Bobby Jindal Didn't Represent The GOP Well At All In His Response To President Obama's Address!

For heaven's sakes!Bobby Jindal's response to President Obama's address was very poor & disjointed!And I didn't understand why he used a horrific tragedy like Hurricane Katrina to emphasize why people don't need the government.I thought that was really insensitive of Mr. Jindal to use the victims of Hurricane Katrina as examples of people depending on government handouts.Especially since folks like Neal Boortz said that "New Orleans was a welfare city". Here's more from Media Matters:

"On the January 30 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, while discussing former Sen. John Edwards' (D-NC) then-upcoming announcement that he was withdrawing from the 2008 presidential race, Neal Boortz asserted: "But I am fed up with this conventional wisdom that Katrina and the disaster that followed was George Bush's fault. It was not. The primary blame goes on the worthless parasites who lived in New Orleans who you -- couldn't even wipe themselves, let alone get out of the way of the water when that levee broke." Edwards made his withdrawal announcement in the city of New Orleans.

Earlier in the show, Boortz described the city of New Orleans as having been, prior to Hurricane Katrina "a city of parasites, a city of people who could not and had no desire to fend for themselves." During the show, Boortz also said, "When these Katrina so-called refugees were scattered about the country, it was just a glorified episode of putting out the garbage." Responding to a caller who said she used to work for the post office and claimed that "[t]he people in New Orleans were waiting on their government checks. They weren't moving until they got them ... trust me. As a mail carrier, they were waiting on their checks," Boortz stated: "Well, I don't know if -- you see, I don't think they were waiting on their checks before they would evacuate after a flood. But I do think, I do think that their entire lifestyle prior to Katrina was sitting around on their asses and waiting for checks."

Reading from a January 30 Associated Press report on Edwards' withdrawal, Boortz said:

BOORTZ: I like this: "Edwards' campaign will end the way it began 13 months ago, with the candidate pitching in to rebuild lives in a city still ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. Edwards embraced New Orleans as a glaring symbol of what he described as a Washington that didn't hear the cries of the downtrodden." Cries of the downtrodden, my left butt cheek. That wasn't the cries of the downtrodden; that's the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them. "It's somebody else's job to get me out of here. It's somebody else's job to save my life. Not mine. Send me a bus, send me a limo, send me a boat, send me a helicopter, send me a taxi, send me something. But you certainly don't expect me to actually work to get myself out of this situation, do you? Haven't you been watching me for generations? I've never done anything to improve my own lot in life. I've never done anything to rescue myself. Why do you expect me to do that now, just because a levee broke?"(END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest here.


Bobby Jindal must have been speaking to folks like Neal Boortz when he talked about Hurricane Katrina tonight.Because we all know how the Hurricane Katrina victims got blamed for depending on the government to rescue them.And he has used Hurricane Katrina to gain political points in the past.Here's more on that from The Hindu:

"One reason Jindal did not defeat Blanco in 2003 is that he was unable to draw the full weight of the white vote. Many conservative whites preferred to vote for a white, Cajun (“native” Louisianan) Democrat than an Indian American, albeit born in Louisiana, conservative Republican. David Duke, leader of the virulently racist Ku Klux Klan, won 44 per cent of the Republican vote in a 1990 primary election (60 per cent of the white vote) here. A year later, Duke repeated this feat and bragged, “I won my constituency. I won 55 per cent of the white vote.” Despite having the second largest African American population in the U.S., Louisiana’s politics are structured around the ability of the State-wide candidate to draw in the white vote.

Racist vigilante violence marks the State’s history. After the Civil War ended in 1865, for example, some legislators considered a change in the State’s Constitution that might allow blacks the franchise. Recalcitrant citizens formed the White League, whose violent tactics succeeded in ending any talk of equality. It was in New Orleans that Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was removed from a train in 1892 because he sat in a “whites only” section. The Plessy v Ferguson case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided that blacks and whites should have separate facilities although these should be equal – the “separate but equal” statute.

