C. S. Lewis on Barack Obama

C. S. Lewis

Lewis died in 1963, so there is no knowing exactly what he would say. But I have come across some wonderful quotes from his satirical Screwtape Letters (uncle demon writing to a nephew demon on how to damn souls) that have obvious significance for what we should think of Barack Obama, the campaign he ran, and the state of American culture.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead….

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

It follows then, in general, and other things being equal, that it is better for your patient to be filled with anxiety or hope (it doesn’t much matter which) about this war than for him to be living in the present. But the phrase “living in the present” is ambiguous. It may describe a process which is really just as much concerned with the Future as anxiety itself. Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is, going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. (Letter XV, underlined emphasis mine)

In American politics, the words “past” and “future” have, respectively, negative and positive connotations. Is this a good thing? Did not Barack Obama’s campaign exploit futuristic jargon most successfully? Shouldn’t we be skeptical of so-called “progressive” policy schemes that play on false hopes of heaven on earth?

What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call “Christianity And”. You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring. Work on their horror of the Same Old Thing. (Letter XXV)

From the above passage, I think it is quite clear what Lewis would think of Black Liberation Theology and the Trinity United Church of Christ. He would disapprove.

The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating Pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, “low-brow” and “high-brow” artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride. Finally, the desire for novelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues.

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding”. Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate his horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will. It is here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character of modern European thought (partly our work) comes in so useful. The Enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking “Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?” they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on. And great work has already been done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective “unchanged” we have substituted the emotional adjective “stagnant”. We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is…. (Letter XXV)

Is American culture obsessed with change for its own sake? Is it irrationally afraid of “the Same Old Thing”?

The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unraveling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth…. So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or “science” or psychology, or what not. (Letter XXVIII, emphasis mine)

Do Obama and liberals believe that they can create heaven on earth?

The Left’s Flirtation with the Middle Class

Historically, the political Left has hated and despised the middle class, the hated bourgeoisie of Marxist thought. Yet in our times, the Left has realized (or rather re-realized) the political suicide of openly denigrating the “mushy middle.”

The Left has always hated the middle class because it has always represented and been the chief obstacle to its utopia, its unconstrained vision, its establishment of heaven on earth. Going back to at least Aristotle, observant political scholars have recognized the stability that a middle class brings to society. But the Left is not interested in stability, far from it. The Left is interested in revolution, in transformation, in the creation of the New Man; in a word: Change, the very opposite of stability. Moreover, the middle class tends to be less vulnerable to demagogic appeals to irrational class envy or self-hatred. In general, the middle class has also been the guardian of traditional religion and morality from generation to generation.  From every angle, the Left has had every reason to attack the middle class.

However, it has been said that the first rule of politics in democratic or semi-democratic nations is to add and multiply, not subtract and divide. Of course, from a practical, electoral perspective, political leaders, if they are to stand for anything at all, can’t help but divide the public with their rhetoric and policy positions. No, it is not a question of whether a politician will divide the country but how and to what extent he will divide it.

And if the middle class (admittedly a nebulous term) represents a majority, if not a super-majority (as it almost always has in America), then any political movement cannot afford to alienate this class–if it cares anything for practical, electoral success, i.e. power.

Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party have (re-)learned this lesson well. They campaigned as champions of the middle class, with the unending mantra of promising tax breaks for the lower and middle classes rather than the wealthy (Tax breaks for those who pay relatively little to no taxes?). This stance may work well politically under the current unfavorable economic conditions, just as FDR was successful in pushing his socialist-fascist policy agenda during the Great Depression. But as a matter of economic policy, it is unsustainable and not in the public interest. Conservatives and Republicans must powerfully communicate and demonstrate this truth the the American people.

When the American middle class re-awakens to this harsh reality, it will turn on the leftists, just as it did on Jimmy Carter. After that, it will only be  a matter of time before the Left’s natural hatred of the middle class re-emerges. The Left’s only hope is to weaken, corrupt,  or destroy the middle class before it re-awakens, or to patiently wear it down over time and enjoy the fruits at a later time. We conservatives must work to win over the middle class (or more of it) again. We must illustrate the economic harm that the Left is inflicting upon everyone. We must be in the fight for the long haul as well.

Texas-Born Muslim Supremacist Fundraises for Obama

Here is a good summary video:

Why is Obama accepting the fundraising services of a wacko racist anti-Christian Muslim who is in bed with the Saudis?

In the following video, Percy Sutton says that Khalid al-Mansour “is raising money for [Barack Obama].” (Sorry about Sutton’s slow talking but please stick with it to the end.)

