Brainlesser

More on Jindal - or rather, Jindal apologists. Zachary Roth posted a piece questioning the story Bobby Jindal told to illustrate conservative discomfort with the idea that the government could indeed be competent and should work for the public good. Roth's suggestion that something about the story smelled was based on news reports and, largely LACK of news reports on Nexis that would have placed Jindal in NOLA at the time. Zach writes:

But there are several pieces of evidence that suggest this just didn't happen. Nothing, to be sure, that definitively proves the story was made up. But more than enough to declare it highly suspicious. [emphasis mine]

He then comments on Jindal's schedule and the fact that "Jindal listed several anecdotes to illustrate the problem, including one that involved a sheriff, and another about a boat evacuation. But nothing that resembled the Lee story he told Tuesday. " As an example, Roth quotes Jindal saying:

There are thousands of these stories. I talked to a sheriff in an area where they had people with boats that were ready to go in the water and rescue people and they were turned away because they didn't have proof of registration and insurance, they didn't bring the right paperwork. The bureaucracy was just awful.

Josh Marshall reports that Erick Erickson posted an article at RedState refuting Zachary's points. He gets it wrong from the get-go, of course.

Based overwhelmingly on two things - the musings of a Daily Kos diarist and a few Nexis searches that didn’t turn up results (as we all remember, the media got more stories wrong than right when reporting in the heat of the moment in the midst of Katrina) - TPMMuckraker and The Washington Monthly conclude that Governor Bobby Jindal is a liar.

There are two problems immediately apparent: one is that TPM concluded no such thing. Read the TPM quote above. It's very clear - the only "conclusion" was that the story was suspicious. The second problem, as we now know, is that Jindal is, indeed, a liar.

I wonder when Erick Erickson will post a retraction?

Now, here comes the funny part: One of RedState's commenters (the aptly named "falsehood"),disputes Zachary Roth's claim that Jindal had never never told the Lee story before by quoting essentially the same Jindal anecdote that Roth quoted - except from an interview Jindal gave to Rush Limbaugh:

“Contrast that with the bureaucracy. I witnessed the frustration of the local law enforcement officials. At one point, volunteers were rushing in boats, to come and pick up people out of the water. Some bureaucrat decided that they couldn’t go in the water — turned away even sheriff’s deputies because he said they didn’t have the right paper- work. He said if you don’t bring proof of insurance and registration, you can’t go in the water to rescue.”

I'm really at a loss to explain such stupidity.

Brainless

Here's how Jack Coleman compares Rachel Maddow and Booby Jindal:

Both are wonkish former Rhodes scholars in their mid-30s, bright and personable. Each could be perceived as a political outsider, Maddow for being openly gay, Jindal by dint of skin hue and ethnicity

Most of the rest of his article is an attack on Maddow's response to the Response; Coleman's dishonest and asinine recasting of what Jindal meant when he evoked government's failure during Katrina to suggest that government could not help the economic crisis (and decrying that Rachel didn't play the now-known-to-be-false story about Jindal and Sheriff Harry Lee), and then he ends with this:

Indeed, so-called progressives want ever more "dialogue" on Katrina, race, gender, etc. -- the more "candid" the better -- followed by liberals condemning conservatives who follow suit as racist, insensitive, pathological, etc. See how it works?

Yes, I see how it works. Jack opens his remarks with racist, sexist, homophobic remarks and then is surprised that liberals don't welcome his "dialogue." Maybe Republicans consider those who are gay or have "skin hue and ethnicity" to be "outsiders," but we don't.

By the way, Jack, if you happen to read this - do you have any further comment on the Harry Lee story?

Today's Dueling Headlines

Back when I wrote "Albatross" I had a regular feature called "Today On Washington Journal" in which I discussed comments by callers to that show. People seemed to like it. And by people, I mean me.

I haven't hit on a regular feature here yet, and am hoping this will do. See. I have an old technology (pre-iPhone) cell, but I can view iGoogle. No audio or video, but headlines and stories. My home page has top stories from BBC, NYT, and CNN (plus weather, the Onion and the always lame Joke of the Day). I started noticing that even without Fax News, headlines about the same stories had decidedly different slants even though the stories beneath them were the same. Often exactly the same, having been supplied by AP or some other source. So far, CNN seems to have the slantiest, but that's just an impression. A few of these posts should prove whether there is a pattern. So here's how they will go - I'll post the headlines (sometimes only 2/3 of the sources have the story in the top 3), then a piece of the story, and then pass judgement. Decisions of the judge are final, but feel free to shout your comments into the wind.

