Well, you can do what you want to us. . . .

From a yellow-dog Democrat fan back home in Louisiana:

Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief.

The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests.

We did.

But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals.

If you do, shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system?

And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general?

(Cheering)

I put it to you, Greg.

Isn't this an indictment of our entire American society?

Well, you can do what you want to us, but we won't sit here . . . and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!

Gentlemen!

(Stalking out, humming the national anthem)

OH, I'M SORRY . . . wrong indignant speech. That was from Animal House, not from Louisiana's defenders of the indefensible. Here's the faux-outraged bleat, in response to this, from one LA Media Watch (as in, "Watch for truth, squash it like a bug"):

First, as a point of reference, Bruce Fein, the constitutional lawyer who wrote the first articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton, is now also calling for the impeachment of Cheney and Bush. It is noteworthy that you have joined a chorus of many others, myself included, who believe impeachment is now a necessary course of acton, but this stance, in and of itself, does little to justify the ridiculous arguments you are leveling against Louisiana Democrats as well as the entire State of Louisiana, as you sit behind your computer in Douglas Country, Nebraska.

Ripping a page out of Ann Coulter's playbook, you have attempted to conflate the notion of loyalty or alligiance to a cause as analogous to totalitarian obedience; referencing "Nazis" and "communists" is a tired, weak, and intellectually dishonest rhetorical trope that is only employed by those who cannot withstand the rigors of a serious debate. And this is what you have done.

You have denounced those who have read and questioned Mr. Jindal's early work, yet when confronted, you attempted to scuttle the issue into an argument about your own political identity.

But what is even more insulting are your crude and reckless statements about my home, Louisiana. Your fetishization of Louisiana culture is undermined by your rabid attacks against a State that has suffered tremendous injustice at the hands of the man you would like to be impeached, President Bush. Perhaps, sitting as you are in Douglas County, it is difficult for you to empathize or even recognize the struggles this State has had to endure, but the notion that failures and shortcomings are the principal responsibility of the Louisiana Democratic Party is both vile and ignorant, displaying a predilection for selective memory. Certainly Democrats in Louisiana have engaged in corruption but so have Republicans in Louisiana and so have Democrats and Republicans in Nebraska. Those with a shred of honesty recognize this and understand corruption should not be tolerated, regardless of one's party affiliation.

Your statement about Louisiana "teetering on the cusp of oblivion" demonstrates the height of vapid, self-righteous arrogance, and it is an insult to all Louisianans, Republicans and Democrats, who are working every single day to recover and restore our State.

Sir, we are proud of our State, and though the hurricanes may have destroyed much, they did not destroy our spirit. For someone like yourself to sanctimoniously spit on us, while grandstanding about a tradition of which you obviously know nothing, is truly deplorable.

I hope you enjoyed your po boy sandwich. They're a speciality down here.

FIRST OFF, PODNA, you seem not to get that I'm a Louisianian. I was born there; I was raised there; I was educated there. I can trace half of my family tree to Louisiana when it was a Spanish colony. Some of those ancestors came from Paris, others from Quebec.

Another great-great-great-great-great grandfather -- on the other side of the family -- was otherwise occupied fighting the British in South Carolina as a captain under Gen. Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox."

I know a hell of a lot about your "tradition," half of which is wonderful and which I miss very much. It's the other half -- the ignorant, bigoted, lazy-ass, insouciant "Id" half -- that I deplore, and from which I fled in 1988 during the oil bust.

Unfortunately, it's the Louisiana "Id" you (and your party) celebrate, and have celebrated for generations as you enable, elevate and elect grafters and incompetents that bleed and bleed and bleed my home state, all the while entrenching a culture of criminality and fatalism. A culture that tells poor and working-class Louisianians that excellence is for suckers, that the key to getting ahead is "knowing somebody."

Or bribing somebody.

