Castles Made of Sand Fall into the Sea or the foolish Man who built his House upon the Sand

Anyone can be a critic, including me. Heck it can be a lot of fun. What’s not to like in criticizing the disgraced ex-speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich or other such ilk. Your run of the mill Teabagger can be especially fun to criticize and mock. But criticism only goes so far. Like assholes everyone has an opinion.

And that takes us to the Governor of Louisiana, one Bobby Jindal. Now you could refer to Mr. Jindal as an anchor baby, to use the vernacular found in right wing blogs to describe children born in the United States whose parents are not citizens. One could also point out that without the Civil Rights Reforms of the 1960s, Mr. Jindal’s parents would not have gained entry into the United States and that instead of Anchoring his family in Louisiana, Mr. Jindal would have been raised in India and not gone on to be the Conservative Governor of a Southern State. Despite these ironies, Mr. Jindal considers himself a conservative and to be quite comfortable within the GOP notwithstanding its hostility to immigration reform and other such subjects one does not discuss in polite society.

Now as far as opinions go, everyone has one including Mr. Jindal. And for Mr. Jindal as the governor of the state most affected by the gulf oil spill, this disaster presented the perfect forum to make his opinion known to the world. And boy did he:

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in a new book accuses the White House of caring more about President Barack Obama's image during the BP oil spill than fixing the problem itself.

The government led a "lackadaisical" response and the White House was guilty of "political posturing" over the spill, said Jindal, a conservative and the nation's first Indian-American governor. Jindal's name has come up as a possible candidate for the Republican party's presidential nomination in 2012.

The 256-page "Leadership and Crisis", which is part autobiography and part conservative manifesto, contains a long chapter on the spill with behind-the-scenes detail and singles out the federal government for criticism. "The White House seemed to focus on the wrong things. I felt like we needed to be on a wartime footing against the oil, and the president was wondering, why is everybody criticizing me," Jindal said.

Opinions. Everyone’s got one.

Jindal blames the President for focusing on the wrong things and having a lackadaisical attitude. Politically this made perfect sense for Governor Jindal. It puts him in the spot light fighting for the local folks against the bureaucracy back in DC. It gave him a chance to knock off the not ready for Prime Time image he earned after his dazed response to the State of the Union speech by not just offering opinions and criticism but by taking charge of the scene with a little common sense conservatism. And according to the Foxnews coverage, folks down in the Red States liked what they saw from Bobby Jindal.

So what does commonsense conservatism look like from a man of words and deeds:

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Sand Berms and Such - why not? Let's see how commonsense conservatism worked in action.

Not so good:

For months, critics of Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal's BP-funded $360 million sand berm project have blasted the effort as a tragic misuse of time and resources. They charged that the governor and his lead advisers could have undertaken scores of other projects that would have been far more beneficial to the damaged Gulf and the inhabitants of its coast.

Some have even charged that the plan was nothing more than a multi-million dollar kickback for the governor's supporters.

however, the independent commission appointed by President Obama to investigate the oil spill has chimed in as well. Its verdict is, if anything, more harsh than the assessment offered by earlier critics: In the report the commission's members released today, they concluded the berm project was a total bust that succeeded in capturing virtually no oil.

In emphatic language, the bi-partisan commission announced that it can "comfortably conclude that the decision to green-light the underwhelmingly effective, overwhelmingly expensive Louisiana berms project was flawed."

Take the simple question of oil containment. "Estimates vary, and no precise figures are available," the report notes. "But no estimates of how much oil the berms captured are much greater than 1,000 total barrels. In comparison, according to peer-reviewed government estimates released in November, burning, skimming, and chemical dispersion addressed a total of between 890,000 and 1.85 million barrels spilled from the Macondo well."

Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. Your plan was a complete failure. It was less than .001 as effective as the plan those eggheaded Feds approved.

You should have stuck to casting stones from afar. You know, nobody is gonna blame you for having an opinion. Everyone has got one, after all. But now you’ve gone and shown yet again that you ain’t quite ready for prime time with your cockamamie Sand Castle Scheme.

A larger question still remains. Since Bobby wasted 360 Million Dollars of BP Money, will Congressman Smokey Joe Barton be calling him up and demanding an apology?