Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, at a Republican Governors Association news conference this week:
President Obama is clearly the most liberal president we’ve had. You’d literally have to go back to Jimmy Carter’s years in the White House, back in the 1970s, to match the liberal ideology, to match the incompetence.
This is, as they say, a free country, so everyone has a right to interpret "incompetence" as they see it. But contemplate the egregious history in Mr. Jindal's comments. Obama "is clearly the most liberal president we've had" -- which knocks the founders of the New Deal and Great Society down one ideological peg, at least; then to confuse matters, Jindal asserts that Obama is equal in liberalism to conservative Democratic president Jimmy Carter.
Which is it?
Is Jindal actually unaware of what the 1980 Kennedy-Carter primary battle was all about? -- as Jules Witcover put it in his history of the Democratic Party, that "New Dealers ... abhorred Carter's lack of passion for the old party commitment to government as an engine of aggressive and imaginative change"? Or does Jindal merely believe that since his base mindlessly believes that Carter was a flaming liberal, by virtue of his party label alone, then why tamper with their atrocious history?
The most peculiar aspect of Jindal's revisionism, settled among the vastness of GOP revisionism, is that it accomplishes only two things: 1) a few buffoons in the GOP base let loose a Hurrah! and 2) it becomes yet another laughingstock item to everyone else.
Why do they do this to themselves? There ain't no future in it.