In New Orleans again, a black man, Oliver Brown, began a court case to get his son, Earl, into an all-white school. Eventually, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Brown v The Board of Education that segregation of this kind, known as Jim Crow, is illegal and should be abolished. Drawing energy from this decision, young Martin Luther King, Jr., and his fellow liberal clergy formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in New Orleans in 1957. In response, the White Citizens’ Council, an organisation of the landed white aristocracy of the region, announced, “Integration is the Southern expression of Communism”. King and others took the fight against racism to the doorstep of the enemy.

Hurricane Katrina revealed the rot of a racist, segregated society. King’s movement ended de jure segregation, but it did little against de facto segregation and inequality. Almost 20 per cent of Louisiana’s residents live beneath the poverty line, and a dramatic number of blacks live not only in poverty but also in jail. The incarceration rate in New Orleans, where most blacks in the State live, is twice that of the average U.S. rate: 1,480 prisoners for every 100,000 residents of the city.

Katrina tore through the city and State, exposing inequality and shocking the nation. Jindal, then a Congressman, held his tongue. His main carp was not against the Bush administration, which had sent the bulk of the State’s National Guard to Iraq, and so away from their posts when the disaster struck, nor was it against the long history of inequality revealed by the aftermath. Jindal decided to speak out against the “red-tape” of government response.

Katrina, which had come to mean the racism of the federal and State government, provided the young Congressman with an opportunity to champion less government and more “faith-based” reconstruction solutions. No word about the dispossession of his fellow citizens, and little care that the white elites were now moving to grab the land which once housed a large black population. Scott Crow, who worked in the reconstruction of New Orleans, recalls how white militias roamed the city after Katrina, making sure to run the blacks out of town: “These white militias made it their jobs to secure law and order in the absence of the police. Their brand of justice was to intimidate any black person walking on the street alone, or in any number that was smaller than the militia.” Blanco’s inaction compromised her; Jindal’s silence on issues of racism enamoured him to a section of the white voters.

As the election campaign heated up, a terrible incident in the town of Jena brought national attention to the enduring racism in Louisiana. When white students intimidated black students at Jena High School by hanging nooses on a tree and by pointing shot guns at them, the school authorities blamed the black students for making trouble. The police joined the administration and in the course of an altercation jailed six black students, all teenagers. The Jena case angered the nation. On September 20, thousands of people converged in the town to demand the release of the six students.

Jindal, in the thick of his election battle, took a strong stand against the demonstrations. “We certainly don’t need any outside agitators coming in here,” he said. The phrase “outside agitator” has a long lineage in the anti-Civil Rights movement and within the White Citizens Councils. Jindal’s heavy-handed code sent a strong message to the racist vote that he could be trusted not to “pander” to the black population. Jena is in the LaSalle Parish, whose white voters overwhelmingly voted for David Duke in 1991. This time Jindal carried that vote, winning the parish with a handy 55 per cent; his closest opponent Walter Boasso won short of 15 per cent. “Don’t let anyone talk bad about Louisiana,” Jindal said as he claimed his victory. In other words, do not talk about racism. “Those days are officially over.”

A few days after the victory, Rev. Nehemiah Thompson of the National Association of Asian Indian Christians wrote a letter to The New York Times. Thompson’s advice was simple, “Go easy on conservatism. Ideology is a luxury of the upper class. But rebuild New Orleans. Care about the poor, the children, the elderly, the unemployed, blacks and Hispanics.” Jindal’s programme, however, opposes stem cell research and abortion and is in favour of “faith-based” public policy and corporate solutions to social problems. His election coffers were lined by oil and petroleum magnates.

Other Indian Americans share Thompson’s concerns. Deepa Iyer, head of the South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow says, “Bobby Jindal should not get a free pass solely because he is of Indian descent.” She is concerned about his civil rights record. During his time in Congress, Jindal voted against hate crimes legislation and for strict immigration enforcement. “As the Governor of Louisiana,” Deepa Iyer says, “Jindal will have to confront some of these issues.” But will his confrontation be in the vein of Bush, or as Thompson put it, will Jindal “teach and practice what Jesus taught: non-violence, compassion for the poor and the oppressed and healing of sick [health care for all]?”(END OF EXCERPT)Read the entire article here.

It's obvious to me that Bobby Jindal is still doing his best to secure the white vote!