Bobby, Get Your Gun ...

Anything you can do,
I can do better.
I can do anything
Better than you.

If this keeps up, Leonard Pinth Garnell is going to need that Universal Healthcare package, to deal with his exhaustion.

Two big duds in the same week.

And, I don't believe Tweety mumbling a plaintive "Oh God" as Bobby Jindal came to the podium, was the only one to do so ... There had to be, throughout Jindals' GOP Talking Points rehash, titled "Americans Can Do Anything", thousands of others.

Numerous folks are comparing Bobby Jindal's rebuttal to Obama last evening with Kenneth, from "30 Rock".

Fine, however, for me, it played out much more like an old SNL skit, a "Bad Politics" delivered dead-center in the strike zone for Garnell to seeth as a "delicious disaster".

Boy, if the message we are supposed to believe from it, that the Republican's "Can Do" spirit is better than the Democrat's "Can Do" spirit, man are the Republicans so tone deaf, and so, so fucking lost.



I mean, when your offical rebuttal to Obama's Not-A-State-of-the-Union-State-of-the-Union Address is Hurricane Katrina, and a racist sheriff .... 

Let me tell you a story. 

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I'd never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: 'Well, I'm the Sheriff and if you don't like it you can come and arrest me!' I asked him: 'Sheriff, what's got you so mad?' He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn't go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, 'Sheriff, that's ridiculous.' And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: 'Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!' Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

From Joan Walsh;

But Jindal is making no sense: He's lying about Obama's plans (there will be no government-run health care) and his Katrina stories are the perfect symbolism for the current GOP: They'll rescue wealthy bankers from oblivion, but leave low-income black people on roofs. Also, Politico caught it first, to my knowledge: The sheriff Jindal lionized in his speech, Harry Lee, is most famous for gruesome racial profiling during his tenure as Jefferson County's top cop. His Wikipedia page has all the details.

Jindal, among other distortions, dissed the monitoring of volcanos;

While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending. It includes $300 million to buy new cars for the government, $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, such as a "magnetic levitation" line from Las Vegas to Disneyland, and $140 million for something called "volcano monitoring." Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.

Well, he might have well mocked the rebuilding of the levees in New Orleans.

Nate Silver has the 411 on this, in his "Jindal Versus the Volcano";

Before the cataclysmic eruption, roughly one million people lived in the region around Mount Pinatubo, including about 30,000 American military personnel and their dependents at the two largest U.S. military bases in the Philippines--Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Station. The slopes of the volcano and the adjacent hills and valleys were home to thousands of villagers. Despite the great number of people at risk, there were few casualties in the June 15 eruption. This was the result of intensive monitoring of Mount Pinatubo by scientists with the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) and the USGS.

The first recognized signs that Pinatubo was reawakening after a 500-year slumber were a series of small steam-blast explosions in early April 1991. Scientists from PHIVOLCS immediately began on-site monitoring and soon declared a 6-mile-radius danger zone around the volcano. They were joined in a few weeks by USGS scientists from the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program, a cooperative effort with the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The USGS and PHIVOLCS estimate that their forecasts saved at least 5,000 lives and perhaps as many as 20,000. The people living in the lowlands around Mount Pinatubo were alerted to the impending eruption by the forecasts, and many fled to towns at safer distances from the volcano or took shelter in buildings with strong roofs. Additionally, more than 18,000 American servicemen and their dependents were evacuated from Clark Air Base prior to the June 15 eruption. In the eruption, thousands of weaker roofs, including some on Clark, collapsed under the weight of ash made wet by heavy rains, yet only about 250 lowland residents were killed. Of the 20,000 indigenous Aeta highlanders who lived on the slopes of Mount Pinatubo, all but about 120 were safely evacuated before the eruption completely devastated their villages.

No, wait a minute, it was, forget about the Democrats, and their Big Government, Big Spending Ways, you should just "Trust Us";

In recent years, these distinctions in philosophy became less clear -- because our party got away from its principles. You elected Republicans to champion limited government, fiscal discipline, and personal responsibility. Instead, Republicans went along with earmarks and big government spending in Washington. Republicans lost your trust -- and rightly so.

Tonight, on behalf of our leaders in Congress and my fellow Republican governors, I say: Our party is determined to regain your trust. We will do so by standing up for the principles that we share -- the principles you elected us to fight for -- the principles that built this into the greatest, most prosperous country on earth.

"... Went along with earmarks and big government spending in Washington ...?"

Hello? ... The Bush Grindhouse and their billions-of-dollars lies? ... Ted Stevens? ... The rubber-stamp Republican-controlled Congress for six-of-the-last-eight-years?

Yeah, we'll get back to you on that one, Bobby ... 



It would have been much better off, despite whatever the traditions may be, if the Republicans sat this one out last evening.

If Jindal is supposed to be one of the top tier, "the smart one" of the potential 2012 field, you saw how worried The Wasilla Whiz Kid is about him, using the day to dump the news of settling her Ethic Charges, and getting dunned about $7,000 in reimbursement payments and taxes.

Trying to compete with the Big Show, Obama in his groove spot of a giant spotlighted speech, was a lost cause.

They should have saved themselves, and sent out Stumblin' Bumblin' John McCain, for his continuing bitch session, which, undoubtedly, would have been equally, if not more, entertaining.

But no, the Republicans wanted to show us their future, a shitbag of failed policies, bankrupted ideology, completely empty of any new ideas, and no desire to even get into the game.

That's their mantra and their sticking to it.

My fellow citizens, never forget: We are Americans. And like my Dad said years ago, Americans can do anything.

Yeah, that song has already been sung.

Anything you can be
I can be greater.
Sooner or later,
I'm greater than you.

Bonus Jindal Riffs

There is an explosion, out on the World Wide Web, of great reactions to Jindal today, so we have posted them separately ... Jump on over to Jindal Jabberwocky to catch up on them.

And, since we weaved it into the narrative above, we might as well post it.

Annie Get Your Gun - Anything You Can Do