Did the NOR Change the Course of the 2008 Presidential Race?

Did you know that, before John McCain tapped Sarah Palin, the GOP presidential nominee was considering an exorcist as his running mate? If you can believe the hype from heavy-hitting media outlets like Time magazine and The American Spectator, Bobby Jindal, the 37-year-old governor of Louisiana, was on the short-shortlist to share the stage with McCain at the Republican National Convention. So why do reporters from coast to coast believe the Governor of Louisiana casts out demons? All fingers point to a single 1994 article written by Jindal in the NOR.

That’s right, back in the mid-1990s, before Jindal waded knee deep into electoral politics, he had several excellent articles published in the NOR, including “Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare” (Dec. 1994). The dirt investigators at Democratic headquarters in Louisiana first got hold of the article from our website when Jindal was running for governor in the fall of 2007. In fact, liberal politico-blog extraordinaire “Daily Kos” went so far as to make PDF scans of the original article available on his website — in contravention of international copyright laws. After we objected to the pirated scans, Daily Kos blew a gasket. In a rant dated August 21, 2007, Daily Kos accused us of “protecting” Jindal: “It’s worth noting that Louisiana Dems are [getting] this material from the New Oxford Review, which used the copyright provision of the DCMA to force Daily Kos to pull PDF scans of Jindal’s articles from this site. That fundamentalist Catholic publication is doing everything they can to protect Jindal by removing copies of it from the web (almost nobody will pay for those articles). So Jindal can deny he wrote those things, while making it hard for people to verify for themselves.”

Hilarious! We charge a mere $1.50 for access to archived articles for non-subscribers. That makes for pretty low-rent bodyguard work.

Interestingly enough, conservatives in Louisiana asked us to make Jindal’s articles publicly accessible for another reason — in order that readers could see firsthand that the media’s accusations against Jindal were at once distorted and highly exaggerated. But the NOR, due to our nonprofit status as a religious organization with the IRS, does not endorse or “protect” candidates for public office; thus, Bobby Jindal’s articles are treated no differently than any other articles available on our website.