The "tradition" you celebrate stares back at a state that's at the rock bottom of all the good rankings and the top of all the bad ones, and that "tradition" has the face of Edwin Edwards, now sitting in the federal pen at Oakdale. It has the face of agriculture commissioner Bob Odom, who is fighting like hell to keep out of some pen's geriatric ward. It has the face of former Edwards aide Clyde Vidrine, whose son went to my Baton Rouge school. That kid's notable quote from Broadmoor Junior High, circa 1974, was "Mr. Carlos is a nice man."

That would be Carlos Marcello, then Mafia boss of New Orleans.

That tradition you say I know nothing about stares back on the ruins of my home with the face of U.S. Rep. William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson, awaiting trial on federal bribery charges. It wears the ugly, deformed face of an endless line of lower-light Louisiana pols, overwhelmigly Democrats -- can you say Oliver Thomas? -- whose corruption and kleptomaniac ways have taken money from schools, money from roads, money from hospitals and money from the poor.

And the most damnable thing about that is your sainted "tradition" has, by and large, gotten its countless Louisiana victims to be pretty much OK with that.

Don't tell me I know nothing of your "tradition." I know too damned much about Louisiana "tradition."

About how my mother's family was dirt poor during the Great Depression. About how my grandparents got 11 of 15 kids to adulthood amid tenuous circumstances, spotty employment and a long stint as sharecroppers. Exactly one of those kids managed to graduate from what little high school Louisiana offered back then.

And local school officials didn't exactly bust a gut to ensure that my mother ever actually went to school. No, the Louisiana "tradition" was OK with her growing up illiterate because it was her lot in life to be the family flunky, working in the fields and helping raise the younger kids.

This all was accomplished with the nonexistent "help" of the state, as "good Democrats" Huey Long, O.K. Allen, Richard Leche and their ilk bled Standard Oil, only to give the people third-rate leftovers from that largesse.

People tell me that was "populism," and that that "populist legacy" is Louisiana's problem.

Me, I hardly equate operating a rump kleptocracy with populism. Populism is not addicting a whole state to the idea of something for nothing and then leaving it for bitter history to point out that you can't fool all of the people all of the time, but that Louisiana pols came close.

With every dilapidated school with pathetic test scores, with every crumbling state highway, with every politician being "perp walked" before the TV cameras, Louisianians learn that they didn't pay much for their Third World government, and they pretty much got what they paid for.

On the other hand, you could argue they've paid a lot. They've paid with the jobs that aren't there, because the employers aren't there, because too many Louisianians are too ignorant to hold jobs in the modern marketplace.

They've paid with their taxes, though they pretty much get squat for their money. They pay with a high crime rate. They pay with their humiliation as the rest of the country looks at Louisiana and laughs. That is, when they aren't looking at Louisiana with pity.

They pay in sorrow, as they watch their children -- the ones who somehow managed to prosper amid the wreckage of an education system, having navigated crumbling buildings and endured official neglect -- look around, figure "I can do better than this," and flee as soon as they're able.

They pay with the violence done to their souls and consciences amid a culture of cronyism and corruption. They pay every time they come out on the short end of "It's not what you know, it's who you know."

I TAKE IT BACK. Louisianians have paid a lot. They have gotten much in return. Much of nothing in exchange for their well being, their self-respect and their human dignity.

Furthermore, don't you DARE mau-mau me with that stuff about how Louisiana "has suffered tremendous injustice" at the hands of George W. Bush and the feds. I know that's true. You know that's true. Hell, probably even George W. Bush knows that's true.

Don't mau-mau me with that because, frankly, it doesn't matter. Get this straight . . . most Americans don't give a rat's ass that the feds have screwed you over. It's wrong, it's evil, it's not fair . . . but it is what it is.

But most of all, don't you dare hand me that fragrant load because many of the fools you so indignantly defend -- historically, overwhelmingly Democratic fools -- screwed over Louisiana first. Locals made it into the Poor Man of America, a basket-case failed state with a deeply deviant civic culture that, for all intents and purposes, wore a gigantic "KICK ME" sign as a target for Washington reprobates like Bush.

Yeah, Louisiana has been used, screwed and tattooed. But before it was a case of rape, it was a case of incest.

And now my home state has to live with that . . . or die from it.

The choice is yours.