Based on the transcripts of President Obama's magisterial Speech to Congress and Piyush "Bobby" Jindal's umm, response, your devoted Dawg provides the following hermeneutic analysis, without editorial comment. These are the number of times a particular word (root) was used in their respective speeches.
Words (count in parentheses) used by Jindal NOT used by President Obama:
Lousiana (7) Katrina(3) Governor(2) Bobby(2)
Somewhat disturbing:
Yelling (2) Raging(1) Devastating (1)
And puzzling:
Republicans (11) Bush (0)
Boats (2) Underwater(2) Soviet (1) Disneyland (1)
Well, just a little bit of textual analysis and commentary:
(Jindal's text in red)
I'm Bobby Jindal: Don't call me Piyush. What kinda parents would name their son Piyush? Didn't they read Stellaa's seminal piece: Odd Boy Names Lead to Life of Crime. I'll show 'em. Wait for it.
The son of an American mother and a Kenyan father.... my own parents came to this country from a distant land: Hmmm. Him African, me...?
Throw parents under the bus:
When they arrived in Baton Rouge, my mother was already four-and-a-half-months pregnant.... To find work, my dad picked up the yellow pages and started calling local businesses.
This story might have legs, according to my frequent collaborator from Bangalore Bunghole days. , who came here from the same distant land around the same time (1970s):
It was Raj (the mom) who was the holder of the F-1 student visa, enrolled as a graduate student at LSU and must have had an assistantship or fellowship. Amar, the dad, on a F-2 visa (spouses) was not permitted to work by law. In fact, the consular authorities in Delhi were very clear and sticky about the point that the Financial Aid had to support both partners (and children, if any).
Oh, Piyush, did you just start a Pappygate?
And make your dad sound like a dolt? Piyush's Pappy Philosophy:
As we walked through the aisles, looking at the endless variety on the shelves, he would tell me, "Bobby, Americans can do anything."
What? What is it with Republicans and supermarkets (cf. Bush I and Scanner). An epiphany in the aisles looking at 96 varieties of sugar crunchy cornflakes? Why do pols peddle these pappy stories? Idiots should leave the aisles clear for tequilaanddonuts, who can DO supermarkets
Not content with patricide, throw Republicans under the bus:
And then some bureaucrat showed up and told him they couldn't go out in the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration.
Let's see now, Katrina was in 2005. He-who-must-not-be-named-by-any-GOPpers was in office. Say, that bureaucrat wasn't "Heckuva Job, Brownie," was it?
Throw more Republicans under the bus:
Our party got away from its principles. You elected Republicans to champion limited government, fiscal discipline, and personal responsibility. Instead, Republicans went along with earmarks and big government spending in Washington. Republicans lost your trust, and rightly so.
Pssst, Piyush, wanna tell us when this started happening? OMG, no, not under Reagan!
During the presidency of the revered Ronald Reagan, a true "fiscal conservative," Federal Public Debt levels as percent of GDP rose from 26% in 1980 to 41% in 1988, an increase of 60%. Under Bush I, it reached 49%, almost double the level the Republicans had inherited. So much for the much vaunted smaller government, leave it to the private sector, expansion of the 1980s.
Throw yourself under the bus:
In Louisiana, we took a different approach. Since I became governor... to create jobs for our citizens, we cut taxes six times, including the largest income tax cut in the history of our state.
The result: According to the latest US Department of Commerce BEA Personal Income by State Bulletin: Louisiana was 49th out of 50 states in 2008 QII to QIII. That's after Jindal took office and his ballyhooed tax cuts. They were 45th out of 50 when he took office!!
Those tax cuts sure worked, Bobby.
But don't burn your bridges:
While some of the projects in the bill make sense, their legislation is larded with wasteful spending.
And we just bet those "some" that make sense will be Lousiana ear-marked "Laissez les Bon Temps Rouller!" On the other hand, I can't imagine Bobby two-stepping to "Boogie Woogie Zydeco."
WOOF
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MEMO to Bobby Jindal - NOBODY gives a flying f*ck about what you did in Louisiana (except maybe the people in Louisiana)
and this is golden -
Idiots should leave the aisles clear for tequilaanddonuts, who can DO supermarkets
I love the idea of pappygate - we need to get Saturn on that now.
Bobby Jindal - what a maroon.
Sending a (virtual) case of greenies and beggin' strips your way...
lps, can you picture Piyush boogieing to zydeco? As to Pappygate, there really could be something there. Wouldn't that be something -- Bobby Blows Big Chance, Dad Deported.
WOOF
Shiral, that's a great point. Maybe they'd still be foaming at the mouth denouncing Big Government, but then they'd really be marking themselves as brain-dead loonies without ideas.
Zum, I don't know about replacing those old farts with an even older farter! But I can't believe not one of them picked up on the fact that Jindal didn't utter the word "recession" even once. I mean how out of touch are the Republicans?
