Strike Two, Bobby

(I titled my post in homage to Matthew Gagnon's post from a few days ago.)

Jindal has now admitted that a key portion of his response speech was not true.

Here is what he said in his speech:

During Katrina, I visited Sheriff Harry Lee, a Democrat and a good friend of mine. When I walked into his makeshift office I’d never seen him so angry. He was yelling into the phone: ‘Well, I’m the Sheriff and if you don’t like it you can come and arrest me!’ I asked him: ‘Sheriff, what’s got you so mad?’  He told me that he had put out a call for volunteers to come with their boats to rescue people who were trapped on their rooftops by the floodwaters. The boats were all lined up ready to go - when some bureaucrat showed up and told them they couldn’t go out on the water unless they had proof of insurance and registration. I told him, ‘Sheriff, that’s ridiculous.’ And before I knew it, he was yelling into the phone: ‘Congressman Jindal is here, and he says you can come and arrest him too!’ Harry just told the boaters to ignore the bureaucrats and start rescuing people.

Problem is, through the magic of the internets, people where very quickly able to establish that Sheriff Lee's more contemperanous account of the events didn't agree with Jindal's. Specifically, Lee said he did not find out untill days later that there had been a bureaucratic hold-up. He said this in 2005 on "Larry King" (emphasis mine):

When I realized that we had a problem, I was the one that made the call in WWO (UNINTELLIGIBLE) radio if there was anybody with a boat to come to a place so that we can get the boats in the water because I was around when -- the other big hurricanes, and most of the rescue done early on were individual fisherman, recreational fisherman that had boats that went in the water. Those boats where not allowed to get into the water when they were needed and I just found out about seven days later one of the reason boats couldn't get in was they didn't have enough life preservers and some of them didn't have proof of insurance. And I'm sure that there's a FEMA regulation that says that. But when a storm of this magnitude hits, you through those regulations out the window and you do what you have to do and start saving lives.

And now Politico is reporting that a Jindal aide has come out and said:

the Louisiana governor didn't intend to imply that an anecdote about battling bureaucrats during Katrina directly involved the governor or took place during the heat of a fight to release rescue boats.

In other words, when he told that little story, he "didn't intend to imply" that it really happened.

And this guy was a Rhodes scholar??