Sutton is a San Antonio, Texas native and former civil rights attorney who represented Malcolm X, who was Muslim. Sutton actually went to Prairie View A&M as well, so there is an Aggie connection here.

This Obama fundraiser, Al-Mansour (aka Donald Warden), also born in Texas, mentored Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the founders of the Black Panthers, a violent black Marxist organization of the 60s and 70s. (As if the Weather Underground wasn’t enough for Obama!) He also became a top lawyer for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and OPEC in 1977. He now resides in San Antonio as well, apparently.

Al-Mansour is radically anti-Christian:

“…the Church Fathers were the architects of apartheid…. The church participated in discrimination. The church participated in segregation. But in South Africa the church designed it!”

For the correct analysis of the relationship between the Judeo-Christian tradition and slavery please see my post.

Like Jeremiah Wright, al-Mansour has a warped, racial view of the Bible:

A long version of his racist, anti-Christian diatribe:

Chet Edwards: The Disgrace of the District (TX-17)

Why the heck is Chet Edwards, a liberal Democrat, still representing the 17th District in Congress??

This district is overwhelmingly conservative and Republican. President Bush won this district by almost 40 percentage points in 2004. It is time for the 17th District to be represented by a conservative Republican like Rob Curnock. Chet doesn’t belong here.

Chet Edwards is skillful at talking moderate but voting liberal. This past session he voted 96% of the time along Democratic partisan lines with the San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi. He’s been one of the most liberal representatives in Congress. I told a woman in the last 2006 election cycle that a vote for Chet was a vote for Speaker Pelosi. She didn’t listen. Hope she’s listening now.

He voted to retreat from Iraq and cut off support to our troops in May of 2007 (HR 1591). If he and his liberal comrades had succeeded, we would not have seen the success of the surge.

Chet has a 100% pro-abortion rating from NARAL and voted to keep partial-birth abortion legal and to fund abortions with taxpayer money. The 17th District of Texas is a pro-life district. On this issue more than any other, it is a disgrace to have Chet as our representative. The Family Research Council gave Chet a rating of 18 out of 100. And Chet regards himself as a Christian, a Baptist?! Yeah, right!

He also has a very spotty record when it comes to protecting Texans’ 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

Lastly, as poor and middle-class Americans continue to suffer high gas prices, Chet voted with Nancy Pelosi to take a vacation and ignore the problem. Moreover, Chet has voted to make our energy problems worse (HR 6, Roll Call 1177), burdening industry with more regulations, wasting taxpayer dollars on the ethanol boondoggle, and cutting off our own domestic sources of energy.

Chet Edwards is too liberal for District 17. It is time for a change and that change is Rob Curnock.

What Child is This?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article4392846.ece?print=yes&randnum=1216989980152

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth – for the first time – to bring the light unto all the world.

He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the

Taleban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world.

And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.

From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it.

And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child’s very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light.

And the Persians, who saw all this and were greatly fearful, longed to speak with the Child and saw that the Child was the bringer of peace. At the mention of his name they quickly laid aside their intrigues and beat their uranium swords into civil nuclear energy ploughshares.

From there the Child went up to the city of Jerusalem, and entered through the gate seated on an ass. The crowds of network anchors who had followed him from afar cheered “Hosanna” and waved great palm fronds and strewed them at his feet.

In Jerusalem and in surrounding Palestine, the Child spake to the Hebrews and the Arabs, as the Scripture had foretold. And in an instant, the lion lay down with the lamb, and the Israelites and Ishmaelites ended their long enmity and lived for ever after in peace.

As word spread throughout the land about the Child’s wondrous works, peoples from all over flocked to hear him; Hittites and Abbasids; Obamacons and McCainiacs; Cameroonians and Blairites.

And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child’s journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over.

The Great Prophet Algore of Nobel and Oscar, who many had believed was the anointed one, smiled and told his followers that the Child was the one generations had been waiting for.

And there were other wonderful signs. In the city of the Street at the Wall, spreads on interbank interest rates dropped like manna from Heaven and rates on credit default swaps fell to the ground as dead birds from the almond tree, and the people who had lived in foreclosure were able to borrow again.

Black gold gushed from the ground at prices well below $140 per barrel. In hospitals across the land the sick were cured even though they were uninsured. And all because the Child had pronounced it.

And this is the testimony of one who speaks the truth and bears witness to the truth so that you might believe. And he knows it is the truth for he saw it all on CNN and the BBC and in the pages of The New York Times.

Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length.

But when he had finished speaking his disciples told him the crowd was hungry, for they had had nothing to eat all the hours they had waited for him.

