Landrieu reinforces her athlete's mouth with rally remarks

Just when you thought Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu might be winning back some lost support, she has to go out and show again that she’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, hypocritical about her professed religious faith, and willing to permit her athlete’s mouth disease to continue unabated.

In recent months, she had allowed her good alter ego to come forward after being the crucial vote to allow health care reform legislation to go into law that will decrease quality and increase costs made her an object of scorn to the majority of Louisianans. If any one politician could have used and benefitted from a long-lasting oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it was her as she mostly bucked the Pres. Barack Obama Administration’s insistence on a needless long-term drilling ban in deep waters and a stealth ban in practical terms in all waters, solidly in line with that majority.

But, as often has happened in the past, give her a national (if small) television audience, and the Good Mary Landrieu suddenly gets overwhelmed by the Bad Mary Landrieu. On one of the lightly-watched Sunday news shows, Landrieu first fielded some softball questions, blamed obligatorily former Pres. George W. Bush’s Administration for an inadequate response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, tapdanced around criticism of Obama’s concerning the spill, and then got a bizarre question trying to link the Restoring Honor Rally from the weekend in Washington with the recovery effort. To which Landrieu replied:

… What I think Glenn Beck misses is that it's not just talking, it's actually actions. It's caring for the poor, it's caring for the sick, it is, you know, using the power of government in a positive way to meet the private sector and the nonprofits and all of our people of faith to do right by the people. That's where Glenn Beck's wrong.

And I'll tell you another way Glenn Beck's wrong. He and his whole crew said that this city could be rebuilt by private effort alone. The government was terrible, the government couldn't do anything. Do you know how many houses all of the nonprofits have built? No more than 5,000 in five years. Do you know how many we lost? Two hundred thousand. So Glenn Beck has to go back and look at the facts because he is preaching a gospel that never has existed, doesn't exist today and never will. We follow the gospel, [brother and New Orleans Mayor] Mitch [Landrieu] and I, of Jesus Christ.

In other words, Landrieu said those speaking at the rally, which its organizer talk show host Beck said was held to encourage greater religious faith and good moral practice, were “wrong” because they did not have sufficient faith in government and that to rely upon voluntary efforts was foolhardy, if not contrary to the Gospels. No doubt such a statement thrilled actor Brad Pitt as he waited to come onto the line to talk about how charitable efforts organized by him were rebuilding homes in New Orleans. (It might have made Mitch cringe off camera, too.)

Landrieu’s warped version of forcible practice of Christianity through government activism in provision of things is a peculiar wrinkle to her already-distorted view of Catholicism, which has put her in the position of the pot calling a presumed kettle black. She may rail against those she does not agree with ideologically not turning their words into action, but when comparing her political career to the beliefs she claims to follow in her religious faith she has built an impressive glass house from which she eagerly casts the first stone. As one example, consistently she has supported public policy that violates the Church’s teachings on abortion, so much so that her archbishop publicly has criticized her for that.

Nor did she appear to have had her and/or Democrat staff monitor well the rally, or to brief her on it. At many points urgings were made by speakers to put their faith into action, in many forms such as charity. One of the more prominent moments was when baseball star Albert Pujols received an award for his efforts to help the impoverished at home and abroad. Add “ignoramus” to “inopportune” and “hypocrite” as adjectives describing Landrieu.

Ironically, Landrieu provided a perfect foil for the rally. Where it maintained that people must turn to faith and individual initiative to achieve good, Landrieu preached the exact opposite that the rally speakers identified as a growing problem in America, faith in big government to the point that she argued such activist government must crowd out volunteerism to achieve what she thought were good works. It’s also likely, given her rather constipated worldview, that’s she’s never even considered that the Christian spirit of reaching out and performing good works is dulled and diluted by government when its social welfare policies make it the renderer of first resort for what was once considered “charity.”

One wonders, again, how such a stupid woman got into office and continues there. She put any successful reelection into jeopardy by her affirmative health care reform vote, and any good will she might have gained back from the Louisiana public from her position on offshore drilling she now has thrown away with these seeming off-the-cuff and certainly ill-advised comments. If you’re going to keep your foot in your mouth on a regular basis, the least you can do is say some sensible things at those rare intervals it’s not lodged in your throat.