Pardon Me, Mr. Governor, But I Do Believe Your Pants Are on Fire*

Tuesday night, during his deservedly much-maligned (even at Fox!) rebuttal to President Obama's address, Louisiana Governor Bobby "Kenneth from 30 Rock" Jindal told a doggone adorable tale about a grizzled sheriff, a plucky politician, and their crusade against a terrible monster named Bureaucracy:

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.

Awwwww. I just love stories that make me proud to be an American by showing how the American Spirit^TM of Real Americans^TM can triumph over evil like the American government and all its rules and regulations designed to ensure that people drown!

Too bad it looks to be a big stinking pile of horseshit.

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* And I'd totally help you put them out, if only my Republican governor hadn't done his patriotic duty of defunding emergency services like volcano monitoring and fire prevention, leaving me without a fire extinguisher. So I guess you're on your own. Luckily, because of Republican health and safety deregulation, your proverbial bootstraps are probably made of asbestos!