Let's Ask Elroy!™

Scenes From A Parallel Galaxy.

2009-11-04T23:39:00.013+11:00

SCENE: A BOMBED OUT TOWN IN AFGHANISTAN. ONE MAN IS SQUATTING IN THE DIRT LOOKING AT VARIOUS BITS OF PAPER BEFORE HIM. ANOTHER MAN JOINS HIM.

MAN 1 – Mohammad, my friend how are you? May Allah bless your family and bring you many sons!

MOHAMMAD: Abdullah! May your daughters be chaste and honour your name! Where is your house?

ABULLAH: (Picks up dirt; runs it through fingers) Right here.

MOHAMMAD: Oh. The infidels?

ABULLAH: May the fleas of one thousand camels infest the genitals of their mothers – yes, the infidels.

MOHAMMAD: But why?

ABULLAH: They thought my father to be a Taliban fighter.

MOHAMMAD: Your father? He does not fight for the Taliban!

ABULLAH: He does now!

MOHAMMAD: So what will you do?

ABULLAH: I have no choice. I must leave.

MOHAMMAD: Leave? But this is the land of Allah! Why would you leave?

ABULLAH: Allah has blessed me with many, many sons and daughters, and those sons and daughters who still walk upon this earth have also been similarly smiled upon, and these sons and daughters and their sons and daughters do not deserve this life of dodging bombs in the dust.

MOHAMMAD: Allah be his name! So where will you go?

ABULLAH: Well, that’s what I’m trying to work out.

MOHAMMAD: With these? (Holds up piece of paper) What are these?

ABULLAH: Ah, they are brochures?

MOHAMMAD: Brochures?

ABULLAH: Yes, by Allah, brochures from people smugglers!

MOHAMMAD: Really?

ABULLAH: The latest ones, fresh from Indonesia!

MOHAMMAD: Ah yes, a country with many a million Muslim! You will be happy there…

ABULLAH: No no no, by the all the flies in the ears of one thousand dead donkeys, I do not want to go to Indonesia!

MOHAMMAD: No? But why?

ABULLAH: Mohammad! You know less than the infidels! Don't you know that Indonesia is not a signatory to the UNHCR Treaty on the Rights of Refugees?

MOHAMMAD: Of course! May Allah grant me more wisdom! So where DO you want to go?

ABULLAH: Well, these fine gentlemen say they can take me to…Australia!

MOHAMMAD: Australia! Of course! The collection of former British colonies that federated in 1901!

ABULLAH: The very same!

MOHAMMAD: Australia! The nation that claims independence yet failed to renounce the British royal family at the 1999 referendum!

ABULLAH: By all the full stops in the Koran, that’s the one!

MOHAMMAD: Australia! The country that…

ABULLAH: May the seventy-six virgins of heaven preserve us! Your knowledge of Australia! It barely exits!

MOHAMMAD: Forgive me Abdullah, but now that the coalition of the willing has flattened our town back into the desert from which Allah himself created it, the reception from my cable TV satellite has been somewhat compromised and I cannot access the History, Discovery and National Geographic channels as before!

ABULLAH: That is no excuse for ignorance, Mohammad. However, I admit that I, since the complete destruction of my home and all that I own on this earth, am somewhat blind to some of the more recent domestic policy decisions made by the new Labor government, which is why some of these brochures are so helpful and informative.

MOHAMMAD: Is that so? And why is that?

ABULLAH: Because, according to this pamphlet at least, some recent domestic policy decisions have resulted in a softening of conditions for asylum seekers and refugees!

MOHAMMAD: Really? Woo hoo!

ABULLAH: Yes! It seems that by the all the hairs on the goats of my many uncles, Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister, has gotten rid of the Pacific Solution! No more being sent to Nauru!

MOHAMMAD: Praise be! And tell me, what of those accursed places of torture Woomera and Baxter?

ABDULLAH: Gone, by Allah! Closed! Shut! Being overcome by the desert sands as we speak!

MOHAMMAD: Mohammad be praised! There was a wandering goatherd who told me something similar but I thought that maybe he had been misinformed.

ABDULLAH: No, I fear he merely had been reading some out-of-date promotional literature!

MOHAMMAD: But are you sure about the reputation of these smugglers? Are you sure they are honest?

