Louisiana Voice

Turns out that Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Sam Brownback and Rick Scott were just the warmup acts, the amateurs hoping to move up in the comedic pecking order.

The headliner, of course, turned out to be a TV reality show personality with an overblown ego and decidedly short-changed IQ – a kind of one-man Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis act, only not nearly as funny.

You do remember a guy named Bobby Jindal, right? He was the wunderkind who was anointed by Gov. Mike Foster as the future of Louisiana. Rush Limbaugh was so taken with the boy blunder that he gushed that it wasn’t a matter of if he was destined to be president, but rather just a matter of when.

Of course, after he devastated the Louisiana economy, closed centers for the treatment of the mentally ill, slashed taxes for the rich (and even refused to renew an existing tax because, he insisted in some twisted Republican logic, that it was a new tax), gutted the Office of Group Benefits reserve fund, decimated public education in favor of charter schools for the wealthy, cut funding for higher education (forcing tuition hikes that made a college education cost-prohibitive for many in the state), he capped it all off by launching a pitifully inept run for the Republican presidential nomination. He never received more than 1 percent in the Republican primaries and caucuses.

Scott Walker was so controversial in Wisconsin that a recall movement was initiated against him. It failed, and Walker, thus emboldened, led an EFFORT to gut the powers of Walker’s Democratic successor in the Madison statehouse and in what would become a presage to future Repugnantcan efforts to restrict early voting in other states.

Brownback, like Jindal, took a wrecking ball to the Kansas economy – except he did an even more thorough job than did his Louisiana counterpart. But worse, going back to 1996, when he ran for the U.S. Senate to succeed Bob Dole who resigned to become the Republican presidential candidate in an effort to deny a second term to Bill Clinton, he showed anyone who was paying attention just how underhanded the Republicans can be and in so doing, offered a hint of things to come. Fines were levied against the Brownback campaign and against his in-laws for improper campaign contributions. But worse was the tactic ripped from the David Duke playbook by Brownback when his supporters, posing as pollsters, contacted Kansas voters to ask those expressing support for Democrat Jill Docking if they would change their vote if they knew that “Jill Docking is Jewish.” Docking, who is indeed Jewish, lost. Funds for the “push polls” were traced back to Koch Industries.

Rick Scott, who preceded current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, laid the groundwork for Deathantis but not even Scott could envision the path the current governor would take in condemning Floridians to the Delta Death. I mean, all Rick Scott did was take $300 million in stock, a $5.1 million severance package and a $950,000 per year consulting contract from COLUMBIA/HCA, his former hospital company when it was being investigated by the feds in 1997. But while he was taking the money. He said he took responsibility for a settlement the company reached with the government in which it admitted to 14 felonies related to fraudulent billing, practices, and kickbacks to doctors in exchange for referrals – even as he denied any knowledge of wrongdoing. The company ended up paying $1.7 billion in fines (at the time, the largest health care fraud case in the country). And of course, the good people of Florida rewarded him by electing him governor and later to the U.S. Senate.

Those are the warmup acts. The headliner, of course, is one Donald John Trump, the person whom the foregoing men only aspire to be. In the entertainment industry, be it musicians or comics, the warmup, or feature, act always hopes to move up to the headliner spot, mainly because it leads to bigger venues that pay more.

And then there are the wannabes. Again, reference the entertainment parlance, these are the opening acts or worse, the open mic acts who think they have something to offer. Sometimes they do, often times they don’t.

