Will Bobby Jindal please make up his mind?

In the end, it comes down to an honest and fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government. We oppose the national Democratic view that says the way to strengthen our country is to increase dependence on government. We believe the way to strengthen our country is to restrain spending in Washington, to empower individuals and small businesses to grow our economy and create jobs.

Those are the words of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal — not today, of course, but during his debut on the national stage in 2009, delivering the Republican response to President Obama's address to Congress on February 24th, 2009.

Today, of course, he’s singing a different tune — along with all of the other “small government” conservatives on the Gulf Coast.

Jindal became a national laughingstock when, a month after criticizing federal spending of $140 million "for something called 'volcano monitoring,'" a volcano in Alaska erupted, covering fellow Republican Sarah Palin’s hometown in ash.

Now he’s again a hypocrite of the first order: a small-government Republican who sponsored the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act (H.R. 4761) to eliminate the moratorium on offshore oil and gas drilling, but now wants taxpayer-funded government resources like the National Guard to respond to a disaster created by exactly the kind of lax oversight and insufficient regulation he championed.

Jindal was one of many southern Republican governors who didn’t want to accept stimulus funding to help the unemployed, but now he wants federal assistance for workers in the Louisiana seafood industry whose livelihoods will suffer because of lax oversight and insufficient regulation of big business.

And make no mistake: Bobby Jindal isn’t a political anomaly. He’s the norm for conservatives who want less government… except when they want more.