Bobby Jindal: Screw Obama, trust us! After all, remember Katrina?

The relevant passage:

Today in Washington, some are promising that government will rescue us from the economic storms raging all around us.

Those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina, we have our doubts.

Let me tell you a story.

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’ He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

There is a lesson in this experience: The strength of America is not found in our government. It is found in the compassionate hearts and enterprising spirit of our citizens.

Maddow nails this one: Republicans should never, ever bring up Katrina. Ever. But for a Republican to bring up Katrina to argue against government interventionism is absolute cock-eyed, deranged, cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs madness. It almost forces me to consider the possibility that Bobby Jindal is a Democratic saboteur.

And that was before he mocked disaster planning explicitly.

David Brooks:

Combined with his laughably hypocritical grandstanding on the bailout money (as Matthews points out), Jindal is in for a deeply unpleasant week or two, and a couple of big dents in his presidential hopes. This was ugly.

...though, as an aside, I would also like to note that, when discussing the speech of an Indian American governor, I think it's deeply inappropriate to invoke the term "outsourcing." Just sayin'.