June 11, 2008

Bobby Jindal, The Exorcist

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal participated in an impromptu Catholic exorcism on a college classmate that coincidentally faith-healed her skin cancer. Read all about it here -- Jindal and his other friends thought she was acting funny. And she smelled of sulfur. So the others forcibly held her down for several hours, ignored her protests that she wanted to get up, prayed and chanted, and demanded that she read Bible passages. At one point when she tried to escape, they pinned her down again. Finally, she relaxed and said "Jesus is Lord," and they let her get up. She said she had no memory of the previous several hours, and later the doctors could not find cancerous cells in her body.

Now, she may have started out acting funny because, oh, I don't know, she had just been diagnosed with cancer and a close friend had just committed suicide. That might tend to affect someone's behavior. The smell of sulfur? Umm, you don't suppose she might have eaten some eggs recently and had to fart? No, demonic possession is a much more likely explanation than passing gas, which we all know girls don't do. As for the "exorcism" itself, it seems to match the definition of something closer to my own professional training than a religious exercise.

Mr. Jindal is, by all accounts, on John McCain's "short list" of possible running mates, and will certainly be delivering the keynote address at this year's Republican National Convention.

6 comments:

zzi said...

Nice photo. Now I will run down the blog page and see if anything negative is written about the Muslim religion.

Burt Likko said...

While I concede that it's not as up-front as pillorying Gov. Jindal for believing he performed an amateur exorcism when in fact he's admitting he tortured has college classmate for several hours, yes, I do have critical words for Muslims (in particular the Islamic Republic of Iran's theocratic leadership) in a post on the front page of the blog. I condemn their fanaticism and their picking a fight with the United States, resulting in preventing people like me from being able to engage in tourism in Persia, which would be a place I'd very much like to go if it weren't run by a bunch of fundamentalist maniacs who would just as soon kill me for being a heretic as sell me oil with which to buy centrifuges so they can nuke my friends in Israel.

My question is, what does that have to do with anything?

zzi said...

What airline would you take to go to Persia? Does it make a stop in Byzantium?

Burt Likko said...

Please, don't be deliberately dense. The phrase "Persia" as I used it refers to a geographic region, like "the Middle East" or "Latin America." The Islamic Republic of Iran ("Iran" for short) is the nation-state that occupies the bulk of that region. I'd venture to say that portions of this region can be found in other nation-states as well, but I'm not likely to visit Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, or Azerbaijan in the near future, either, all thanks to tensions with Iran (and other wars with causes that can be traced, at least in part, to the mullahs and fanatics who run that country).

James H said...

WOw the more this story is told the more it becomes like the Child game of Telephone.

Where oh where do you find that Jindal performed a Catholic Exorcism in any of this

Burt Likko said...

I think it was the part where he helped involuntarily confine a woman and prayed over her until he believed a demonic presence was cast out of her body. That and the fact that he's Catholic.