ABULLAH: Indeed Mohammad, I have great faith in these brave men, for many a Muslim sings their praises to the heavens! Listen to this:

‘From when I left Iraq to being found on Ashmore Reef, Bong Bong & Son’s smuggling service was second to none! I would recommend it to any Muslim fleeing a war zone!’ - M. Ali, Bankstown.

MOHAMMAD: My my! Praise indeed!

ABDULLAH: And this:

‘I thought that when our fishing boat caught fire, capsized and sank in international waters we were in big trouble, but the Bong Bong representative stayed with us every step of the way – in fact, I now live in Shepparton and the former Bong Bong employee has just become Mayor!’ – A. Mohammad, Shepparton.

MOHAMMAD: Such service!

ABDULLA: Listen to this one:

'When Cleopatra's Restaurant in St Kilda closed in 2006, a niche in the market opened for the superior kebab and felafel that they once served. I knew that I could service that market in a cost effective and delicious manner if only I could make landfall in Australia which, thanks to Bong Bong & Son, I did some months later.'

MOHAMMAD: So he was not detained by the authorities?

ABDULLAH: Of course he was! Who, in the name of the prophet, would travel kilometres overland before boarding small fishing vessels of dubious safety and not expect to be detained by the authorities? Who, in the name of Allah himself, would make this commitment without being fully abreast of changes in the Australian government's domestic immigration policy?

'Although the time spent being detained by the authorities was a setback, I had allowed for this period as I had kept myself fully abreast of changes in the Australian government's domestic immigration policy by monitoring the Austraian Government's Department of Immigration website on my computer that was set up under the tarpaulin I called home in the refugee camp, despite the dropout when my son, Mustapha, stopped pedaling.'

MOHAMMAD: But did he...?

ABDULLAH: Forbearance, my brother, forbearance – Allah blesses the patient.

'However, I understand that my stay in Baxter detention centre, and the more than reasonable rates charges by Bong Bong and his associates, was merely part of the costs of doing business. These were offset by selling both my tarpaulin and the deeds to the irradiated patch of desert that has been in my family for sixteen generation, and now my restaurant, Nu Cleo's, is about to start serving authentic Middle Eastern cuisine to the people of Melbourne at affordable prices. – Hussein Hussein, St Kilda.'

MOHAMMAD: May the prophet Mohammad bless those who praise him! How much does it cost to go to Australia, the great southern land claimed for the British crown by Captain Cook in the year of Allah 1788?

ABDULLAH: According to these pamphlets, the prices are most competitive and there are many plans to choose from, and many purveyors of freedom willing to help!

MOHAMMAD: Well then! What are we waiting for?

ABDULLAH: You’re coming too?

MOHAMMAD: Why not? It says here that there is a discount for whole boatloads!

ABDULLAH: By the time we’re finished, Christmas Island will be called Ramadan Island!

MOHAMMAD: & ABULLAH: Allah Akbar! (MEN GET UP AND LEAVE.)

MEANWHILE, IN A SRI LANKAN CONCENTRATION CAMP:

GUARD: So how are you enjoying your stay?

MAHATMA: Look, I will be most and absolutely frank – some of the amenities could with a little tweaking.

GUARD: (WITH A SMALL SOB) You ungrateful bully! When we’ve done all we can to make you happy!

MAHATMA: We’d have been happier if you had not attempted to subject us to genocide!

GUARD: Oh, don’t split hairs! Picky, picky, picky! You’re still alive, aren’t you?

MAHATMA: Only just.

GUARD: Well, we don’t want you to stay where you’re not wanted so why don’t you just…why don’t you just…leave!

MAHATMA: OK! Where would you like us to go?

GUARD: As if I care! Hang on though…I’ve got these…(RUMMAGES IN POCKETS)…I’ve got a brochure somewhere…ah, here we are! It's the latest from Indonesia!

‘Bong Bong & Sons! International people smugglers! Antipodes a speciality! Call for low, low rates! Special deals for Xmas! Take advantage of the touchy-feely bleeding hearts now in power! Offers can’t last!

MAHATMA: Wow! A left-wing government wouldn’t DARE let us sink!

GUARD: Off you go then!

MEANWHILE, IN AN INDONESIAN FISHING VILLIAGE.

