If you haven’t heard the fallout from Bobby Jindal’s story in the Republican response to Obama’s address, then you’re in for a treat. Jindal told a story about how a sheriff in Louisiana was trying to save lives while some bureaucrat told him he couldn’t until he had the right insurance coverage. Jindal told the tale about how the sheriff stood up to the lousy, sniveling bureaucrat, and said “you can come and arrest me” but he’d go and save those lives, insurance or no. With the sheriff now passed away, we may never get a definitive recounting of the actual events, but Jindal went further: he then went on about how he was there, that he backed up the sheriff, and the sheriff said they could come and arrest Jindal as well! Two maverick lifesavers, standing up to the lousy, sniveling bureaucrats!

Except for the tiny detail that Jindal wasn’t there–he made that part up. Nor was it a spur of the moment kind of thing, either–he apparently has been telling the same tale since last year, soon after Sheriff Harry Lee passed away. Despite the fact that the record clearly shows that Jindal was elsewhere at the time.

Add to this the fact that a letter exists from early September, 2005, which tells the story somewhat differently–at least in that the bureaucrat, a Dept. of Wildlife & Fisheries agent, told a flotilla of 500 citizen rescuers to go home, not because they lacked insurance and registration, but because the boats were too large to use because the water level had dropped overnight. The agent ordered the boats home, and all but a few small boats complied. That sounds like the same story Jindal is telling–but even without Jindal’s embellishment about how he was there, the story sounds pretty different.

However, the central theme is still the same: some bureaucrat screwed up and probably cost lives. Jindal used the story to drive home a popular Republican theme: you can’t trust government to do the right thing, you can only trust the people (always eventually extended to corporations) to do what needs to be done. This harkens back to Reagan’s joke about the “nine most terrifying words in the English language” being, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Republicans use this image of government being perpetually incompetent to accompany their cry for “smaller” government, but as we’ve seen so strongly demonstrated from the Reagan and Dubya years is that they in fact have a great love of big government; they only want to make certain parts of government smaller and weaker–parts like social programs that help the poor and lower middle class, taxes and regulations where they apply to corporations and the wealthy, that kind of thing. But when it comes to big spending that puts money into the pockets of corporations and the wealthy, government can never be big enough for the Republicans.

This theme echoes throughout Republican rhetoric; just recently, we heard Republican Party chief Michael Steele insist that the government never created a single job–it just creates “work” (apparently, he himself has been “working” without a job for quite some time now). You can find examples of this everywhere. Republicans want to take anything that they don’t like and leave it up to the “people”; break down public education and put it in the hands of private enterprise; never allow social health insurance to come together; deregulate industries and let the market take care of things.

The thing is, most of the examples of government ineptitude come from the Republicans’ own inept handling of government. FEMA was an unmitigated disaster during Katrina, something Jindal used to suggest that Obama’s plan for more government job projects are doomed for failure. The problem is, FEMA was a disaster because Republicans made it so: Bush made FEMA into a personal checkbook for paying off cronies, so no wonder it did terribly. And despite the fact that sweeping deregulation leads to massive bank failures every generation which require ever-increasing bailouts, Republicans seem completely incapable of recognizing the fact that deregulation is a prime factor in causing these disasters.

But what about the Katrina story, at least as we know it happened? Did not a government bureaucrat turn away a flotilla of citizen rescuers? The fact seems pretty solid that he did, though we have to take the storyteller’s word that the guy was wrong. Assume he was, assume it was just the screw-up it is painted to be. Isn’t that evidence enough of how government bureaucrats, regardless of which party is in power, always screw up?

Well, no. It’s a single incident. Republicans love to do this: come up with isolated stories about how bureaucrats, regulations, entitlement programs, etc. make some massive screw-up, therefore the whole department/program/system should be taken down. We almost never hear overviews, analyses that prove the programs are wasteful; instead we get stories. The stories always get embellished like Jindal’s; Reagan went wild in his exaggerations of the legendary welfare queen scammer, and opponents of Affirmative Action took a case involving the Daniel Lamp case and distorted it heavily out of proportion. In all these cases, there is a kernel of truth about something related to government going wrong, but in all these cases it’s an isolated incident, and does nothing to demonstrate that the program or system as a whole is bad. Whatever faults welfare had, it was not bad because a few scammers were able to cheat here and there. Affirmative Action works quite well on the whole, thank you very much; the abuses most commonly come from people who take literally the right-wing horror stories made up about it and so take wrongful actions. And when systemic faults do appear, the reaction is to demolish the system rather than to address the faults and repair the system.

In the end, what you usually have is a few idiots doing something stupid, and thus the whole system gets blamed and tagged as unacceptable. The thing is, such idiots are everywhere, in every system, public and private. Look at the banks that accepted bailout money–they mismanaged the banks horrendously, took the bailout money and paid themselves big bonuses, and then refused to use the money for what it was intended–to get loans to Americans flowing again. These are exactly the people that Republicans say we should leave things up to, instead of government. When it was the Republicans that enabled them–pouring money into their coffers and not demanding regulation or oversight–while it was the Democrats who called for oversight and eventually put the brakes on the banks’ worst excesses.

On the other hand, look at what government has done right. Does anyone truly believe that building the railroads in the 19th century was a bad thing? (Yes, there was graft, corruption, and abuse especially in that example–but the central idea was rock solid.) Or building the interstate highway system in the 20th century? Both were government programs and both served to dramatically spur the national economy. The space program on the 60’s and 70’s was a marvel of accomplishment, and its technological investment created the seeds of the computer industry that so enriches the United States today. The Internet was a government project, kept alive by people like Al Gore in the 80’s, and served to dramatically elevate the economy and bring America back to the forefront of the worldwide economy. Even the put-people-to-work programs Roosevelt enacted which Republicans now revile worked, the market only acting badly when Roosevelt listened to his opponents and scaled back temporarily. But in all these programs, it was not just the many jobs created by the programs themselves, but all the jobs made possible by the infrastructure built by these programs. The fact is, the U.S. government, for all the idiotic bureaucrats you’ll find here and there, is the single largest creator of well-paying, productive jobs in history. And it has specifically been infrastructure investment in particular that has generated the most jobs, the kind of investment that Obama is trying to get done and that Republicans are trying to derail.

Robust government spending in education, infrastructure and scientific research, free from the kind of corruption Republicans have infested our government with, alongside strong and responsible regulation of industries, will lead to a strong and capable America. The “fiscally responsible” (har!) Republicans want instead to covert the country into a plutocracy complete with serfdom–which, after all, is the American Dream, right?