Right-wing gay journalist Christopher Pearson died recently at the age of 61, and one of Labor's longer-serving speech writers decided it was appropriate for him to repeat an old and baseless rumour - while at the same time cleverly covering his back by admitting the dubiousness of its veracity. He also decided it would be a good idea to say some pretty disgusting things about the Leader of the Opposition, with particular focus on Mr Abbott's Catholicism. What class. (/sarc)
Prime Minister Julia Gillard decided she was going to keep on playing the gender card, inexplicably linking the issue to the wearing of blue ties. Unfortunately it didn't seem to go down all that well, even among her feminist sympathisers. Nor did her instructions to her Members of Parliament that they should stand at school gates and defend her school funding "reforms".
Amid all this, and possibly distracting from the utter failure of her misandrist ranting and misogyny paranoia, there appeared (with convenient timing) a juicy scandal involving a highly slanderous menu allegedly distributed at a Liberal Party dinner function, which referred to her in most unflattering terms. Now I'm all for calling an incompetent failure an incompetent failure, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation or anything else, but this thing referenced her physical attributes in unflattering terms; it truly went beyond the pale. And so Labor and the media jumped on it with all the enthusiasm of a 21 year old American frat boy taking his first legal drink, and quite a few people who were at the dinner (and some who weren't) were liberally smeared with the moral responsibility of having produced this sexist tripe (although the menu's closing admonition to "eat all your greens before they take over" was a nice little stab at our 'environmental' extremist friends).
Except the truth outed; it turns out the menu was nothing more than a tasteless back-room joke, which was shared on Facebook by a man who hadn't drafted it, and subsequently tweeted hither and yon by a second chap who (per the link) had been fired from that restaurant months earlier. This chap professes (also as per the link) to prefer anal rape by an HIV-positive dog to living in an Australia governed by Tony Abbott. What class. (/sarc) Not that this has stopped the ALP or its media defenders from continuing to beat the drum on behalf of this complete joke of a Prime Minister.
It's looking like things are not going to end well for her, with the possibility that she might not even get to contest the next election (which can be no later than November of this year).
The only clear replacement for her is Kevin Rudd, blue tie and all, whom she herself replaced three years ago on the basis that "a good government had lost its way". Shortly before this happened, she said in an interview that there was more chance of her playing full-forward for the Western Bulldogs football team than there was of her replacing Rudd. Shortly thereafter she replaced him, then proceeded (quite sensibly in my view) to an election, stating (not so sensibly) that there would be "no carbon tax under [a] government I lead". And then of course she introduced one (as the Liberal Party had insisted in the leadup to the election that she would), and looked as pleased as punch when it passed the Senate.
So, Ms Prime Minister, just who has lost their way now?
I'd like to see her kept on, simply to see what abysmal depths the Labor Party can plunge to in the polls before it is wiped out at the ballot box. On the other hand, there's a small part of me that wants Kevin Rudd back, so Tony Abbott can tear into him and finish the job he started in 2010. Of course it may be that Labor replaces her with some other person, some sacrificial lamb, so that both Rudd and Gillard can claim they were never defeated at an election as sitting Prime Ministers (they both stand a significant risk of losing their own seats unless they retire at this poll). This, while technically true, would also be grossly dishonest - it would ignore the fact that neither was ever permitted to contest the election at which they would have been annihilated.
This behaviour puts me in mind of Howard Staunton, who cravenly avoided defeat as the unofficial chess world champion by never facing the brilliant American chess prodigy Paul Morphy. Morphy instead challenged and beat Anderssen, who was the best active player of his day, and then gradually went insane; IIRC partially because of Staunton's continuing refusal to face him; reminiscent of the mind games the KGB played - eventually successfully - with Morphy's equally gifted (and sadly equally unstable) countryman from a subsequent century, Bobby Fischer.
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