BONG BONG SNR: You know what, son? I’m over that bloody Kevin Rudd!

BONG BONG JNR: Why, Dad?

BONG BONG SNR: All his recent domestic policy decisions!

BONG BONG JNR: What about them?

BONG BONG SNR: I can’t keep up! First off he’s all Bornhoffen and ‘They came for the communists’, saying that asylum seekers are legitimate refugees until proven otherwise, but no sooner do I get my new brochures printed up than he’s all ‘Illegal immigrants have no place in our land’ or some such.

BONG BONG JNR: What a dick!

BONG BONG SNR: Too right! Now I’ve got 20 million leaflets advertising the end of the Pacific Solution and Temporary Protection Visas while Rudd works overtime to put in place the Indonesian Solution! It’s just not fair!

BONG BONG JNR: No!

BONG BONG SNR: I mean, I understand that we’re not a signatory to the UNHCR Treaty on the Rights of Refugees here in Indonesia or anything – we’re no mugs! – but Australia? Right on the dotted line! So what’s with all the ‘bugger off back to where you came from’ malarkey?

BONG BONG JNR: Um…

BONG BONG SNR: Look, either these agreements mean something, in which case we Indonesians are bastards, or they don’t, in which case it’s the western liberal democracies are that are bastards and hypocritical bastards at that!

BONG BONG JNR: Total bastards!

BONG BONG SNR: I mean, after John Howard I was really hoping that trade might pick up a bit ‘cause he just about killed me! I couldn’t get any testimonials – in fact, quite the opposite! The Tora Bora broadband server was overloaded with people trying to warn warn the locals of John Howard’s meddling with Australian immigration law! The SMS network completely keeled over! It was madness!

BONG BONG JNR: Bloody Howard!

BONG BONG SNR: Bloody Howard's right! All that Tampa stuff – how was I supposed to build brand loyalty with anti-business behaviour like that? I nearly reported Howard to the WTO for restrain of trade!

BONG BONG JNR: Yeah! Reported him!

BONG BONG SNR: And now, just when the customers are starting to return and business is turning around a bit…this! Rudd takes some Aussie government tub, fills it full of punters – MY punters – and sends it bobbing off across the Indian Ocean to land wherever!

BONG BONG JNR: Shocking!

BONG BONG SNR: Now, how is that fair? Huh? I mean, of course the government can provide a better quality ride – they’re the bloody government! The Australian opposition treasurer called it a three-star cruise if you don’t mind!

BONG BONG JNR: I don’t!

BONG BONG SNR: Bloody protectionists! I should report Rudd too, for anti competitive behavior!

BONG BONG JNR: Yeah!

BONG BONG SNR: I’m not in this just for the money, y’know – I take great pride in knowing that my customers are now picking stone fruit in the Riverina! And what about when the SIEV X sank? The victims would’ve been outraged! They would’ve wanted their money back if they’d have lived! My ‘Australia Guaranteed!’ gimmick would’ve looked pretty silly then, wouldn’t it?

BONG BONG JNR: Very silly!

BONG BONG SNR: I ask you, what kind of position does the Oceanic Viking put me in? On the one hand, if those punters get dumped in some third world hell hole –

BONG BONG JNR: What? Like here?

BONG BONG SNR: Yeah, pretty much – well, if they got dumped here there’d be a right ruckus! Those punters would moan, complain, text me, call me on their mobiles, get on Face Book, MySpace, twitter me, email, get on the cable news and YouTube – some might even write 'letters' – I’d never hear the end of it! But if they get taken to Christmas Island and Australia, well, everyone will be Skyping everyone else and their Auntie Nellie telling them to make sure they sink their boats so that customs will pick them up and ship them to Australia in comfort!

BONG BONG JNR: So? You still get the business!

BONG BONG SNR: So? So? Where does that leave me? I’m not made of boats! Where do you think boats come from? Trees?

BONG BONG JNR: Er...

BONG BONG SNR: And what about the return trips? I mean, I'm trying to build a little brand loyalty here! What if any of those refugees want to nip home for a couple of months? Hmm? I've got all these boat going out full and coming back empty, but if this Oceanic Viking bizzo keeps up I'll be stuffed! I'll have no boats al all! And how can I charge the full rate when they know they'll only be using my boat for half the trip? I'll be 'rooned!

