"Bobby" Jindal, the battered bit of old presidential timber presently warping out behind the bait shoppe, put on his National Political Figure drag again and went to Washington to talk about energy policy. Most of the energy in the plan is to get people talking about what a serious person Jindal is, and not to notice that his state is falling apart, his education plan there is a whopping side dish of theocratic corruption, and that his constituents would be bitterly divided should Jindal be eaten by alligators. So he goes to Washington to be a smart person again and what a hot messhe continues to be.
Of course, it was scientists -- and the odd economist -- who first established what a sucker bet our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, is. And, on the whole anthropogenic climate change thing, scientistsalready pretty much have decided that. But what makes Jindal's most recent stab at political puberty even more of a work of art is the way that the same guy who's calling the administration a bunch of science deniers declines to answer the burning political question of whether Charles Darwin was right.
OK. Things I'm not, but which I believe anyway.
I am not an astronomer, but I believe the sun is there.
I am not a physicist, but I'm pretty sure gravity works.
I am not a chemist, but my own unlettered review of the peer-reviewed literature leads me to believe that two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen makes pretty good water, and that when it gets too cold, the water tends to become solid.
I am not a mathematician, but I still trust Pythagoras when I'm checking out someone's hypotenuse.
And it is here where I point out that Jindal's wingnut-catnip reversal on Common Core could cost Louisiana $25 million over the next five years. But, hey, Jindal's got that covered. He'll take$15 million in my money as long as he can use it to keep kindergartners as ignorant as he is. Yeah, and Bernie Sanders is an unserious candidate.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.