Today's post was going to contrast the NYT headline "Iraq Combat to End By August 2010" with CNN's headline proclaiming that U.S. Troops would remain in Iraq indefinitetly after "withdrawl." However, CNN screwed me up by changing their headline to match the Times. I guess CNN got wind that I was going to blow this story wide open. Or, perhaps they read the story. But that's ok - I'll try again tomorrow.

Eleven Simple Words

Louisiana Governor "Bobby" Jindal's response to President Obama's address to congress had me musing once more over how completely the Republican Party has abandoned the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. They either don't or won't remember or understand the phrase that Lincoln is most remembered for uttering. Well, alright, the second most remembered phrase; but "four score and seven years ago" is just a fancy way of saying "87 years ago" and was out of date within a year. This one is timeless, and in eleven simple words defines exactly what makes the USofA the great nation that it is - or at least, that it should be. Allow me to type it out in big, bold, red letters to remind everyone what it is:

Government OF the People, BY the People and FOR the People.

This is important. The US Government is by design not composed of royals or strongmen or high priests or corporations. It is made up of the People. That's us. American citizens. And who performs the daily tasks of governing the richest, most powerful, most loved and feared nation on earth? Why, those duties are handled by the People. All that wealth and power and freedom and every other benefit realized from those activities are not intended for Halliburton or the Church or the Military Industrial Complex - they are for the People. And every time you see the phrase "the people" remember that the word "all" is implied just ahead of it.

This phrase goes to eleven.

Contrast this vision of America to Jindal's philosophy, summed up in the lesson he learned when two government officials - a Sheriff and a Congressman - stood up to a Republican administration that forgot that government was for the people and took it upon themselves to do the job that should have been being done by all of the people.

"There's a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and the enterprising spirit of our citizens."

Really? But if we live in a representative democracy that is made up of the people, by the people and for the people (repetition assists in memory), then shouldn't that government be a concentrated, distributed, efficient implementation of our national compassionate and understanding spirit? What is Bobby saying here? That it is better that enterprising citizens in the free market decide to rescue people if and when it profits the entrepreneurs? Or that nearby compassionate but likely ill-equipped, under-resourced citizens should take on all the risk and effort of rescuing their neighbors? Citizens who are themselves in the middle of a disaster area?

OK, in a crisis it's all hands on deck and heroes are made from volunteers who leap into the brink; but forgive me for believing that it would be far better for all of the people to be prepared ahead of time and provide a quick, efficient, well equipped, co-ordinated and safe response. Without a profit motive. Without random hope that someone somewhere will "do something." Without all the risk and loss going to the very someone who does do something. Without the chaos of every well-intentioned do-gooder loading up his pickup truck with whatever he imagines might be needed, a gun or two to protect what he considers the good people from the bad people, and towing a leaky boat that he found somewhere but doesn't really know how to operate because by god someone has to do something so the hell with safety regulations and if nothing else he can at least jump in and need just as much rescue as the guy on the roof. Remember the scene in Jaws where all the landlubbers jumped into anything that would float to go hunt the shark? Is that the response Bobby wanted to Katrina? This is one of the times when I regret the decision to avoid obscene expletives in this blog - I guess I'll have to substitute a pithy explanation:

The problem with Katrina was not that the government should not have been doing the rescues. The problem was that the government SHOULD have been.

Jindal also said this:

This is the nation that cast off the scourge of slavery, overcame the Great Depression, prevailed in two World Wars, won the struggle for civil rights, defeated the Soviet menace, and responded with determined courage to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The American spirit has triumphed over almost every
form of adversity known to man, and the American spirit will triumph again.

Yes. The nation cast off slavery. That is to say, the Federal Government (made up of whom? that's right) cast off slavery. You can read why and how in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

It's true FDR did not overcome the Great Depression - the People did, by understanding that it was a huge problem that could only be solved by all the People (working together through what overall organization? good, you've got it!). Of course, part of the way the People overcame the Depression was by electing FDR (four times) and supporting/shaping/contributing to the solutions he implemented on their behalf.

