The gloves are off in Louisana:
"Most Americans believe we should respect one another's religion. But not Bobby Jindal," the ad says, according to a script from the Democratic Party. "He wrote articles that insulted thousands of Louisiana Protestants. He has referred to Protestant religions as scandalous, depraved, selfish and heretical."
The ad references articles Jindal wrote for New Oxford Review, a Roman Catholic magazine, during the 1990s before he was a congressman. Vezinot, the Democratic Party spokeswoman, said the religion ad is running in the Alexandria, Monroe and Shreveport TV markets — areas of the state that are more heavily Protestant than south Louisiana.
Vezinot would only offer limited comments about the religion ad, saying the Democratic Party wanted voters to know Jindal through his own words. "If voters have any question about the words in the ad, we suggest they call Bobby himself," she said.
Jindal said the ad was outrageous, mischaracterizing his writings about religion. He called the ad "an attack on his Christian faith."
"They'll do anything to hold onto their power. This ad is absolutely false," he said.
Wow. Jindal can deny it all he wants, but fact is he wrote stuff to that effect.
It's worth noting that Louisiana Dems are pulling this material from the New Oxford Review, which used the copyright provision of the DCMA to force Daily Kos to pull PDF scans of Jindal's articles from this site. That fundamentalist Catholic publication is doing everything they can to protect Jindal by removing copies of it from the web (almost nobody will pay for those articles). So Jindal can deny he wrote those things, while making it hard for people to verify for themselves.
The ads aren't running in Catholic southern Louisiana, instead running in the northern Protestant part of the state (in the South, the party is running a more pedestrian ad about Jindal's vote against ethics reform in Congress). In political terms, this is a nuclear bomb of an ad -- clearly the gambit of a state party that has nothing to lose since Jindal otherwise appears headed toward an easy first-round victory.
If nothing else, this has injected some drama into what was a sleepy, uninteresting race.