Bobby Jindal Wants to Bomb Things Now, So Please Make Him President
It's been five years since Bobby Jindal, postmodern joke, retaught himself how not to speak like an NBC page. But if he's going to be endear himself enough to be your president he's got to do something big, like taking more of your money from you to bomb more non-Americans into loving America.
Speaking Monday at the American Enterprise Institute, a disruptive-ideas incubator run by a secretive society of conservative Mr. Magoo impersonators (and one "factual feminist"), Jindal sought to downplay his Oxford education and multicultural background to right-wing presidential pickers by advocating perpetual war financed by perpetual tax revenue. Via CBS:
"[Obama] leaves for the next president tools of hard power that have fallen into disrepair. Military strength should not be the primary means by which the United States executes its foreign policy. But it is the indispensable element that underpins the other tools," Jindal said... He said he supports recommendations by AEI, a conservative think tank, to spend about 4 percent of America's gross domestic product on defense...
He argued that more money will allow the United States to "rebuild the tools of military power" to create a force, "not to nation-build overseas, not as a police force or a Keynesian jobs program, but as a deterrent to our adversaries, and as a tool to eradicate threats to American lives and interests."
It's a brilliant move on the part of Jindal and his personal Randolph and Mortimer Duke-like benefactors at AEI: They recognize that even the American right has grown war-weary. But it's not that they're weary of war! They're weary of not winning and not comprehending complex sociodynamics, which you need to understand in order to "engage" the world with "nation-building." But imagine if you could bomb your way to victory, or at least complete ignorance of whatever losery things are happening beyond American borders. It's elegant, really, the notion that we can bankroll more war in order to be more isolated from the rest of the world. Bliss!
"For anyone with a degree of introspection, this would be a time to consider whether the ramifications of your ideas were leading the world to experience more chaos and less clarity. But that is not what President Obama has done," Jindal said.
You know who else wished the rest of the world would shut the fuck up, banish chaos forever, and embrace clarity through the global imposition of his ideas? Jindal thinks it's the American voter. Well, okay, maybe him, too.