Civil Rights are now enshrined in laws passed and enforced by the government, even to the extent that the Feds compel individual states to follow those laws (and this is done for the P....; I don't even have to finish, do I?)

Government is not the problem, except to the extent that We The People are the problem. And as bad as it sometimes gets, it is at least ours. Sorry, make that "at least it is us." Consider the alternative.

It's (Not) A Miracle!

You know what was the best part of Captain Chesley Sullenberger's landing of the flight 1549 in the Hudson River? OK - right. Everyone survived. How about the second best part?

It was that neither Sully nor his wife nor co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles nor, as far as I know, any of the crew praised Jesus for rescuing them. Or Yahweh. Or Allah, for that matter. No, Sully has been a true professional: humble, forthright, dedicated to the passengers and crew for whom he was responsible. If he is a religious man, he has wisely kept it to himself. He did the job for which he had been trained - did it very well, without a doubt - as a human being committed to the task before him. Of course, he saved his own skin as well but that seems secondary. In every interview I've heard him give, he has been nothing but factual, discussing the conditions and his actions as purely natural phenomena (as opposed to super-natural intervention.) Although some of his questioners and, if I recall correctly even the co-pilot, mentioned "luck", Sully didn't even go that far.

So my least favorite interview question came from Katie Kouric, who asked whether he had prayed. And my favorite interview answer was Sully's to that question, which is that he had been pretty busy flying the plane. He didn't dismiss the question (he even said that perhaps someone in the back had done it for him) but he gave it no gravity whatsoever. Kudos, Captain. Kudos.

Meanwhile, in preparation for this post I Googled "Sullenberger Jesus Pray." There is a Yahoo Answers question on "The Miracle on The Hudson" with comments that mostly echo the sentiments here. But one comment stood out to me:

I believe it was a miracle like they are saying. Praise God!! And I believe anyone who was on that plane and they were not "saved"; they will seriously begin to think about eternal, spiritual things and salvation. I was actually wondering what an atheist would do in this situation. And for anyone not to see that this is a miracle... well I think they seriously have to be jaded.

What would an atheist do in this situation? Just ditch the plane into a city neighborhood because, what the hell, existence is meaningless without God anyway? Or maybe she meant an atheist passenger, which is an easier question to answer: He or she would have stayed in his or her seat and followed instructions, just like everyone else.

And anyway, how do we know whether Sully is an atheist or not? *Gasp!* For anyone not to see that a human being can be outstanding in his work and a selfless hero without the threat of hell or promise of a golden harp, well, I think they seriously have to be jaded.

If I am ever in such a situation, I will pray that the pilot is an atheist. Then I will be sure he is relying on his skill and knowledge and experience to do everything in his power to get that plane down safely. The last thing I want is for the pilot to have his head bowed, eyes closed and hands folded as he asks a mythical being to interrupt the laws of physics for the sake of what are doubtless a mixed collection of sinners and souls ready to go home to their heavenly father.

So thank God there has been no religious fervor over this extremely laudable and exceedingly human effort.

Oh, except for this one:

Passenger Jeff Kolodjay said he saw the engine blow up. “We thought we were going to circle around, but we didn’t have time,” he told the Newsday newspaper.He heard Sullenberger tell passengers to brace for impact and then said a Hail Mary.
[snip]
And most of all, we can assume from the above that Sullenberger is a true devotee of Virgin Mary, as he cried for her intercession in this toughest time of his life.
Come on friends, don’t be surprised at the intercession power
of our Holy Mother.

First of all, Sullenberger did not cry for anyone's intercession. Kolodjay said a "Hail Mary." Kolodjay's account was pretty clear, unlike this sloppy uncredited blog post. Secondly, crediting the captain and crew's competence and heroism to divine intervention does them a disservice and is, quite frankly, insulting. Insulting to Sully, his crew, his company, his employer. Insulting to every religion that doesn't consider Mary to be "Holy" and able to intercede in earthly tragedies. And insulting to Mary, who apparently would have let a planeload of (nominally) innocent people perish had someone not cried out a Hail to her.

So Hail Sully, and may other people in the public eye learn from his example.