Jindal's Katrina Tale: UPDATE

TPM has the story about Bobby Jindal's GOP response to President Obama's speech to Congress. Jindal had his first chance to impress a national audience. To do so, he told the following story:

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I'd never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: 'Well, I'm the Sheriff and if you don't like it you can come and arrest me!'

I asked him: 'Sheriff, what's got you so mad?' He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn't go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration.

I told him, 'Sheriff, that's ridiculous.' And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: 'Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!' Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

Nice story but there is evidence to suggest that it is not true. According to Kos, "He was lying about this being his personal experience."

It would seem logical to ask Sheriff Harry Lee to confirm whether this is true. But Lee died in 2007.

_______________________________

UPDATE: But now:

A Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone"days later." [...]

There's a larger point here, though. The central anecdote of the GOP's prime-time response to President Obama's speech, intended to illustrate the threat of excessive government regulation, turns out to have been made up. [...]

This doesn't seem to bear on the key question. As we said, the key elements of Jindal's story were that he was in Lee's office during the crisis itself, and that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. Neither of those things was true, it now seems.

The Devil and Bobby Jindal

Gov Bobby Jindal has become a GOP rising star. Jindal along with Gov Sara Palin and former Gov Mitt Romney are emerging as the top contenders for the Republican nomination for President in 2012.

He's the rock star of the Republican Party right now," says Jeff Crouere, the former executive director of the Louisiana GOP and host of daily political talk show Ringside Politics.

But as the country gets acquainted with the Bayou's boy wonder, the stranger details of Jindal's religious or personal background remain largely unknown, even among the Republican grassroots.

How many Americans know that Jindal boasted of participating in an exorcism that purged the spirit of Satan from a college girlfriend?

The blogs are in a-twitter about story of Bobby and the Devil.

In an essay Jindal wrote in 1994 for the New Oxford Review, a serious right-wing Catholic journal, Jindal narrated a bizarre story of a personal encounter with a demon, in which he participated in an exorcism with a group of college friends. And not only did they cast out the supernatural spirit that had possessed his friend, Jindal wrote that he believes that their ritual may well have cured her cancer.

Reading the article leaves no doubt that Jindal -- who graduated from Brown University in 1991, was a Rhodes Scholar, and had been accepted at Yale Law School and Harvard Medical School when he wrote the essay -- was completely serious about the encounter. He even said the experience "reaffirmed" his faith.

In the essay (purchase required), Jindal describes an emotional friendship with a classmate, "Susan," recently diagnosed with skin cancer and reeling after the suicide of a close friend. Susan's behavior becomes stranger, and she is surrounded by "sulfuric" smells. Finally, one night at a prayer meeting, she collapses in a seizure -- and the exorcism begins:

It appeared as if we were observing a tremendous battle between the Susan we knew and loved and some strange evil force. But the momentum had shifted and we now sensed that victory was at hand.

While Alice and Louise held Susan, her sister continued holding the Bible to her face. Almost taunting the evil spirit that had almost beaten us minutes before, the students dared Susan to read biblical passages. She choked on certain passages and could not finish the sentence "Jesus is Lord." Over and over, she repeated "Jesus is L..L..LL," often ending in profanities. In between her futile attempts, Susan pleaded with us to continue trying and often smiled between the grimaces that accompanied her readings of Scripture. Just as suddenly as she went into the trance, Susan suddenly reappeared and claimed "Jesus is Lord."

With an almost comical smile, Susan then looked up as if awakening from a deep sleep and asked, "Has something happened?" She did not remember any of the past few hours and was startled to find her friends breaking out in cheers and laughter, overwhelmed by sudden joy and relief.

According to Max Blumenthal at The Daily Beast:

During the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, the campaign of Jindal’s Democratic opponent, incumbent Gov. Kathleen Blanco, attempted to inject his religious views into the race by running an ad promoting a website called JindalonReligion.com, which featured his essay about participating in an exorcism. However, Jindal immediately fired back, denouncing the commercial as an assault on his faith and on the deeply religious culture of Louisiana.

TMP notes that "the state Dems did make an issue in 2007 out of Jindal's extreme Catholicism and his view of Protestant tenets as heretical, but the effort provoked a backlash among voters who thought the assault was religious bigotry. So Dems didn't make an issue out of Jindal's experiment."

The question is will Palin or Romney resurrect the "devil tale" if Jindal decides to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2012.

Trying to Find Transparency

As President Obama gave his address to the joint session of Congress on Tuesday, he commented on the transparency of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

I know there are some in this chamber and watching at home who are skeptical of whether this plan will work. I understand that skepticism. Here in Washington, we’ve all seen how quickly good intentions can turn into broken promises and wasteful spending. And with a plan of this scale comes enormous responsibility to get it right.

That is why I have asked Vice President Biden to lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort – because nobody messes with Joe. I have told each member of my Cabinet as well as mayors and governors across the country that they will be held accountable by me and the American people for every dollar they spend. I have appointed a proven
and aggressive Inspector General to ferret out any and all cases of waste and fraud. And we have created a new website called recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent.

According to The Hill, the website that President Obama spoke of is getting an enormous amount of hits since it was launched.

The website President Obama said will allow Americans to monitor the spending of the $787 billion recovery plan is generating intense traffic, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Peter Orszag, Obama's director of the Office of Management and Budget, said recovery.gov received 3,000 hits a second upon its launch last week."

The president has repeatedly touted the site as a means through which Americans can ensure that their tax dollars are not being wasted as the largest spending measure in the country's history is doled out.

In his response to the President, Gov. Bobby Jindal spoke of transparency.

We need to bring transparency to Washington, D.C., so we can rid our capital of corruption and ensure that we never see the passage of another trillion-dollar spending bill that Congress hasn't even read and the American people haven't even seen.

Will somebody please show the Gov. where he can get this information.

Stunning!!!

Rachel Maddow goes Ga-Ga over Ba-Ba Bobby Jindal

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy