Epic Flail For Jindal & The Republicans

The overnight polling on Barack Obama's address to Congress was astounding. The CNN/Opinion Research survey, for example, found that 68 percent of viewers had an extremely positive view of the speech while 24 percent had a somewhat positive view. While I'm not very good at math, I think that means only eight percent of viewers were turned off, which brings me back to the smoking turd handed up by Bobby Jindal in the Republican response.

Not even the talking heads at Faux News tried to put a good face on the Louisiana governor's effort.

But what is worth repeating is that Jindal, who I'm told is a pretty smart guy, was reduced to mouthing the Republican talking points on the stimulus package specifically and economic recovery in general:

No new ideas. Zip. Nada. Zilch. Only yet another recycling of the "government is the problem" meme that the Grand Old Party tries to peddle when it is not in power.

No one -- not even a Grover "Taxes Are Death" Norquist or Michael "Hip Hop" Steele -- would have expected the beginnings of a turnaround from the Republican response to a popular president's maiden address to Congress. Jindal will rebound, but Republican thinking is so small at a time when the opposition is busting a gut thinking big, that it is worth repeating yet again that the party's time in the wilderness is going to be long indeed.