Piyush "Bobby" Jindal

If you watched Obama's address to Congress and the nation, and if you stayed tuned to hear the man touted as the silver-tongued Republican star-on-the-rise who gave the response, you saw the best stand-up comedy relief of the year.



Mr. Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, is the son of immigrants from India. At one point in his riveting speech, he said his mother had come over to the U.S. while forty-four and a half months pregnant. Either this was a mistake in his reading of the teleprompter, or his mom was reluctant to unleash this man on an unsuspecting world. The effort to hold him in must have been beyond description.



If this man is the rock star of the Republican party, they are in deep doo-doo. Outside the world of politics, anyone with his degree of disconnect from reality would be termed psychotic. Politics being what it is, though, you can be a howling lunatic and still get elected. Mr. Jindal is a very intelligent man by all accounts, and he has been an honest governor of his state--which very often elects people who are either honest or smart, but rarely do Louisiana's governors have both characteristics at one time. The problem with Mr. Jindal is that he already sees himself running for president and spends a lot of time fund-raising for just that purpose, much to the annoyance of many. He must have thought his time for leaping on to the nation's stage had come at last. Poor devil.



It doesn't really matter if you are unimposing in appearance if you can nail 'em with your speech. Mr. Jindal, however, needs all the help he can get. A rather nerdy sort, he stared with a kind of fascinated obsession as the camera..that is, the t.v. prompter..and sounded like someone who was reading a rather slow child a bedtime story. You could almost read his mind: "Hot damn!!! The entire country looks on as I wow them with my reply to the great Obama!!!" Or, as one of the pundits on PBS said in a succinct summation, "Demosthenes, move over."

If that sounds unfortunate, you should have seen part where his talk was cut off, blackness reigned supreme on the screen, and then a taped portion lauding his accomplishments as governor came on. I really hope the Republicans were watching their star commit ritual sepuku.
Youtube, of course, got every agonizing bit.