And so the Child told his disciples to fetch some food but all they had was five loaves and a couple of frankfurters. So he took the bread and the frankfurters and blessed them and told his disciples to feed the multitudes. And when all had eaten their fill, the scraps filled twelve baskets.

Thence he travelled west to Mount Sarkozy. Even the beauteous Princess Carla of the tribe of the Bruni was struck by awe and she was great in love with the Child, but he was tempted not.

On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair and his successor, Gordon the Leper, and his successor, David the Golden One.

And suddenly, with the men appeared the archangel Gabriel and the whole host of the heavenly choir, ranks of cherubim and seraphim, all praising God and singing: “Yes, We Can.”

Noriega: US Government Spying on Its Own Troops!

LOL, this is truly ridiculous:

“I suspect that the government probably listened in on my and Melissa’s conversation because it was communication between two countries.”

I went to Noriega’s website to comment on the original video. Here is what I wrote:

“haha, that is truly ridiculous! You think the NSA is so incompetent that it can’t distinguish between terrorists and the troops we send out to kill them? That really is laughably incredible. How do you propose we disrupt terrorist operations if we can’t infiltrate their communications?”

Obviously, his campaign staff moderates the comments so I doubt it will get through and posted. But I encourage you to go to the site and leave your own comments anyway!

10 Reasons NOT to vote for Obama

1. He supports infanticide, literally!

2. His spiritual mentor for 20 years has been Jeremiah Wright whom Obama personally chose out of many Chicago pastors. It strains credibility that he didn’t know about Wright’s views. He listened to tapes of Rev. Wright when he was at Harvard Law! So why did he choose him and stick with him for so long? The only possible explanation is that he approved of Wright’s tirades.

3. He is a close friend of William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn, unrepentant Weather Underground terrorists.

4. He is a target for assassination, not because he is black but because he is a Muslim apostate, according to devout Muslims around the world. Therefore, he cannot be a good Chief Diplomat to the Middle East.

5. He was mentored by a communist.

6. His economic plan will harm the US economy and create more fiscal irresponsibility with the Congressional Budget. Why do we want to return to the days of Jimmy Carter?

7. He is in favor of unilateral disarmament, leaving America defenseless against its enemies.

8. He is unaccomplished. He hasn’t really done anything of worth relative to the office of the US presidency. He’s only been in the Senate for about two years (assumed in office Jan of 2005 and announced his candidacy for the presidency in Feb 2007). One can’t be simultaneously a full-time senator and a full-time presidential candidate. Soon he will have campaigned for almost as long as he has been in the Senate.

9. He is willing to personally meet with hostile dictators like Hugo Chavez and Ahmadinejad with no preconditions. They don’t deserve such a privilege of meeting the President of the USA. Reagan negotiated from a position of strength, when he thought he could gain something. What does Obama hope to gain?

10. Three other people: Tony Rezko, Eric Holder, Jim Johnson. Why does Obama associate with such shady characters?

Obama Supports Infanticide!

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=18647

by Amanda B. Carpenter

Posted: 12/26/2006

Sen. Barack Obama (D.-Ill.) portrays himself as a thoughtful Democrat who carefully considers both sides of controversial issues, but his radical stance on abortion puts him further left on that issue than even NARAL Pro-Choice America.

In 2002, as an Illinois legislator, Obama voted against the Induced Infant Liability Act, which would have protected babies that survived late-term abortions. That same year a similar federal law, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, was signed by President Bush. Only 15 members of the U.S. House opposed it, and it passed the Senate unanimously on a voice vote.

Both the Illinois and the federal bill sought equal treatment for babies who survived premature inducement for the purpose of abortion and wanted babies who were born prematurely and given live-saving medical attention.

When the federal bill was being debated, NARAL Pro-Choice America released a statement that said, “Consistent with our position last year, NARAL does not oppose passage of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act … floor debate served to clarify the bill’s intent and assure us that it is not targeted at Roe v. Wade or a woman’s right to choose.”

But Obama voted against this bill in the Illinois senate and killed it in committee. Twice, the Induced Infant Liability Act came up in the Judiciary Committee on which he served. At its first reading he voted “present.” At the second he voted “no.”

The bill was then referred to the senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, which Obama chaired after the Illinois Senate went Democratic in 2003. As chairman, he never called the bill up for a vote.

Jill Stanek, a registered delivery-ward nurse who was the prime mover behind the legislation after she witnessed aborted babies’ being born alive and left to die, testified twice before Obama in support of the Induced Infant Liability Act bills. She also testified before the U.S. Congress in support of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act.

