RED STATE LOUISIANA

Washington politics can be so much fun if you look upon them as the world's best circus.  This week's clown act was hilariously performed by the Breck Boy, John Edwards, announcing his candidacy for the presidency in the 9^th Ward of New Orleans.

It was especially funny for me, as I was in New Orleans at the time for New Year's.  The 9^th Ward was the area most devastated by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.  The day after Edwards' appearance, I drove my son Jackson through it.

Endless block after block after block, street after street after street, the small cottage homes are unlivable and abandoned.  At the most, one home out of every two or three dozen is repaired and occupied.

Even many of these, however, have only cosmetic repairs covering up irreparable damage from mold.  After all, all these homes were under water for weeks.  Thousands upon thousands of homes that have to be torn down are still standing because Mayor Ray Nagin insists they be rebuilt – which they never will be.

What he can't face, what John Edwards can't face, is that the corrupt heart of Democrat control of Louisiana – New Orleans' 9^th Ward – is gone.

Pre-Katrina New Orleans had a population of 450,000.  That's in total, men, women, and children.  Out of that 450,000, 80,000 were convicted felons.  The greatest concentration of those felons were in the 9^th Ward.  There are only a handful of them left.  They are dispersed through the south, from Houston to Baton Rouge to Birmingham where they continue their criminal ways.

(There are now vicious wars in the schools and streets of Baton Rouge now between the "225's" and the "504's" – local gangs from the black neighborhoods of Baton Rouge's 225 telephone area code, versus invading Katrina thugs from New Orleans' 504 area code.)

The blessing of Katrina is that the criminal society of the 9^th Ward is gone with the wind and can't be used for bought votes and bought elections.

Louisiana has come a long way since Democrat Mary Landrieu stole the 1996 Senate election from Republican Woody Jenkins.  Her father, Moon Landrieu, had been mayor of New Orleans for years.  Although exit polls during election day showed Woody clearly ahead, there was a sudden "surge" of votes out of the 9^th Ward at the end of the night that made Landrieu the winner by 5,788 votes out of 1.7 million cast.

That will never happen again.

In 2004, Louisiana went 52-44 for Bush over Kerry.  Of the seven Congressmen in the state's delegation, five are Republican, and one of the two Democrats will soon be indicted for bribery – William Jefferson.

One of those five Republicans is Bobby Jindal, whose parents immigrated from India to Baton Rouge.  Bobby converted from Hinduism to Catholicism, became a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford, then president of the University of Louisiana.  He lost the election for governor to Democrat Kathleen Blanco in 2003.  He won't this year.

Blanco is breathtakingly incompetent.  The national media blamed the disaster of Katrina on President Bush.  Louisianans know better.  That's why her approval rating among them is in the mid-thirties.  After election day on October 20, 2007, Bobby Jindal will be the next governor of Louisiana.

Thus it was so ironically appropriate for a retro politician with views so obsolete they are straight out of the class warrior Great Society 1960s to announce he's running for president in the destroyed ground zero of Democrat corruption.

John Edwards is so clueless he has no idea how obsolete he is.  Such obsolescence is gone with the wind of Katrina in Red State Louisiana.  The Breck Boy will discover this year how gone with the wind he is throughout America.