Hey @realDonaldTrump you can't make America great again by throwing the Christians in jail. (1/3)
— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) September 4, 2015
But even really rich New Yorkers should oppose jailing Christians for their religious beliefs. (3/3)
— Gov. Bobby Jindal (@BobbyJindal) September 4, 2015
Nothing dogwhistle-like about suggesting people in city with nation's largest religious minority population don't like Christians
— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) September 4, 2015
Okay, so Bobby Jindal is desperate to be somebody’s VP candidate, and presumably he thinks attacking Trump makes him look like a new-gen Spiro Agnew for one of the GOP Establishment candidates. (The other Bible-bangers weren’t gonna give him the time of day anyways, what with Catholics only barely qualifying as Christians in Huckabee/Cruz world, and Santorum is polling even lower than Bobby.) I still say that an Indian-American in the Deep South should be very, very careful about encouraging “Those People, you know they’re not like Us” murmurs among the rubes…
For context, this is about Kim Davis, Christ’s Living Martyr in Kentucky. When the media rushed to get every GOP candidates’ opinion about Davis being willing to go to jail rather than do the job she’s (well) paid for, Trump was sensible enough to say that SSM is now the law of the land, full stop. Since the rest of the GOP klown klan were already hustling to out-Taliban each other, Jindal seems to have decided to gum The Donald’s ankles rather than just me-too’ing the day’s reading from the altar. Hey, it’s not like he has much dignity left to lose!
Jerzy Russian
Where is part 2 of Gov. Jindal’s sequence of tweets? Was it even dumber than parts 1 and 3?
dubo
It’s true, you CAN’T make America great again by throwing bigots in jail
but it’s a start
Betty Cracker
What a sad little man.
We had a little excitement earlier. My kiddo, who has had her license for one year and one month, was in her 3rd fucking car accident tonight. Everyone is okay, which is all that matters.
But what the fucking fuck? I’ve been driving for more than 30 years, and I’ve never had so much as a fender bender. My kid drives for one year, and three separate morons slam into her car.
craigie
That got a guffaw out of me
Anne Laurie
@Jerzy Russian: Funny you should ask! Gov. Jindal actually has those two tweets “pinned” at the top of his Twitter page, because the interim tweet is complete jibberish to non-Believers…
Suzanne
It’s really tragic that Trump is likely the sanest of them all.
How long until this Davis idiot resigns to spend more time with her family? And how long until we find out that one of her kids is gay?
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Anne Laurie: It’s gibberish to this believer, in relation to the other two tweets.
Pie Happens (opiejeanne)
@Suzanne: I don’t know, but I did learn one good thing. GoFundMe rewrote their rules because they were tired of being the conduit for millions of dollars paid to bigots and murderers and homophobes. They seem to be honoring their new rules, too, which Kim Davis fails on two counts: she’s in jail, and her offense includes denial of rights based on sex.
Anne Laurie
@Betty Cracker:
Maybe part of it is a variant of what the driving instructors call “inexperienced drivers attracting accidents”? Your kid may be doing all the right things, but she doesn’t have the instinct-level unconscious habits of long-term drivers. (In Florida, where, according to Dave Barry, ‘drivers compete with each other on the roads using the driving codes of their 137 different original homelands’, or something like that.)
There’s plenty of minor & not-so-minor “adjustments” Boston drivers make to deal with our insane cohorts, under the assumption that there’s always an idiot who will attempt a left-turn-on-red or speed up to beat a cop car with its lights flashing to the intersection. CrackerDaughter may just not have internalized the local “unspoken rules” about which traffic situations are liable to put her in peril?
(For instance, there’s many Massholes who believe that a car which stops for a yellow light that’s not that “aging” deserves to be rear-ended. Or that some stop signs, at particular intersections, are “suggestions, not commands”, as one long-suffering driver instructor phrased it… )
jl
@Pie Happens (opiejeanne): I don’t get it either. Need a BJ guest post by Jindal to explain? I’ll definitely read it (and the comments too, they will be good).
Gene108
It is truly sad to watch somebody jettison the things they learned, in order to pander to the rubes.
Jindal, on paper at least, should not be as ignorant as he is trying to be.
Ivy League educated science major and Rhodes Scholar should be proud of his “book learning” and not try to be what he is not.
A guy named Piyush is never going to folksy anyone else in his appeal to white nativists, no matter how hard he tries to be Bobby Brady.
Should tried sticking to play the role of the “smart one”.
George W Bush got “street cred” because his supports could say, “who you call in’ stupid, he went to Yale and Harvard”.
Also, Bobby should have taken a page from Bush, Jr’s example, and become an exercise freak. Something about tough manly-men that could out arm wrestle anyone else they compete with that seems to appeal to right-wing voters. Unfortunately for Piyush, he looks like Ken the Page from “30 Rock”.
Anne Laurie
@jl: Best I can make out — and it’s only an informed guess — Davis doesn’t want to have to “ask God for forgiveness” for letting queers get marriage licenses, and the rest of us non-Talibangelicals need to “respect (her) communion (with her God)” by not insisting she do anything she says God doesn’t want her to do. There is also, I suspect, some kind of faith-based dogwhistling about her “faith community”, i.e., us heathens are trying to publicly shame her in front of her fellow Bible-bangers, which is most un-Godly of us.
