On Twitter…

@mattyglesias You tell me. If your name was Matt Smith would anybody read the garbage you write?

— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) June 18, 2013

Yglesias was trying to rip Jindal for his piece earlier today about the Republican Party and its need to stop navel-gazing and self-flagellating. The paragraph Yglesias especially disliked was this…

Because the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

That paragraph is full of exaggerations, of course, and it would have been a great deal more effective if Jindal had supplied links proving or at least supporting each of the allegations he makes. Which he could well have done, as there is evidence galore for each of them.

But in making that case Jindal has set the Left into Vituperative Beast Mode, as Yglesias’ bedwetting Twitter feed serves in the way of evidence. Even Business Insider’s Josh Barro, who isn’t a particular leftist, went ballistic about what Jindal said…

This is a big reason the Republican party can’t change. So many of its members have a warped vision of what liberalism is. They think it’s something so mind-bendingly awful that they cannot fathom how voters could willingly choose it. It must be some mistake. And sooner or later, mistakes get fixed.

Back in Louisiana, Jindal has an approval rating of 38%. His popularity took a nosedive this year because he pushed a plan to repeal the state’s income tax and replace it with a higher and broader sales tax, which would have meant a big tax cut for the wealthy financed by higher taxes on the poor and middle class.

He had to withdraw the plan because he couldn’t get it through the legislature, even though it has a Republican majority. It was just too unpopular — the same poll that found Jindal at 38% found only 27% support for his tax plan.

Yet Jindal does not seem to have gotten the message: Voters are unimpressed with an economic agenda that claims the best way to create jobs and grow prosperity is to cut taxes on the rich.

The liberal economic agenda is flawed, but it’s not as flawed as the Republican agenda of tax cuts, spending cuts, and hope. Republicans won’t grasp that until they get past the idea that Barack Obama is a red-meat rationer who’s trying to destroy the economy.

What Barro wrote was stupid, of course. Any reading of exit polls shows that Republicans didn’t lose in 2012 because the voters don’t believe tax reform is a good idea. In fact, voters very much believe a simpler tax code would be a good thing – what the voters want is something that’s harder to cheat on.

But that’s not what Jindal was talking about anyway. Barro got it right that the Governor was offering some red meat to the GOP base – which, by the way, is exactly what Barack Obama and his crew did to the Democrat base at that clown-show convention they put on last year. And while the confab in Charlotte the Dems put on, which they still haven’t paid for at our last check, was nothing short of a Party Of Losers dystopian menagerie, it mobilized and energized their base to get the vote out. By contrast, the GOP put on an “Up With People” show with nary a nasty word uttered, aimed at making soccer moms swoon and mainstream media types grudgingly admit that gee, these guys have more black and Hispanic folks than we thought and they sure seem like nice folks.

How’d that work? Says here that 3 million conservatives stayed home rather than turn Obama out of office.

What Jindal was saying was that for all the self-flagellation Republicans waste their time with, if nothing else our side should realize that (1) nobody’s perfect and (2) we might suck but Good Lord, how lousy is the Left?

He’s not talking to Matt Yglesias – if he was, he’d have to use much smaller words – and he’s not talking to Josh Barro. Jindal shouldn’t give the proverbial rat’s derriere what those guys think.

What was good about what the Governor had to say was that he hinted at our oft-mentioned theme of a new kind of conservatism, one in which the nanny state is left in the ash-heap of history and what social services continue are largely provided through the private sector via voluntary associations and charities and coercive, industrial-era bureaucracy gives way to the Information Age and all the individual choice and responsibility that entails.

If there’s a legitimate criticism to make of Jindal’s piece, it’s that he hasn’t consistently governed to the standard of that new kind of conservatism.

But to call him stupid – particularly if you’re a Soros-funded hack like Matt Yglesias, whose Hispanic heritage and kool-aid-drinking socialist prattle has made him a household name in a very limited niche echo chamber on the web – for offering up a vicious critique of the Obama Left and highlighting it as a comparison for conservatives to bolster their self-esteem…well, there isn’t much value to be found there.