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On Meet The Press today, Bobby Jindal excused the race based Republican attempt to delegitimize Obama by with a bogus claim that Democrats did the same thing to Bush.

Video via Meet The Press:

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David Gregory asked Gov. Jindal about Colin Powell’s opinion that there is a dark vein of intolerance within the Republican Party. Jindal answered by comparing the Republicans’ Obama racism to Democratic treatment of George W. Bush.

Jindal said, “Well, I have a lot of respect for General Powell. I think our party at its best, its core principles looks at people and treats them as individuals, not as members of special interest groups. talk about specific examples, impeachment, for example. Look, I reject that kind of talk. The reality is I didn’t like it when the left spent eight years trying to delegitimize President Bush. I don’t think we should be doing that to President Obama. The reality is one of the great things about this country is we have a peaceful transfer of policy. I disagree this president’s policies, but instead of talking act impeachment, let’s have a legitimate debate, try to repeal his policies, repeal Obamacare, fight for school choice, fight against war and debt spending. entitlement spending. you see the disparity numbers, have the numbers from earlier about the African-American unemployment rate, the challenges in joining the middle class. It’s time for a new approach. Let’s not talk about impeachment. Let’s talk about the policies we disagree with.”

On the surface it looked like Jindal was speaking out against the Republican desire to impeach President Obama, but what he was really doing was setting up a false equivalency.

Can you image what the Republican reaction would have been if the Obama/McCain election came down to hanging chads and a recount in Florida? Picture the Republican riots in the streets if the Supreme Court would have handed the presidency to Barack Obama in 2008.

Barack Obama is has been elected to the presidency twice by large majorities, but some Republicans spend every waking moment trying to delegitimize the Obama presidency. George W. Bush was twice elected to the presidency by the margin of what many would call two questionable outcomes in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

Bush lost the popular vote in 2000, and won the 2004 popular vote by 3 million in 2004. Obama won the popular vote by more than 5.5 million votes in 2008, and 5.5 million votes in 2012.

Republicans have no grounds on which to question President Obama’s legitimacy, but they continue to do so.

Bobby Jindal can’t admit that the Republican delegitimization of Obama is based on race, because they would be forced to deal with reality that he is dreaming of running for the presidential nomination of a racist party that will never nominate him.

This is why Jindal had to hide behind the flawed and worn Republican talking point that Democrats did the same thing to Bush that they are doing to Obama.

Democratic Reps. Kucinich and Wexler did introduce an impeachment resolution in 2008, which was promptly killed by 227 House Democrats by sending it off to the Judiciary Committee to die.

In contrast, House and Senate Republican leaders have spent years looking for an Obama scandal that they can use as the basis for Obama impeachment. Just days ago, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) warned that Obama was “perilously close to impeachment.”

Bobby Jindal wasn’t rejecting the idea of Obama impeachment. He was giving the Republican Party a free pass on their efforts to de-legitimize the first African American president.