Betty Cracker
@Anne Laurie: God, Masshole drivers! I lived up there for a few years, and they are terrible. NYC drivers have nothing on Massholes.
Not sure how the poor kid can acquire better defensive driving skills. Two of the assholes who hit her shot out of parking lots to t-bone her car, and the other rear-ended her while she was stopped at a light.
Le sigh. I never wanted her to drive at all. This is why.
sukabi
@Anne Laurie: I don’t do Twitter, but from clicking over and perusing his feed, it appears Bobby is even dumber than I thought. He’s nothing but a talking points regurgitating machine.
Anne Laurie
@sukabi: In his defense, Jindal may not be the one writing ‘his’ tweets. Which doesn’t excuse him for letting some nitwit intern or office drone dribble out these market–tested snippets, but he may not be producing the stupidity personally.
(IIRC, even President Obama, who does not mind being intelligent in public, uses his initials to differentiate those tweets on “his” feed that he actually wrote. Social media for “professional political use” is an even weirder mish-mash than the stuff us amateurs commit.)
Thoughtful Today
talkingpointsmemo.com:
“Parody Twitter Account Hilariously Skewers Jailed Kentucky Clerk.”
Betty Cracker
@Thoughtful Today:
Tee to the hee!
Honus
@Suzanne: that’s the crux of the whole thing. It’s a relatively high paying job in a rural Kentucky county. She can’t do anything else nearly as lucrative. Put another way, her love for Jesus is less important than her need for money, or else she’d quit the job that requires her to do something she considers immoral.
Thoughtful Today
!!!
that one got a full secondary belly laugh
;)
MattR
@jl: @Anne Laurie: The communion and forgiveness tweet was in reference to Trump’s statements about his personal religious beliefs and practices. Jindal is basically calling Trump out as a non-Christian, which may be the biggest weapon that can turn the Republican base against Trump.
jl
@Anne Laurie: Thanks, but I still don’t get it. There is the parable of of the pharisee and the publican
I guess I am a heathen in their eyes since I am not ‘Bible believing’. So this heathen would just try to explain to her that she is not presiding over religious marriages, just certifying civilian contracts, legally speaking, so she has nothing to worry about. The two fornicators don’t need the contract to keep a’ on sinning together.
And she should read St. Paul about how to live among godless pagans and heathens and still keep your wits about you, which is, don’t sweat it too much if no one is making you worship false gods or sin yourself.
Or maybe I would suggest she read the whole passage where Paul says gays are sinners and then says if a Christian thinks they are better then they are worse sinners.
It is sad. I won’t try to figure it out anymore. I’m sleepy and it’s no use anyway.
jl
@MattR: OK that makes a little more sense, and it is nastier, so I guess more likely to be correct.
Edit: but Jindal needs to get out the Good Book and read the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. And here Trump is the justified publican (tee hee hee).
jl
Wrote a comment about what I, a Bible reading heathen would say to this poor misguided woman to try to bring her to her senses, but FYWP ate it, looks like. Oh well, she probably doesn’t read this blog anyway.
Anne Laurie
@MattR: Well, yeah — so was pointing out that Trump comes from Nooo Yark Cittah, which every good Heartland American(tm) knows means he’s Jewish, or at least an atheist, like there’s such a big difference to them. But Jindal’s phrasing is so deeply jargon’d that even he (or the person who’s responsible for Jindal’s twitter feed) didn’t want to draw attention beyond the hardcore “(loudly public) faith community”.
Honus
I wonder how many republican candidates and conservative pundits would be defending Davis if her religious beliefs prevented her from issuing concealed weapons permits? (I’m not sure about Kentucky, but in virginia they are a ministerial duty of the circuit clerk). I don’t recall Jesus condemning homosexuals, but he did he drew his sword to defend Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane her savior quite clearly directed Peter to put away his sword, and then there’s that pesky fourth commandment, something about not killing unless you’re a member of a well-regulated Christian militia.
redshirt
@Honus: Rhetorical questions!
Robert Sneddon
@MattR: Governor Romney, a Mormon Bishop got over 45 million votes from Republicans last election. They refused to vote for the candidate who was accused of attending a Christian church too often in the previous election.
Christianity in the US is a tribal marker rather than a true belief structure.
mai naem mobile
Bobby Jindal is such an inconsequential nothing that if he said something really outrageously offensive, nobody would call him out on it. Fvcking Arnold Schwarzenegger would get more primary votes right now than Jindal and Arnold’s not even American born.
Ruckus
As this is an open thread I will report that my congressperson is now for the Iran agreement. She emailed me a form answer to my asking her about it as she made no mention on her website. Her form email was involved and made to sound like this was a hard decision to make, that took a lot of information and thought to arrive at. I thanked her and gave her a gentle round about barb that it took her so long to make the correct decision. I think she’s someone who wants to go far in politics and that’s OK but she needs to put the job first and her career will most likely take care of itself, rather than the other way around, which is how it feels from her website and her email. I do give extra credit for her involved answer, better that she thinks about it than just makes knee jerk reactions.
