Gov. Bobby Jindal's Awful Repsonse to Obama's Speech

There has been a good amount of reaction to both President Obama's address to the nation last evening and also the response that was given by Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA). Jindal's response can be viewed below:

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I would like to meet whoever it is that thought this type of speech would be a good idea. The delivery is poor, Jindal is talking down to his audience as if they are in grade school, and he merely recycles the same Republican talking points that we have seen articulated for the last few decades. There are some surprising new arguments, like ridiculously using Hurricane Katrina as a positive example of restructuring the schooling system, but the majority of the speech plays the same old tune. From stirring up patriotism ("Americans can do anything") to using the same old "Republicans believe in the people, Democrats believe in the government", to telling stories with an overly simplistic message, it was one of the poorest rebuttals that I have ever seen.

David Brooks says:

..to come up at this moment in history with a stale "government is the problem," "we can't trust the federal government" - it's just a disaster for the Republican Party. The country is in a panic right now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill, but that idea that we're just gonna - that government is going to have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that - In a moment when only the federal government is actually big enough to do stuff, to just ignore all that and just say "government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending," it's just a form of nihilism. It's just not where the country is, it's not where the future of the country is. There's an intra-Republican debate. Some people say the Republican Party lost its way because they got too moderate. Some people say they got too weird or too conservative. He thinks they got too moderate, and so he's making that case. I think it's insane, and I just think it's a disaster for the party. I just think it's unfortunate right now.

The fact that the Republicans chose this type of message as a response to President Obama clearly shows the dysfunctional position that they are currently in. It is almost as if they set out to produce a GOP recruitment video, but forgot about (or omitted) everything that has happened over the last few decades.