The Patriot Post® · A Forceful Man’s Fight

Piyush Amrit Jindal is a man who I admire greatly and, believe me, I have watched him closer than I normally would for the past 93 days. You know him better by his nickname “Bobby,” which he himself adopted from a TV character when, as a child, he would often watch “The Brady Bunch” after he would get home from school.

At age 36, Bobby Jindal is the youngest governor in the United States and he has exemplified himself in the way he has handled Louisiana’s mounting peril after the devastating BP oil spill. Born to Hindu parents who came to Baton Rouge as immigrants from India, Bobby is brilliant, passionate, forceful, and full of greater promise.

He is also madder than an oil-slickened pelican. In a bylined-story that he himself wrote and that was published in last Sunday’s Washington (D.C.) Post, he lashed out at the federal government as a “slow-moving albatross” and insisted that “the only way to attack a crisis like this is with the urgency of a military mind-set.”

The BP Oil Corp. continues to work desperately to stem a still-seeping oil flow that has spread a dreadful slick over 2,500 miles of the Gulf of Mexico. Bobby’s mission is different. He is fighting to lessen the human impact and, in last Sunday’s essay, furiously railed the Federal government for its moratorium that halted deep-water drilling.

“This federal policy risks killing 20,000 more jobs and will result in a loss of $65 million to $135 million in wages each month,” he wrote, arguing the moratorium will do nothing to clean up the oil spill. “America has already lost two rigs (that were scheduled to be built off the La. coast) to foreign countries. More drilling companies are negotiating right now to work somewhere else.”

In an article I think all of America needs to read, the La. Governor claimed, “On those few occasions when our country suffers a commercial airline tragedy, we do not respond by stopping all air travel for six months. Rather, we get to work figuring out the root cause and set about trying to make air travel safer. We don’t grind everything to a halt and put tens of thousands of people out of work, jeopardizing our economy.”

That’s why Louisiana joined a lawsuit against the moratorium, he explained, but what now has Jindal so furious is that after a judge ruled the government’s action were in fault and that the “hair-splitting explanation abuses reason and common sense,” guess what happened?

Jindal offered this: “One might assume that the federal government would back down, lift the moratorium and get on with the business of ensuring that nothing like this ever happens again in federal waters.

"Nope.

"Our federal government chose to fight on in court, and lost a second time,” he wrote.

“Surely now, many of us thought, the federal government would stop its efforts to halt all drilling and instead get serious about more rigorous oversight and inspections,” the article continued.

“Nope.

"Instead, the federal government drafted a new moratorium. This seems to be a cynical ploy. It will take time to again take federal officials to court. If Washington loses, officials can issue a third moratorium and play this game out as long as they want. Such is the power of the federal government.

"Louisianans, of all people, don’t want to see another drop of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. It is our land and our way of life that are being harmed. Yet the administration tells our people to simply file a claim with BP or file for unemployment. Our people want to work, not collect unemployment checks.

"We don’t want to see the federal government create a second disaster, an economic disaster, for the people of our state thanks to its ‘capricious’ and ‘arbitrary’ actions. The bottom line is this: Thousands of Louisianans shouldn’t have to lose their jobs just because the federal government can’t do its job.”

As I stated earlier, I like Bobby Jindal but now I’m irked, too. Thank God a man like that is in charge of Louisiana right now.