Ruckus
@Robert Sneddon:
Christianity in the US is a tribal marker rather than a true belief structure.
Certainly seems that way. Like wearing a flag pin in the lapel.
Alexandra
I’m not hearing the phrase ‘deep bench’ so much anymore.
Amir Khalid
@Alexandra:
The Republican party’s presidential bench was never deep, merely crowded. It has only just realised the difference.
Elaine Benes
Huh. I just popped into a message board that I used to frequent and lo and behold: the extremely insane RW nutjobs have turned on the moderately insane RW nutjobs.
I have to chuckle when an Ayn Rand fanboy libertarian asshole (who also rabidly opposes abortion!) is told that he’s “nothing but a RINO!” *spit*
I get the sense that the moderates are somewhat taken aback. They finally see – or, more precisely, feel – the fury and delusion and hatred, maybe? One hopes?
SRW1
Not that I have any sympathy for him, but didn’t Graham also respond to l’affair Davis that the law is the law?
ETA: Bobby Jindal is a sad sack. So much so, he almost tickles my empathy reflex.
SRW1
@Gene108:
Jindal claims to be an exercise junkie:
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/bobby-jindal-exercise-junkie
Bobby Thomson
@Robert Sneddon: are you suggesting Mormons aren’t Christians? They would disagree.
trnc
It’s always satisfying to peruse the twitter threads after comments like that. Jindal or whomever maintains his account must be a masochist.
Lurking Canadian
@Bobby Thomson: What Mormons think isn’t really relevant to the issue of what non-Christian Mormons think. Many fundamentalists do, indeed, believe that Mormons are not Christian.
For that matter, many fundamentalists believe that Roman Catholics are not Christian.
Stacy
@Honus: She was/is thinking of the sweet Jesus money she was going to collect from fellow deep thinkers.
Princess
@Bobby Thomson: Mormons only have a slightly better claim to call themselves Christians than Muslims do. Which isn’t to say they (and Muslims, who have no interest in making such a claim) don’t have any claim. And of course they are free to call themselves what they like, but it doesn’t mean other who also call themselves Christians have to agree with them.
Howard Beale IV
@Betty Cracker: I take it you have a dashcam?
RaflW
I’m pretty sure a significant portion of people in jail in the US of America identify as Christians. Should they all be let out?
benw
We should start a BJ pool on who will be the first R presidential candidate to visit Davis in jail and pray with her. My money’s on Huckabee, with Perry as the surprise dark horse.
Frankensteinbeck
@Anne Laurie:
Part of it is ‘You forced us to serve negros. No more. We will not budge another inch.’ That’s become a part of a more general resentment of the government restricting their ability to shit on the Other, but history suggests that it really set off the furious looking around for whoever they can abuse.
@Honus:
In this case, no. Her giving the marriage licenses is the lesser ‘immorality’. The greater immortality is her being forced to give the marriage licenses. It’s possible she’s motivated by greed, but her behavior is consistent with standing up for what she believes – that straight white Christians should have the right to hurt everyone else whenever and however they feel like it.
schrodinger's cat
@benw: Jindal, because there is no depth he won’t sink to. I wonder what the senior Jindals think about their son.
delk
@benw: Huckabee already said he would be visiting her on Tuesday.
J R in WV
@Betty Cracker:
Talk her into driving with her lights on all the time, that might help dumasses see her coming/stopped. Only suggestion I have for being less of a target.
You’re right, tho, no way to avoid that kind of hostile driving around you. Esp the t-bones, for crying out loud! Or the stop light. Mrs J was once coming home from work at 3 or 4 am, stopped at a light, got rear-ended by a drunk, cop asks why did you stay stopped?
Didn’t even breathalyzer the drunk! Blamed the innocent target coming home from work instead of the guy who spent all night at a bar!
She was furious!
SFAW
@RaflW:
That depends on an individuals color, I would think.
@delk:
It would be too bad if they “misplaced” the keys while Huck was visiting her in solitary confinement.
Of course, Jeebus, with just the slightest movement of his middle finger, would magically free Huck and Unclueable Kimmy Davis. Well, if He determined that they truly were Christians, i.e., truly followed his teachings, that is.
benw
@delk:
Wow. I swear that I didn’t know that when I posted. I guess this means I literally think of R candidate behavior as a joke. I hope his visit goes something like this (youtube).
sukabi
@Anne Laurie: EVEN IF that is the case, HE’S ultimately responsible for his public persona…. I’d think he’d want to be perceived as a bit MORE than a series of really BAD talking points.
Ethan
If you owned a bar and your bartender told you he had deepened his faith in Islam and would no longer serve alcohol to your customers — soft drinks OK, but not alcohol — what would you tell him?
Bill Murray
@Howard Beale IV: how else would Betty know there was fucking going on?
Kyle
Maybe not, but it’s certainly worth a try now that you mention it.
I can think of plenty of Repuke-voting fundagelicals this country would be better off having out of public circulation.
athEIst
and then there’s that pesky fourth commandment, something about not killing unless you’re a member of a well-regulated Christian militia. FUNNY!