Bobby Jindal: We've heard it all before

              Governor Bobby Jindal is a shape-shifting fraud and a gross and habitual liar.  His stump speeches for Romney this year were deployed with his usual awkwardly wooden style--one that even gave GOP hacks the incentive to ignore him during VP selections.  Jindal, occupied by Hurricane Isaac, didn't make it to the RNC debacle, though Clint Eastwood saved him a chair.  "The Gre't State's" governor did, however, go to the usual stage-managed gatherings where he could play the color-blind individualist.
                "President Obama is the most liberal president since Jimmy Carter!" he never tired in hissing.  As if such a statement is something profound, clever, or even accurate.  It had all the intellectual depth and probity of Dan Quayle's son bellowing "President Obama is the worst president in history" before being ousted by the loons in a conservative primary.
              The "liberal" charge is an old but still useful tactic.  Jimmy Carter was no liberal--ask the PATCO union who grew so frustrated with his feckless leadership that they endorsed Reagan in 1980.  (The Republican hero notoriously rewarded them with pink slips after their failed strike.)  In 1978, the stock market was at its lowest point in three years, the trade deficit was growing, and inflation was quickly rising.  While Carter was accurately called the "last victim of the Vietnam War" he was also hostage to America's lack of an energy policy.  So how did the pious peanut broker and supposed "liberal" respond?  He urged Congress to cut spending and reduced federal job programs.  This, despite the opening tremors of de-industrialization, layoffs, and the ignored liberal coalition's demand that everyone deserved the dignity of a job.  
              Carter openly declared in 1978 that inflation not unemployment was America's greatest dilemma.  How is this, combined with no action on a health care bill and continued subsidies to conservative farmers on the federal dole, a liberal Presidency?  That Carter was followed by the tax-raising Reagan and Bush as well as the budget-balancing Clinton is not news, but it perplexes me why Jindal thinks "he's a liberal" attacks are at all interesting, vital, or accurate?
             In a CNN editorial ( http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/15/opinion/jindal-gop-election/index.html?hpt=hp_t3) Jindal mused on new ways to "move forward."  (While using obviously using no new ways to write.)  Of course these played-out tunes are simply sad re-giftings of conservative herd words.  They range from the cliche: "Stop looking backward." To the inane:  "Compete for every single vote."  There is some honesty:"stop being the stupid party."  In fact,  I was reminded of J.S. Mill who said in a Parliamentary debate in 1866, "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it."  
             Jindal also encouraged his fellow budget cutters to "reject identity politics."  Though this should more accurately be read as "stop with the racism."  The recently released Lee Atwater interviews demonstrate how the enduring use of linguistic subterfuge as a strategy to instigate latent racism is so well sewn into conservative rhetoric that what once was simply a Southern strategy is now a national strategy.  One built on the twin pillars of resentment and self-delusion.  If the rhetoric doesn't repeat racist language, it surely rhymes with it.  (Here's Atwater's "Nigger, nigger, nigger" statements:  http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy)  
              Though, admittedly, it's nice to see Jindal tip the conservative kabuki mask, we've heard the dialogue before.