Aaron, the word counts are approximately (I didn't eliminate all text interpolated by NYT, such as APPLAUSE :-)) Obama - 6378, Jindal - 2027. But instead of normalizing, I chose to show the most egregious differences in absolute terms.
WOOF
Sarah is a uniformed and uninterested geo-political dolt (and we just had 8 yrs of that , thank you) whose own daughter is the living proof of the idiocy that is abstinence only, but the daughter is also publicly dissing hockey-mom about it.
Jindal is an opportunist wedded to a mean fundamentalist streak that makes Palin look almost palatable in comparison. In the glare of the national spotlight, he will melt like so much rancid butter.
Trotsky gives this post a woof for hermeneutical generosity.
WOOF
The bugger say he changed his name to Bobby from watching The Brady Bunch (probably also a crock) but doubt daddy was saying anything to him in the aisles other than "Piyush, I said NO CHOCO-CRUNCHO-FLAKES."
WOOF
WOOF
Thanks for this. It IS the most clever analysis that I have seen on the rebuttal. I would have missed it if not for CM's Picks of 2/25!
You say:
"(a) It was Raj (the mom) who was the holder of the F-1 student visa, enrolled as a graduate student at LSU and must have had an assistantship/fellowship, which most likely included Student Health coverage.
(b) Amar, the dad, on a F-2 visa (spouses) was not permitted to work by law. In fact, the consular authorities in Delhi were very clear and sticky about the point that the Financial Aid had to support both partners (and children, if any).
Oh, Piyush, did you just start a Pappygate? "
Without doing the actual research, but after 15 years of being associated with LSU, I will say that a) although Raj was a graduate student at LSU, and must have had an assistantship, I would bet that she didn't have health insurance. Specifically, I cannot believe that she had insurance that covered a pregnancy.
I say this because a person very close to me that works at LSU and has for 15 years (errr my husband) worked with the International Student Association, and helped all grad students to get decent insurance, just a couple of years a go. There are various options, and one now comes with benefits that cover pregnancy. I will go out on a limb and say that the previous insurance was , ahem,not sufficient.
b) I'm sure that Visa restrictions would NOT have allowed Amar to work (this has been our experience through 20 years and 3 university contacts). However, it has also been our experience that all spouses DO work. They need to eat.I have never heard of a spouse getting tapped by the IRS for not paying taxes. I think that the university/IRS/state generally looks the other way. I hope that this post, which smartly points out this situation, doesn't create a backlash amongst conservatives. Wouldn't the Republicans just love to squeeze every tax dollar out of these 'student spouses.' This would play well with the same folks who are hot on the topic of illegal immigration.
Denese
Denese, I think CCC is correct in what he says (and does not say), especially since I gave him the data regarding the visas :-). And you are probably correct in saying that the stating that Raj's insurance probably didn't cover pregnancy (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she was in a bit of a pickle with her department and Admin. for showing up with an undisclosed "pre-existing condition" -- this was 1970, remember).
And both of us agree that the dad was NOT allowed to work. I'll let the Woofman speak for himself, but it seemed to me that Jindal by retailing this story is either stupidly uncomprehending or hypocritical (given the Republicans stance regarding "illegals") or both.
(ruh..ruh..ruh..rated)
Stella, that exorcism story is really something. I followed it to the original source (www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=1294-jindal) and it's for real. Too bad I couldn't use it since I was limiting myself to the text of his speech, and he never utthered the word "devil" :-).
Denese, you make some good points. While nothing in my statements is inaccurate, the bit about Raj's insurance coverage deflected from the main point: about Piyush's father working "illegally." And the thing about that, as Smithbarney points out, is Jindal and the Republicans' hypocrisy in recounting the story.
Smithbarney, thank you for your defense. His mindlessness or hypocrisy, choose one or both, is the point. Plus, I think he's way out of his weight class in going up against Obama.
Stacey, good one on the "magnetic levitation." The only time Jindal mentions science or technology is as a laugh line. Going nowhere is right.
WOOF
Karl Rove always advised 'control the vocabulary and your control the argument.'
I'm not a hard core lib, I'm more soft, to match my general body shape - but really, that response was the saddest thing. They've got nothin', the party is split on what to do, there's no new ideas, and everyone on both sides are scared.
WWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOFFFFFFFF!
:D
The speech though....what a drip! specially when I was all agog to rally around a desi turned pardesi bhaiyya. I am hoping he is in government because he loves the people and can conjure up some change , otherwise the oft repeated parroting of government being the problem might wrap itself around his neck....
@Rama, wd u really say they wd know what Piyush means or care? North Indians around me here in Guj don't seem to think of them as Indians, except for what they carry about in their DNA due to origin, they knit their brows and say, "why does the press go 'Indian-Indian'? was he brought up here, holds an Ind ppt, speak the lang, aware of its culture, were in touch with roots here ever in any significant way as to affect his thinking, philosophy or perspective on life?"!