In the political arena, these would be people like governors Deathantis, Greg Abbott of Texas, Mike Parsons of Missouri (he who can’t find the time to address a possible commutation for KEVIN STRICKLAND who has languished on death row for 43 years for a murder that now even the district attorney says he didn’t commit but who fast-tracked the pardons of those gun-waving redneck ST. LOUIS LAWYERS who were so terrified of black marchers that they felt compelled to come outside waving their weapons and looking utterly ridiculous) and Doug Ducey of Arizona; U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Andrew (“they were only tourists”) Clyde of Georgia, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Mo (“you can’t sue me”) Brooks of Alabama, Gym Jordan of Ohio, Devin (“I’m suing everybody”) Nunes and Kevin (Trump is moving my lips”) McCarthy of North Carolina, Lauren (“Crazy Lady”) Boebert, Madison (“I can out-lie anyone but Trump”) Cawthorn, Elise Stefanik of New York, Clay (“Super Cop”) Higgins, Steve (“David Duke protégé) Scalise and Mike (Family Values) Johnson of Louisiana, Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ted (Aruba-bound) Cruz of Texas and John (Foghorn Leghorn) Kennedy of Louisiana, and Attorney General Jeff Landry, also of Louisiana.

I’m sure I missed some, but there’s room for only so many backstage, what with all the seltzer bottles, pies, clown outfits and other props necessary for this spectacle.

But I’m reserving a special place in my heart for Ron Deathantis, who has sentenced an untold number of his constituents to an agonizing death as they fight for air that won’t be there as their respiratory systems shut down. A lot of them will be school-age children but Deathantis is determined to keep local guvmint out of Floridians lives by issuing a state executive order that says funds will be withheld from any school system that mandates masks.

It’s somewhat ironic that a Repugnantcan who advocates less guvmint control would be so heavy-handed in his efforts to placate his mentor and fellow Floridian Trump. It’s also more than a little weird that Trump wants desperately to be credited for developing a vaccination for COVID that he didn’t develop and that he can’t bring himself to recommend to his brain-dead base.

“There are really only two places on the planet where it’s (the viral load) higher” – Louisiana and Botswana, DR. JONATHAN REINER, a professor at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, said on CNN Sunday.

“It’s so high in Florida that I think if Florida were another country, we would have to consider banning travel from Florida to the United States,” he said

So, now we have the governor of Florida fighting logical efforts to fend off a deadly virus. And Deathantis isn’t the only one. Next door to Florida, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster says mask mandates are illegal and inhibit a student’s ability to learn. That’s a novel argument – almost as absurd as the minister I heard one recent Sunday say that there are political leaders who wish to deny our right to worship.

What a crock. He was referring to Gov. John Bel Edwards and his mask mandate and limits on public gatherings of several months ago which slowed collections attendance at local churches. That in no way was an attempt to infringe on anyone’s right to worship. Edwards is a devout Catholic. It was a sensible approach to a very real problem that posed a threat to the entire population because no vaccination had been rolled out at the time. It was, to be perfectly blunt, a stupid, selfish argument.

And right here in Louisiana, our very own Joke Landry, who likes to masquerade as attorney general, actually filed suit against a small private medical school in Monroe after it mandated the coronavirus vaccine for its students. Landry WITHDREW the state as a plaintiff after a Trump-appointed judge questioned the validity of the state even being a party to the suit filed by three students. Such is life in the fantasy world of Shane Jeff Landry.

But the bottom line here, folks, is the frightening dearth of common sense in addressing a pandemic that is fast approaching the U.S. death toll from the Spanish Flu pandemic of a century ago and which has already matched the death toll of the single most deadly war in this country’s history – the Civil War in which 600,000 Americans died.

It was only 174 years ago – 14 years before the start of the Civil War – that Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis first advanced the preposterous (at the time) notion that the spread of disease could be halted, or at least slowed, by the simple act of washing hands.

The idea of hand hygiene to prevent the spread of germs was ridiculed by the scientific establishment. Some may have even said it inhibited learning or violated constitutional rights and individual freedoms. But the good doctor persisted, noting that during the Black Death of the 14^th century, the Jews of Europe had a far lower death rate, leading to the belief that their religious practice of hand-washing most likely served as protection during the epidemic.

But none of that really matters right now because the show must go on and while the headliner’s act has become stale, there’s a roomful of unimaginative hopefuls who, lacking any semblance of originality, would love the chance to duplicate his Vaudevillian schtick.