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Louisiana Republicans, Hurricane Katrina, and Time Travel

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Progressives sometimes criticize the south as backward, but that’s not entirely fair. For example, Louisiana Republicans have developed time travel.

(by Regis Phlyphytyphts Phlyphytyl III (it’s Welsh), aka the BPI Squirrel)

I don’t think of Louisiana as backward. I once covered a GOP leadership conference in New Orleans, and I think of Louisiana as sideways. That probably says more about my embarrassing bourbon on Incident Street, but I bet you’d have strange stories too if you’d been there.

In fact, although that conference was three years ago, you could go now if you use the Louisiana Republicans’ time travel machine. I’m sure they have one, because nothing else could explain this:

A significant chunk of Louisiana Republicans evidently believe that President Barack Obama is to blame for the poor response to the hurricane that ravaged their state more than three years before he took office.

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government’s post-Katrina blunders.

Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans – 44 percent – said they aren’t sure who to blame.

This TPM reader seemed to explain the Louisiana Republicans’ reasoning:

I think it is a fair response.

Obama did nothing to manage the Federal response to Katrina, and Bush did slightly more than that.

But later in the thread he said that was a joke. No one else offered a convincing reason that Louisiana Republicans would blame a junior senator from the Midwest for the federal government’s incompetent response to a hurricane on the Gulf Coast. So I’m going with time travel.

That also explains why Republicans blame President Clinton for the September 11th attacks nine months after he left office, and blame President Obama for the economic disaster that began a year before he took office. Republicans also blame President Obama for domestic terrorist attacks in the 1960s and early 70s, because he met Bill Ayers 20 years later. And they know he was on the grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963.

And now, Hurricane Katrina.

I know you’re thinking my time travel theory is absurd. After all, many scientists think time travel into the past is impossible. The laws of physics don’t forbid it, but if people could time travel into the past, wouldn’t some of them be here now, trying to warn us about today’s mistakes? On the other hand, maybe that’s why Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz are right so often.

Anyway, my time travel theory is no more absurd than Louisiana Republicans. Yes, that’s a low bar, but low bars in Louisiana are why I had that embarrassing bourbon on Incident Street. That’s all the eighty proof I need.

Good day and good nuts.