Jindal, in a new "deep thought" from his speech last night in front of the NRCC. Apparently being against natural disaster preparedness wasn't working out for him, so he's moved on to more abstractly declaring himself against things, and stealing lines from Limbaugh to do it:
The suggestion behind the "do you want the President to fail question" is this -- If you don’t answer their question with a loud "NO" immediately, if you don’t express instant obedience to the question, then you are not really a patriot, and you are essentially trying to undermine America.
Oh, for the love of...
Jindal, you four-star general in the media army of conservative emptyheads, that's exactly what you, your party and the very people you're giving a speech to did during Bush's entire freakin' reign. Whether it was attacking Iraq, or submitting to self-evidently asinine interpretations of international law, or U.S. law, or torture, or wiretapping, or privatizing social security, or even the freakin' debate over S-CHIP -- and that one was a challenge, but not one that went unmet -- there was always a moaning chorus of Republican assholes asserting, on the TV and radio, that if you didn't accept the most conservative Republican view of whatever-the-hell-the-thing-was (not just the president's view, mind you, but whichever conservative Republican was asserting the point), you maybe Were Not Really A Patriot.
It was said on the floors of the House and the Senate. It was said by pundits galore, from Rush Limbaugh on his radio show to Glenn Beck on CNN. It was the defining principle of Republican support -- that no matter what spectacular f-up the Republicans wanted to subject the country to, from war to economic parlor games, you were or weren't a patriot based on which side of the aisle you were on, and whether or not you were willing to put up with the notion that the conservative notion of blah-blah-blah was the only thing standing between us and destruction, and it was obvious that people who thought differently did not love their country enough to see it.
And on Fox News, on the radio, and on websites galore, it's still happening. Does Obama love America enough, if he's not willing to torture people in violation of the Geneva Conventions, or if he's going to "undermine capitalism" and bring on "socialism", through the monsterous travesty of returning to the nearly communistic American tax policies that existed during the Clinton or Bush I or Reagan administrations?
Honestly, I would begin to regain a shred -- a mere, dismal thread -- of respect for the Republicans if they had an ounce of self awareness on this one, or heaven help us showed a moment of sheepishness over it, or even just f--ing recognized the duplicity and dumbassed ignorance they're chucking out over the airwaves like beads at Mardi Gras. But no: doesn't enter their heads. Now that they are out of power instead of in power, their clocks have been reset; they have amnesia about anything that happened in America for the last ten years or twenty. They are newborns, discovering every basic concept anew, and only when it brushes up against them.
It's not even hypocrisy, because that implies an ounce of self awareness on their own contradictions. It's purely an infantile moment of self-pity. Truly, the only America that exists for a conservative is the one they are living in, inside their own heads, at any particular moment of time. Everyone else, whether past, present and future, two doors down or ten states away, can go rot. What's that you say? That the definition of "instant obedience" is not patriotism, and dissent is not treason? Well, paint me blue and call me Papa Freakin' Smurf, but that is exactly the teaching moment we liberals have been trying to drill into your thick and addled skulls for eight long years. Congratulations on finally touching your fingers to the lifeline of the Patently Obvious: climb skyward for such further discoveries as Other People Have Different Values and Ethnic People Have Souls Too.
Yes, dissent is not treason: but if you can only realize that when you think it might happen to you, and only feel outrage over it when you feel it might happen to you, then that makes it even worse, because it indeed declares you to be just as narcissistic, just as incapable of empathy or comprehension, just as plain dumb as we all thought you were on our worst, most mean-spirited post-millennial days. That's what prompts these growing whinefests muttering about your own patriotism, and your own right to disagree, and all the other things that you didn't give two Limbaughian farts over just twelve damn months ago.
What a spectacle. But is anyone honestly surprised by it?