-By Warner Todd Huston
In part three of our series we’ll take a look at the speeches of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Illinois Congressman Peter Roskam, and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. Bachmann’s speech was quite interesting for its singular focus on a particular jihad-supporting Muslim group that is operating in America today. Bachmann was vehement that Obama ban this group.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal
Gov. Bobby Jindal on the main stage
Jindal is another favorite of the greater conservative movement. He has a very compelling story of immigrant parents that came to America to become part of this great nation to finally see their little son become the most powerful man in their adopted state. It’s the perfect American story, for sure.
Speaking of stories, Jindal has a lot of them especially where it concerns his involvement in the BP Oil spill from 2010. I’ve seen Jindal relate this tale several times and it is always a good one. His description of how the federal government was more interested in observing its silly OSHA than deal quickly with the emergency before them was telling and hilarious — though ultimately sad and infuriating. Since this is standard stump speech stuff of Jindal’s, though, I did not Tweet that segment.
Like the others Jindal started praising the Walker win in Wisconsin. One of his funniest lines was that all the news people were proclaiming that the vote would be so close that it would be a long night for Wisconsin as they tallied the votes. But reality proved that the whole thing was over in a matter of hours with Walker’s landslide. Instead of it being a long night for Wisconsin, Jindal joked that it was instead a “long night at Obama headquarters in Chicago!”
Jindal also speculated that the main reason Obama never bothered to show his face in Wisconsin to support Democrat Tom Barrett is because Obama didn’t want to be “seen with a loser.” Jindal also noted that Obama showed no leadership at all in Wisconsin saying, “Walker wasn’t lacking in courage. The president shrunk from this challenge. It’s not what leaders do. There’s a lesson in leadership, here. Leaders don’t run from a fight.”
Speaking of losers, he noted that the whole recall thing was just “sour grapes” on behalf of the far left, anyway.
Gov. Jindal then went on to say that there is a major difference in the visions of the two parties. The President’s is an Occupy Wall Street vision, one of “managing our slow decline.” The Republicans’ vision, Jindal said, was of guaranteeing equal opportunity not equal outcome.
After discussing the success his state has had with school choice policies, Jindal lambasted Obama and his administration as one of abject failure. “The Obama administration is a nexus of liberalism and incompetence and that isn’t a good combination,” he charged.
Jindal said that the President styles his administration after socialist European policies and attacked him for his out of touch claim that the private sector is doing just fine. ” Mr. president when so many millions are unemployed and under employed the private sector is not doing well.”
After saying that the media isn;t telling the full story of the Obama years — he said Obama’s incompetence is an “untold story — he went into his experiences during the BP Oil disaster in 2010. After which the Gov. ended saying to a standing ovation, “Let’s make sure Obama is a one term president and that he comes back to this great city of Chicago.”
Congressman Peter Roskam
Rep. Peter Roskam in the media room
Illinois Congressman Peter Roskam is the Representative from the 6th District but he is also in the GOP leadership serving as the Chief Deputy Whip of the House. I’ve covered Rep. Roskam for years, now, and he is quite a personable speaker, one able to take some pretty complicated concepts and make them understandable to the layman. This time out, though, he stuck to the central themes of the failure of both Illinois politics as well as that of the President’s.
One of Roskam’s early points was that he doesn’t doubt that the President thinks the private sector is “doing just fine.” After all, things are so bad in Illinois that the rest of the country might seem to be in high times by comparison. But Roskam predicted that come Election Day, the country would have something to say about Obama’s cluelessness and the Democrats’ failures.
In speaking of how illicit the concept is that Democrats have of how to govern, Roskam noted that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress have said that the way to a lock on power is through the redistricting process in Illinois. Roskam notes the contrast between a party that would choose to govern through the voters and one, like the Democrats, that choose to govern through the corrupt practice of gerrymandering.
That isn’t the only sort of corruption of Democrats in Washington, Roskam says. “We need to avoid Solyndranomics. That is to subsidize your donors’ speculative ventures with federal dollars.”
To rouse the troops, Roskam ended with a task for us all. “Everyone of us here will be able to say we were there at a pivotal time. So what do we do? What we do is we say we’re going to step into the breach. We’re going to make sure America will be there for our children.”
Another shot of Roskam in the media room
Roskam also visited us in the media room. I made video of that meeting.
Peter Roskam in the media availability room
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann
Rep. Michele Bachmann delivers her address
Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has ended her run for the White House, but she isn’t done trying to keep her message rolling. This day the bulk of her stage time was spent railing against a jihadi-supportive Muslim group called Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that is soon to host its own Chicago conference (though it seems to be having trouble finding a place to hold it now that its hotel told them to look elsewhere).
Bachmann launched right into her broadside against Obama, “the most dangerous president in history on national defense” in American history.
Rep. Bachmann accused the President of allowing White House adviser and political strategerist David Axelrod to plan military actions from his office.”General Axelrod is once again making our military decisions from White House meeting rooms. He has NO business in those meetings,” Bachmann said sarcastically. “This is all insulting to our brave United States Troops,” she concluded.
Bachmann went on at length about the danger that Hizb ut-Tahrir presents the country. “This group is dedicated to subverting and destroying this country,” she said. Next she asked her pointed question: “Why hasn’t Obama shut this conference down?”
Bachmann went on to charge that Obama is favoring jihadi Muslims over Americans and said that his fealty to Muslims — such as his first foreign policy speech being issued “to a religion” instead of to a nation or foreign government — is causing damage American’s First Amendment rights to free speech. Bachmann even noted that Obama bowed to radical Islamist’s demands that any mention of Islam be removed from Federal training programs.
“Obama agreed with the purge of mentions of Islam from US government training info,” Bachmann complained. “But in order to win in this effort we NEED to be able to speak about the enemy.” She insisted that we need to be able to recognize the radicals in Islam to defeat them.
Bachmann said that because of Obama’s constant bowing to radical Islamists, “we could wake up one morning and wonder how the US came under Sharia law.”
“This is why Obama can’t be evicted from the White House soon enough,” she thundered. “We have to stand and fight for our beliefs. We have a destiny in this nation. We owe it to our posterity and our God to keep America free. This is our destiny and our duty to stand up for this nation no matter the cost.”
Bachmann also visited the media room. After her speech I asked her more specifically about how she can square the circle between seeking to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir and our freedom of religion in America. My question and her answer is at about the two minute mark.
Bachmann in the media room
Michele Bachmann in the media availability room
CPAC Chicago Coverage
- CPAC Chicago, Wisconsin Praised, Obama Razed — Part One: Rick Santorum, Ron Johnson
- CPAC Chicago, Part 2: Richard Mourdock, Chris Christie, Herman Cain
- CPAC Chicago, Part 3: Bobby Jindal, Peter Roskam, Michele Bachman
- CPAC Chicago, Part 4: Joe Walsh, Randy Hultgren, Straw Poll Results
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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