Jindal Jabber

When Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal delivered his rebuttal speech to President Obama’s address to Congress on Tuesday night, I was reminded of Sheriff Andy Taylor delivering one of his homespun homilies to a contrite Barney Fife. Except, of course, that Jindal’s speech contained a lot more bullshit and made much less sense than anything Sheriff Andy ever said to his numbskull deputy.

Before Jindal finished telling his disingenuous story about how he and real-life Sheriff Harry Lee defied FEMA bureaucrats to come and arrest them for trying to rescue people from rooftops in flooded New Orleans, another memory began to surface; something about Jindal’s face looked eerily familiar. But, as the Governor’s speech went from lame to lamer and my outrage over his remarks inferring that volcano monitoring is unnecessary spending threatened to make my head do a Mt. St. Helens, I temporarily lost that train of thought.

Hey, if the cost of volcano monitoring displeases Jindal so much, maybe he could apply that same reasoning to other early warning systems; think how much money the government could save if it cut off funding for NASA, USGS, NWS, USFS, and other organizations tasked with gathering information that has the potential to save people’s lives. Applied evenly, Jindal’s logic could turn everyone’s life into a crapshoot (or a crapchute—take your pick). And I’m sure that billionaires would appreciate the resulting tax breaks. But, I digress.

The following day, many of the blogs I follow featured a portrait photo of Bobby Jindal, and the memory I spoke of earlier once again tried to surface. Then—suddenly—a random thought, summed up in a single word, made the memory complete. Freckles! Simply add a sprinkling of freckles to Jindal’s face and you’ve got a near-perfect likeness of Mad Magazine’s poster boy.

In fact, the resemblance is so striking that I now propose that all future displays of Bobby’s portrait photos be accompanied by the caption, “What, me worry?”

And when Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin campaign for the Presidency in 2012, they can do so using the campaign slogan, “What, us worry?”

I’m still undecided if this is something I should worry about.