Bobby Jindal Angles to Lead the Stupid Party

As would be leaders of the Republican Party jockey for position to jump into the 2016 GOP presidential contest, it seems that it's in many ways a race to the bottom - something that has sadly become necessary as the GOP base has increasing gravitated toward the celebratory embrace of ignorance, religious extremism and open racism.  Joining in this race to lead the "stupid party" is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, an admitted dark horse given his Indian descent.  And irony of ironies, he has totally forgotten his admonish from just two years ago that the GOP needed to cease being the "stupid party."  Salon looks at Jindal's willingness to prostitute himself to the ugliest elements of the GOP base.  Here are excerpts:

Following the Republican Party’s humiliating defeat in the 2012 elections — a loss that polls indicated was coming but which nevertheless stunned no small number of Republicans — Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal was scathing in his assessment of the state of the GOP.

It was high time, Jindal told Politico, for Republicans to discard its “simplistic” sloganeering and knee-jerk opposition to President Obama — time, the governor said, for the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.”

“We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism,” Jindal added. “We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.”

Of course, boastful ignorance and anti-intellectualism largely define the modern American right, so Jindal’s summons for a more level-headed, ideas-based GOP never stood any chance of success. And Jindal himself refused to specify what would substantially differentiate a non-stupid Republican Party from its stupid iteration.

But Jindal, eyeing a 2016 bid for president, has completely abandoned his anti-”stupid party” crusade, desperately doing all he can to burnish his Know-Nothing credentials.

Some of the latest evidence emerged Wednesday, when his administration issued a letter asking Ebola researchers who had recently traveled to afflicted west Africans not to attend an upcoming conference of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in New Orleans. Experts have condemned such sweeping bans as not based in science, noting additionally that travel bans and other restrictive measures targeting health workers and researchers may well discourage other professionals from traveling to Ebola-stricken countries. But Republicans, happy to demagogue the Ebola issue ahead of the forthcoming midterms, have little interest in the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and public health advocates. And Jindal is happy to join in.

Jindal’s latest forays into right-wing rhetorical red meat come on the heels of other public statements that put the lie to his self-fancied image as the GOP’s ideas man. He was among the first conservatives to rush to the defense of homophobic “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson, alleging Robertson’s critics were engaged in a “war on religion” and suggesting that pushback against anti-gay remarks somehow threatened free speech. Meanwhile, the Brown University biology major and Rhodes Scholar won’t say if he accepts the theory of evolution or climate science, putting him to the right of the pope on those issues.

So Bobby Jindal, recognizing that thought and ideas are anathema to the contemporary GOP base, no longer has any interest in eradicating the stupid from the stupid party. Instead, he’s angling to become its leader — once he’s gained a little more weight.