Volcano monitoring

I finally got around to watching Obama’s speech and Jindal’s response. (Thanks, C-SPAN.) I thought Obama made some bold promises while staying on the whole realistic. I’ll always wince at the stories of regular folks doing great things, though… it sounds so forced, even if they really did do great things.

What I really want to talk about is this moment in Jindal’s speech where he calls out Congress for passing a stimulus bill that includes this silly, silly earmark for “something called volcano monitoring.” Oh, those nutty Congressmen and their pet projects!

I agree that earmarks are to be avoided, and I understand the strategy of naming ridiculous earmark spending in order to embarrass legislators. It’s effective when you point out millions of dollars going to a nonexistent Grape Research Center, or half a million for the Sparta Teapot Museum. But you have to make sure it sounds really silly. It seems that Republicans, in their fervor to criticize legislative pork, have been gradually forgetting how to determine this. At least as it was starting, they were calling reasonable projects by silly-sounding names — which made them sound uninformed, but at least worked on uniformed voters. It would have been unreasonable for a planetarium to spend that much an an “overhead projector,” but that’s not really what it was. It could sound like “fruit fly research” was a waste of time, if you didn’t know that work on Drosophila melanogaster laid the foundation for modern genetic research and is still extremely relevant today.

Tacking on the words “something called” helps when you’re talking about the World Toilet Summit (yes, that’s another real one, apparently) but it doesn’t work when everyone knows why the thing is called that. Something called volcano monitoring? Well, Bobby Jindal, probably that involves monitoring volcanos. You know, like keeping an eye on them. To predict when they’re going to erupt. For someone familiar with the US government’s previous lack of response to national disasters, I’d think you’d want people to be on the lookout for future ones so everyone could be prepared.

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February 26, 2009 · Written by
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Comments

One Response to “Volcano monitoring”

  1. W.M. Irwin Identicon Icon W.M. Irwin on March 1st, 2009 10:03 am

    Yes, you would think that the governor of the state that was hit by the greatest natural disaster hitting this country in the 21st century so far would be all for disaster prevention! But since volcano eruption threats basically apply to a few Pacific coast “blue” states, Jindal probably thought that he was scoring points with his CPAC pals on the road to the 2012 nomination (you do know that the 2012 campaign is going on right now, don’t you).

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