Stanek told me her testimony “did not faze” Obama.

In the second hearing, Stanek said, “I brought pictures in and presented them to the committee of very premature babies from my neonatal resuscitation book from the American Pediatric Association, trying to show them unwanted babies were being cast aside. Babies the same age were being treated if they were wanted!”

“And those pictures didn’t faze him [Obama] at all,” she said.

At the end of the hearing, according to the official records of the Illinois State senate, Obama thanked Stanek for being “very clear and forthright,” but said his concern was that Stanek had suggested “doctors really don’t care about children who are being born with a reasonable prospect of life because they are so locked into their pro-abortion views that they would watch an infant that is viable die.” He told her, “That may be your assessment, and I don’t see any evidence of that. What we are doing here is to create one more burden on a woman and I can’t support that.”

As a senator, Obama has opposed measures to criminalize those who transport minors across state lines for the purpose of obtaining an abortion.

At a townhall meeting in Ottawa, Ill., Joanne Resendiz, a teacher and mother of five, asked him: “How are you going to vote on this, keeping in mind that 10, 15 years down the line your daughters, God forbid, could be transported across state lines?”

Obama said: “The decision generally is one that a woman should make.”

Noriega Still Clueless on G.I. Bill

In a previous post, I pointed out Noriega’s shameless attempt to deceive Texans. He is starting to feel the heat from this reckless ploy.

It looks like the Cornyn campaign is driving home the point about the necessity of transferability of unused benefits to military spouses and children. Good for him.

Will Noriega finally stop stonewalling and “answer the call” to support this improved G.I. Bill?

Bayou Bobby for Vice President

“My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” quipped John Adams of the vice presidency over 200 years ago.

Not much has changed since the late 1700s (Dick Cheney is quite an anomaly historically), but the VP slot is surely more important the older the presidential nominee is. Thus, more so than Barack Obama, John McCain had better choose well his VP and that choice should be Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a real up-and-comer in the party.

Why? First of all, the guy can talk. Just look him up on YouTube and listen for yourself. Jindal speaks quickly and powerfully on his feet. His is not the fluffy eloquence of a pre-packaged Obama speech, but he can do that too. He is just the kind of talent the McCain camp is going to need if it is to exploit the hypnotic change-mania that has gripped much of the country.

If there was ever a state that needed change, it is Louisiana, and he has capitalized on the change rhetoric in his own campaigns. “I suspect that some of those who oppose making big changes in Louisiana government will try to mount a counter-offensive…. But before we can change the direction of our state, we all have to change our current mindset. We have to defeat cynicism…. We can change. We must change. We will change…. [C]hange is not just on the way: Change begins tonight!” declared Jindal upon claiming victory for the governorship.

Next, McCain can’t win the election without a better outreach to the conservative base, and he has done a poor job thus far. If anybody can excite the base and get them out to the polls for McCain, Jindal is the one to do it. He has a 100% pro-life voting record and an “A” from Gun Owners of America. He campaigned for governor on cutting taxes among other issues. Rush Limbaugh has gone so far as to call him “the next Ronald Reagan.” The battle against Obama for independents will be formidable, so finding a way to win over staunch conservatives is a must.

At 37, Jindal is even younger than Obama by about a decade (helping McCain diffuse the age issue) yet has a much longer and more impressive resume than the Democratic nominee. Brace yourself for a deluge of experience: He graduated with honors from Brown University in biology and public policy and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who turned down admission to medical and law schools at both Harvard and Yale. At McKinsey and Company, Jindal consulted Fortune 500 companies. Two years later he was appointed the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals and another two years later appointed Executive Director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. Jindal’s particular background in health care, which is sure to be an important issue this election, couldn’t be more timely.

From there he went on to serve as the president of the University of Louisiana System and then the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in 2001. Only then did he begin a career as an elected representative to Congress serving two terms and winning his reelection with an incredible 88% of the vote! As governor of Louisiana, his approval ratings have reached as high as a whopping 77%.

And to top it off, no matter how hard we try to ignore it, race will likely be an issue in the presidential campaign. It can only help to have a person of color on the Republican ticket when campaigning against an historic opponent, an African American. Don’t expect much of a shift in the black vote, but it will be much easier to deflect the perennial accusations of Republican racism with an Indian-American at McCain’s side.

In short, Jindal is the youthful, articulate, reforming, conservative, and accomplished rock star that the Republican Party desperately needs in the fight against the predicted blue political tide this November and in the effort to bring the party itself back to its winning principles.

Help us Bobby Jindal, you’re our only hope.