Bobby Jindal and the Volcanoes

I had it in my mind to write a little screed about that ignorant twit's contempt for volcano monitoring and mention, among other things, how a volcano destroyed an entire Air Force base about 20 or so years back and that tens of thousands of lives were saved and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military hardware was saved because of volcano monitoring.

Nate Silver beat me to it.

I had it in my mind to also write about how many American cities are close to known volcanoes and how many thousands of people will be killed if even one of those big fuckers erupts without warning.

The Ornery Bastard beat me to it.

I just don't get it about the party of Hoover. Who do they think will fund research into volcano monitoring, other than government? Is it so hard for them to understand the benefits of being able to monitor a volcano and to generate a forecast of when it is going to erupt? Mount Pinatubo had been inactive for 500 years before it erupted. The Chaiten volcano in Chile erupted last year for the first time in 9,000 years.

What is it about the Hooverites and science? Why are they so opposed to the Federal government engaging in any sort of scientific research (unless it produces a better way to kill people)?

What also bothers me about the party of Hoover is that they have a proven track record of staffing government agencies with incompetent party loyalists and then, when the agencies predictably wind up being completely inept, they blame government for that fact.

Let's look at the record.

Under the party of Hoover during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who we all know as FEMA, was viewed as a political dumping ground, a place to stick party loyalists who were too stupid to hold a real job. As a result, FEMA botched the responses to Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew. Bill Clinton appointed a man with some experience at running an emergency management agency, James Witt. Witt fired all of the party hacks and brought in professionals who knew how to do disaster relief. Witt turned FEMA around.

Then came Our Beloved Chimperor, who reverted to using FEMA as a place to stash Republicans who could not hold a real job in the private sector (you know, people just like Dubya). His first pick was the guy who ran his campaigns, but he didn't last too long, so he put in a guy whose previous experience was at bankrupting a horse association.

And we all know how well that worked out. (Which is why President Obama, like President Clinton, is going to appoint someone who has experience in emergency management.)

Deliberately destroying the functionality of the government and then pointing to the resultant lack of functionality as a reason to not have government is like the Menendez brothers pleading for lienency because they are orphans. It counts on the American people being exceedingly stupid.

I don't think Americans are that stupid.

Bobby Jindal evidently disagrees.