PICAYUNE —
Now here’s a worthy project: Speaking to the Republican National Committee recently, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared that it was time for the GOP to “stop being the stupid party. It’s time for a new Republican party that talks like adults ... We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. We’ve had enough of that.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, there were few cheers. Today’s GOP thrives on idiot contumely. Nor did the crowd applaud Jindal’s pronouncement that Republicans “must not be the party that simply protects the well-off so they can keep their toys. We have to be the party that shows all Americans how they can thrive ... We are a populist party and need to make that clear.”
Now exactly what Jindal means by a populist GOP is almost as interesting as what he thinks would constitute an intelligent political conversation. Apart from those attention-getting pronouncements, his speech was basically what you’d expect from a Louisiana governor to a Republican Party shell-shocked by President Obama’s decisive re-election.
You know, Washington bad, Baton Rouge good; taxes bad, business good, government wicked. A lifetime public employee; Jindal scorns the federal government -— except, of course, he wants to be president.
Despite Jindal’s superficial appeal, the idea that any Deep South governor advocating the policies he’s championed would be considered a viable candidate for the presidency in 2016 speaks volumes about the Republican Party’s refusal to face reality.
But more about that anon.
Republicans have committed the unpardonable political sin: They believed their own propaganda. Many can scarcely comprehend how most Americans see things.
Last week Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote something shrewd about the right-wing fixation with President Obama’s otherness. It was always a mistake, she said, to claim “that he’s a Muslim, he’s a Kenyan, he’s working out his feelings about colonialism. Those charges were meant to marginalize him, but they didn’t hurt him. They damaged Republicans, who came to see him as easy to defeat.”
They also hurt Republicans among voters who wondered about the character, motives and competence of people who ranted about transparently false allegations.
However, Noonan then proceeded to conjure her own imaginary Obama: a hard-core leftist determined to redistribute income from rich to poor, the striving middle class be damned. “’You didn’t build that,’” she wrote “are the defining words of his presidency.”
That’s right, conspiracy buffs. To Noonan, President Obama’s political legacy consists of a truncated quote yanked out of context to distort his plain meaning: basically, that the best restaurant in town couldn’t thrive if customers had to bushhog their own roads to get there.
This same Obama, a veritable American Lenin, emerges in the columns of the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer. “Obama is the apostle of the ever-expanding state,” he writes. “His (inaugural) speech was an ode to the collectivity.”
As evidence, Krauthammer cites the president “clinging zealously to the increasingly obsolete structures of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid ... the very definition of reactionary liberalism.”
Did somebody mention the stupid party?
Putting aside Krauthammer’s characteristic intellectual dishonesty -— he pretends that demographic changes since 1936 doom Social Security — he fails to grasp a fundamental fact of American politics: All three programs are extremely popular with voters. Sixty-eight percent in a recent poll opposed cutting Medicaid; Social Security and Medicare are valued even more. People don’t think they’re obsolete; they want their finances improved and defended.
Obama made a crucial point in his inaugural address. “We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives,” he said, “any one of us at any time may face a job loss or a sudden illness or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative. They strengthen us.
“They do not make us a nation of takers. They free us to take the risks that make this country great.”
Once people see that Obamacare enhances their personal freedom by making it possible to change jobs without giving up medical insurance, it’s apt to prove equally popular. A political party incapable of grasping this elemental truth deserves to lose power.
Meanwhile, down in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal’s idea of populism is to eliminate state income taxes altogether while doubling sales taxes. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, this scheme would greatly benefit corporations and the richest 1 percent, while sharply raising everybody else’s taxes. A public outcry recently caused him to back off a scheme to trim Medicaid costs by eliminating hospice care for terminally ill patients.
Due to entrenched poverty, Louisiana receives far more from the accursed federal government than it remits in taxes -- and always has. People mostly understand that.
In today’s America, however, I seriously doubt that Bobby Jindal’s act is going to play.
Columns
Republicans refuse to face reality
- Columns
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- Vocability Words can be both familiar and extremely confusing when taken from their usual context. Ask any wine enthusiast about legs, fat or bricks and they may assume you are speaking “Vinonese.” Ok — I made that word up; but the language of wine does indeed include legs, fat and brix which have entirely different meanings from what you might assume. Working with definitions from http://www.wineschool.com/vocabulary.html, try your basic knowledge of “Vinonese.”
- Vocability Words can set a tone for a situation, alter someone’s perception of an individual or group — in short, there is power in them. The Bible cautions, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue...” — Proverbs in 18:21, ASB. With that in mind, I will be focusing on words, some recently used and some obscure, to test the readers and build on what you already know. There will be theme weeks, for instance next week will focus on words involving wine — for no particular reason! So try your vocabulary skills with the following and see how you score. I’m always open to suggestions for material.
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A hard rain is gonna fall...
By Kathryn Jean Lopez/Syndicated columnist
After disappearing during his term in office and bringing scandal to his family and state, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford is going to Washington, having won election to Congress. And that’s far from the worst story reflecting the current character of our nation.
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. - More Columns Headlines
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