



A recent poll taken of Republican voters in Louisiana revealed something… well… something kind of stupid: A significant portion of them think that Obama deserves the blame for Hurricane Katrina, which occurred in 2005! In fact, more Louisiana Republicans blame Obama than… George Bush!

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government’s post-Katrina blunders. Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren’t sure who to blame. Bush was criticized heavily when he did not immediately return to Washington from his vacation in Texas after the storm had reached landfall. The government was also slow to provide relief aid and Michael Brown, then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), admitted in a televised interview that he learned that many of the storm’s victims at the New Orleans Convention Center were without food and water well after the situation had been reported in the press.

Former FEMA director Brown’s handling of the federal agency’s incompetent emergency response to Katrina ultimately led to his resignation.

The polls’ results, and the indication that a sizable portion of Louisiana Republicans must be as dumb as cud-chewing cows, is not exactly a jaw-dropping revelation—after all it was the state’s goofy-ass, deeply unpopular Republican governor Bobby Jindal who coined that “stupid party” moniker to describe his own political brethren (and he should know, he appealed to these ignoramuses for their votes!)—but still.

Talk about a short—not to mention, faulty—memory these Republicans must have. Better than a goldfish, but by how much?

