I have a serious question: Is Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal high? Because in this otherwise uninteresting op-ed bleating about how the Republican Party needs to stop introspecting so much and just start being awesome, he closes with perhaps the truest statements on what the Republican Party is about, which is
fighting against an American "left" pulled entirely from his own imagination:
At some point, the American public is going to revolt against the nanny state and the leftward march of this president. I don’t know when the tipping point will come, but I believe it will come soon.
Why?
Because the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.
Wow. Now that's impressive. I could probably write an entire book consisting of nothing but going down that list and pondering what Bobby Jindal thinks constitutes being "left": the exploding government, the flat-earth bit, the urgent leftist need for the IRS to "violate our constitutional rights" and all the rest. The flat earth one is a particular puzzle, coming from someone whose knowledge of post-industrial-age science did not include an awareness that volcanoes still exist and that scientists monitor them in an attempt to provide some warning when they're about to go Michael Bay on us all. No sir, any Republican insistence that they are the truer patrons of science, now
that is an eyebrow raiser. I'm not aware of any particular evidence that the party of Jindal, Palin, Todd Akin, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Sam Brownback, James Inhofe, John Cornyn, Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli, Pat Robertson, E.W. Jackson, Allen West, Rick Scott, Louie Gohmert, Michele Bachmann and countless state representatives howling about conspiracies as diverse as when the United Nations is coming to get us and whether or not the Treasury Department is hoarding ammunition so that good patriots can't fight back or whether the scientific community of the entire planet is on a quest to trick us all—I'm not aware of any evidence that
that party is even tethered to the same reality as the rest of us, much less that they are the party of fact-having and science-promoting. That paragraph of Jindal's pretty much proves the point, does it not?
There's a theory going around that the intellectual underpinnings of conservatism have so collapsed as to render the movement nothing more than a blind reflex against "whatever liberals want," or rather whatever any non-conservative American is perceived to want, as cobbled together from a long list of conservative fears and conspiracies. From health care to deficits, there's precious few actual conservative policy stances that can survive longer than a single opportunistic moment; the only true measure of conservative policy can be found in who proposed it. Romneycare good, Obamacare bad. Deficits unimportant, until deficits will eat us all. Medicare is an evil government overreach—and we Republicans are the true protectors of it. Jindal would be a reasonable example of the theory, though far from the only one; he may not know what the GOP stands for (and has penned an entire op-ed professing no particular opinion on it, so long as Republicans "get on offense" about it) but he can rattle off all the leftist fictions it supposedly stands against in one long breath.