Just a lazy bigot

Jindalmania:

Megan loves her some crazy ass Bobby Jindal, which means no amount of reality will dissuade her from mistaking him for Dinesh D'Souza with charisma. Not even an ad hoc exorcism wil change her mind. And so, she lies about everything she can to pretend his religious extremism is ok, like Bush's totally has been. And Jindal actually means his bat shittery, but whatever, Megan has a crush.

[D]id Obama make some compromise on the Democratic Party's no-restrictions-on-abortion-at-any-time-no-shut-up-I-CAN'T-HEAR-YOU-LALALALALA platform?

Yes.

Because as far as I know, he's still toeing the party line there. And that's just about as extreme, as far from the average American's opinion on abortion, as Bobby Jindal's.

Uh huh.

On the other side, I don't see anything wrong, or "EXTREMIST", about Bobby Jindal being a devout Catholic who wants to enter into a covenant marriage. He hasn't indicated any plans to stop Ta-Nehisi and I from living with our partners without benefit of the marital sacrament, or from getting married, should we choose, the good old-fashioned way, with its 50% divorce rate. I think the option for covenant marriage is a good thing for the government to provide, but then I'm a libertarian. I like people to have as many choices as possible, as long as those choices don't hurt others.

Freedom = a dozen different flavors of Coca-Cola to choose from, and the right for socially conservative families to pressure their children to enter into a more restrictive form of marriage as early as possible. And bless that Jindal for making how the love between him and his wife is expressed into a political issue. How could a libertarian who likes to call herself a feminist have a problem with anything here?

Besides that, I'm willing to bet that Ta-Nehisi has never seen Jindal in person. I have. And while "swarthy" may play a small role in the Obama comparisons, it's mostly along the lines of thinking that the Republican Party's first non-white candidate would help heal the party's image a bit.

Right, no one would recognize the tokenism inherent in running the only brown person of note in the party against Obama, especially a brown person who's so white.

The reason that they're comparing Jindal to Obama is that, in person, he comes off a lot like Obama. He's extremely positive, he's personally charming, and he's kind of skinny and his ears stick out. Like Obama, Jindal is something of an odd duck; he looks like the president of the Paramus, New Jersey High School Chess Club, and talks like a good old boy with a plantation somewhere back in the Bayou. The combination is disconcerting for northern journalists, and a little bewitching.

Megan called the witch doctor, he told her what to do, he say.... you know the rest. Like Obama, Jindal isn't white but doesn't have a dot on his forehead or speak with an Indian accent, meaning neither plays to racial stereotypes. And this causes Megan to link the two. She's so entranced by Jindal she can't notice her own bigotry.

But once you're past that, well, the guy just has skills. His message, like Obama's, is one of hope and actual change; he tends to emphasize the work he's done reforming Louisiana's notoriously corrupt political culture. And like Obama, he has the charisma to put it over. Nearly all prominent politicians are extremely charismatic. Being in a room with them is like being in a room with the sun; you can't really look anywhere else. But some have it more than others, and Jindal has a lot of it.

He's married, Megan.
And he's a barely concealed theocrat. That's not much like Obama, and if you didn't get a sense that Jindal would let the rich be rich you'd pretend to hold libertarian 'values' and be horrified by his religious insanity.

He's also a really good political organizer, which is how a Republican carries Louisiana (to be sure, the Democratic governor's monstrously incompetent performance during Hurricane Katrina helped quite a bit.) And on the other metrics by which Obama stands out--his academic chops, his meteoric rise--Jindal actually betters Obama. The guy was accepted to both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School, but decided to go for a political career, and accepted his Rhodes Scholarship instead. At 25 he was appointed Lousiana's Secretary of Health and Hospitals; at 28, he became the youngest-ever president of the University of Louisiana system.

And his asshole tastes like curry.

You can say many things about him--he's written some nutty things about Protestants, and participated in an exorcism, which means he's gonna have some 'splaining to do if he runs for President. But he is not George W. Bush, or John Kerry, or Al Gore, or any of the other range of uninspired sons of the gentry who have graced our political landscape recently. He is phenomenally smart, and phenomenally talented, and phenomenally likeable. And I'm sure that complacent Democrats dismissing him as a goober with a God complex suits his current plans just fine.

He'll have to overcome Palin and Huckabee competing for the same basic slice of the base, and it just might matter to the average southern fundie that P&H are white, just maybe.
Also, Megan, you have a well established track record of being wrong. Everyone but you has noticed, it might be time to start questioning your own wisdom.