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Wednesday, Feb 25, 2009 5:15 PM UTC

Conservative columnist Brooks: Jindal speech “disaster” for GOP

David Brooks likes the Louisiana governor, and opposes the stimulus, but he says the Republican response to Obama's address was "insane."

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Topics: War Room, Bobby Jindal, David Brooks,

The reviews of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s speech Tuesday night are in, and they’re not good — he’s getting panned by both the left and the right. But no one’s been as critical as one conservative, New York Times columnist David Brooks.

In an appearance on PBS, Brooks said he thinks Jindal’s a promising politician, and that he agrees with Jindal’s position against the stimulus, but he had some harsh criticism regarding the governor’s message and how it came across.

“[T]o come up at this moment in history with a stale ‘government is the problem, we can’t trust the federal government,’ it’s just a disaster for the Republican Party,” Brooks said. “The country is in a panic now. They may not like the way the Democrats have passed the stimulus bill. But the idea that… government will have no role, the federal government has no role in this, that in a moment when only the federal government is big enough to actually do stuff — to just ignore all that and just say ‘government is the problem, corruption, earmarks, wasteful spending,’ it’s just a form of nihilism.”

Video is below.

Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon. More Alex Koppelman.

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