New York Daily News:

You’d think Joe the Plumber’s 15 minutes would be up by now. But , no, after a stint as a correspondent in Israel, he took his act to Capitol Hill today. The first order of business: giving political advice to conservative Republican staffers at breakfast, which, Wurzelbacher told us, “Went really well.” *** One thing that needs to be done, he said, is killing this stimulus package, because it’s just another example of “American government” — Republicans and Democrats — “kicking our butts left and right.” He also called it welfare.

Puzzling Question: If tax problems of Obama nominees are so all-fired important to the Republicans, why is tax dodging Joe the Plumber getting invited to advise them on the stimulus package?