Last night on Countdown, Markos and Keith O. discussed Kenneth the Page'sBobby Jindal's newfound appreciation for Federal spending. Yep, the same Bobby Jindal who objects to funding projects to develop alternative energy sources, the same Bobby Jindal who objected to the stimulus...that very same Bobby Jindal now is asking the Federal government for financial assistance to recover from the BP oil spill.
Partial transcript (full transcript here):
OLBERMANN: The great recession destroyed the economy essentially, every state in the Union. Governor Jindal fretted about government aid especially for, you know, the monitoring of the — would warn of things, of disasters like volcanoes. The big spill threatens to wreck the economy in his state and all of a sudden, he is all over every way he can find to ask for government aid. Do I have it about right?
MOULITSAS: It sounds about right. Yes. No — I mean, it’s not even about Louisiana. I mean, there are a lot of people in Louisiana that could obviously benefit from that stimulus funding. But Bobby Jindal thought that it would be a good, easy way to score points against Obama and position himself for his 2012 presidential run. Suddenly, though, I think that people that sort of — that he know that are directly related to him, and he himself are being directly impacted by this disaster, not just politically but I think personally.
And while they may think, well, people who get stimulus funding, they’re not going to vote Republican, I don’t care about those people, I’d rather score political points of them, in this case, it’s about him. And suddenly since it’s about him, he cares. I just wish that he would have had that kind of empathy for the rest of not just Louisiana but the rest of America that has also suffered because of cataclysmic economic collapse.
Of course, Jindal is right to request assistance, and the entire Gulf Coast region does need Federal support (though it remains crucial to hold BP accountable). But, as Markos says, Jindal is a hypocrite. When there's a disaster in his back yard, he's all for Federal aide. But when the economic disaster hit America, he fought the recovery plan tooth and nail. Hopefully he'll show more empathy in the future, but I wouldn't count on it.