Apu’s a Goner in 2012, Along with Sanford, Palin, and Barbour, As Party Leader Rush Waits in the Wings

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
— Albert Einstein

It’s become a clich矴o point out that Obama, once again, oratorically cleaned the Republican clock, as he did Feb. 23 in his quasi-SotU. To gauge how bad the damage was this time around, all you had to do was look at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who appeared as if he’d just chugged a gallon of alum as he listened to the president, and House Minority Leader John Boehner, who looked like he just fell out of a coffin. But the GOP wasn’t done slitting its own throat; to do that they employed Dr. Bombay, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a very creepy little man who, in his spare time, doubtless flashes women on street corners, smiles his goofy lopsided smile, and then runs away giggling.

GOP ‘Rising Star’ Jindal was no match for Obama it was like watching Barney Fife in the ring with the 1973 Muhammad Ali and his cornucopia of ineptly rendered half-truths and flat-out lies induced much chuckling. Memo to Bobby: There is no Disneyland to Vegas mag-lev train in Obama’s stimulus package; the unnamed ‘bureaucrat’ that you and your sheriff friend were so incensed at for not responding properly to the Katrina flooding was a ‘heckuva job, Brownie’ Bush FEMA employee in other words, an incompetent Republican boob — and, speaking of that folksy-hokum ‘Lonesome Rhodes’ Katrina anecdote, Jindal apparently just made it up since he was 80 miles away from New Orleans in Baton Rouge at the time the alleged incident took place. Of course, sprinkled throughout were Jindal’s ‘better ideas’ such as continuing to cut taxes, as if the massive Bush tax cuts of the last eight years worked so well.

And in Jindal’s national media debut he exhibited all of the aplomb of a geeky 12-year-old appointed mayor-of-the-day, possessing the charisma of a tub of slow-drying glue. Oh, yes, this guy is presidential, all right for a junior high class election. Even many prominent conservatives were disgusted with this so-called ‘Washington outsider’s’ wet-dishrag performance; the NY Times’ David Brooks pegged it as “stale,” and even “insane.” Only the Dittoheads’ Master Brayer seemed to enjoy Jindal’s dance of doom, bizarrely calling the LA governor the “next Ronald Reagan.” (Perhaps he meant the way Ronnie is now.)

Then there’s Jindal’s strange past: I wonder what conservative Protestant Christopublicans would think if they knew he was a Hindu who converted to Catholicism, once participated in a weird college exorcism, changed his name from ‘Piyush’ to ‘Bobby’ because of a Brady Bunch episode, and that his parents were liberal Democrats?

Let’s also have a round of applause for tone-deaf Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who just ended his political career thusly:

Caller: “I hope you all are not playing politics with this. People in South Carolina are hurting. You know how unemployment rates are high right now and going up higher. We are running out of money in the unemployment bank we need money for that, the people that need help. And Im one of them, I cant get no help. []”

Mark Sanford: “Well Id say hello to Charleston because it’s home and Id say hello to this fellow this morning and say that my prayers are going to be with him and his family because it sounds like he is in an awfully tough spot.”

Hello and goodbye, Gov. Slackjawed Moron. In the next gubernatorial election, all the Dems have to do is run that exchange on an endless loop with the governor’s flip-off, “My prayers are going to be with him and his family because it sounds like he is in an awfully tough spot,” on every radio and TV station in the state and point out to hard-hit SC residents that their Republican governor will not lift a finger to help them through tough times and Sanford’s finished.

Up in Alaska, tax-evader Gov. Sarah Palin is having her own problems; her numbers are dropping, she hasn’t learned much since last October, and it’s only a matter of time until the Feds prosecute her for illegally playing footsie with the oil and gas industries. Prediction: She won’t be the GOP 2012 presidential candidate; she won’t win Lisa Mukowski’s US Senate seat in 2010, should she run; and she won’t even win reelection as governor.

And Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour might as well hang it up no one is voting for a Dixie-fried Jabba the Hutt in 2012, especially a governor who cruelly disregards the suffering of his own worst-state-in-the-nation people just to improve his chances at the GOP presidential nomination.

Well, Newtie Gingrich is waiting in the wings he can lose to Obama just as well as any of these roadside excretions, but if the Republicans were sincere, they’d run the current de facto party leader, the grumbling, dyspeptic voice of what the 2009 Republicans erroneously call conservative principles Rush Limbaugh.

Of course, Chicken Little Limbaugh, removed from the safe cocoon of his radio studio and forced to debate his strange ideas in public without his staff to protect him, would suffer the worst electoral thrashing in the nation’s history, but the GOP is dying anyway — they might as well go out in a blaze of the sheer, mad, howling hatred and stupidity that has become their indelible hallmark since the Reagan Era.