BONG BONG JNR: 'Rooned! We'll all be 'rooned!

BONG BONG SNR: Look, governments have no place interfering in my business and trying to undercut me! I mean, these refugees are actors in a free market, people fully engaged and making well-informed decisions as to their destinations, and they should just be allowed to get on with creating their own destinies without the cold dead hand of the state getting in the way!

BONG BONG JNR: Yeah! In the way!

BONG BONG SNR: All I want is a little certainty! I don’t want to lose all my custom to British truck drivers crossing the English channel, do I? If Australia is to remain a viable destination then the Australian government has to leave it to the free market!
Especially with emerging markets like Sri Lanka and the low-lying Pacific islands coming online! How am I going to promise those refugees a rock-solid service if those bloody Aussies keep changing the rules and running their own service? I’ll go broke! The only winner will be the bloody printer!

BONG BONG JNR: Yeah! The printer!

BONG BONG SNR: Oh, shut up.

MEANWHILE, IN CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA, IN A PARLLEL UNIVERSE:

PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: On this Australia Day I would like to extend the country’s highest award for bravery to one of our Indonesian neighbours who have risked life and limb in service to liberty and freedom.

(MILD APPLAUSE FROM AUDIENCE)

Like the heroes of America’s underground railroad, the French resistance and admirable men like Oscar Schindler, Bong Bong Sinarto and his family have given their lives to spiriting oppressed and persecuted minorities away from the clutches of their enemies and into the welcoming arms of liberal democracies across the world, liberal democracies where wounds can be healed and lives rebuilt.

This work is no more poignant than when it involves those from places where the liberal democracies are, sadly, in conflict with the forces of repression and fear. We in the Australian government are deeply humbled and, it must said, shamed by Mr Sinarto’s continued efforts to rescue people from those very war zones where so much damage is being inflicted by us, and from those very tyrants we seek to destroy.

If we, the liberal democracies of the west, cannot find it in our hearts to throw a blanket of freedom across the shoulders of huddled masses whose lives have been destroyed, not through their own actions but through the actions of the very liberal democracies they are now begging for assistance then we, the liberal democracies, are surely not worthy of the name.

The Hippocratic oath says ‘First, do no harm’, and so doctors make sure that, whatever treatment they prescribe, they must be sure that the treatment does not make the patient worse off. In cases, however, where the treatment IS worse than the disease, a doctor will go to great lengths to make sure that the effects of the treatment are as temporary as possible.

And so, just as medical practitioners aim to make bodies whole, we, the liberal democracies, seek to do the same for the world. Cancers must be eradicated, be the malignancy in the body or the body politic and, just like the cure for cancer has to be aggressive - chemotherapy is nothing if not violent – so too must be the efforts to remove the tumor of tyranny.

But, just like we seek to ease the side effects of chemo, so too must we help, in anyway we can, those who are suffering the side effects of war – the homelessness, the loss of loved ones, of livelihoods, of lives – by inviting them into our communities to share the riches we are so lucky to have.

Sadly we cannot organize airlifts too bring everybody out of the hell we have created, but we can certainly welcome those with the grit, tenacity, determination, courage and love of freedom to make it to our shores no matter what, and salute those hardy souls who dedicate their lives helping them.

There are some miserable curs in our society however, who denigrate these worthy individuals and call them and the ‘scum of the earth’, who castigate them for ‘making money from the misery of millions’, but may I remind those naysayers that nothing happens in the darkness without money, that there is nothing wrong with making a living and that there is no more honourable way to make it than by helping others escape the crushing oppression of war and hatred by whatever means necessary.

The ‘people smugglers’ are not ‘human traffickers’ as their customers are not being sold on to any end user – the only end user is us, the Australian people, as we take advantage of all the skills and other benefits these people so doggedly brought with them from overseas.

In fact, those who cop such opprobrium are not even ‘people smugglers’ – they are, in reality, ‘freedom facilitators’ who don’t deal in misery so much as unabashed, glorious and unrepentant joy, as anyone who has seen the look on the face of a refugee as they are granted a permanent resident’s visa will attest.

We Aussies must never forget that we, too, are ‘boat people’, but we don’t call Captain Arthur Phillip a ‘people smuggler’ or a ‘human trafficker’, although the convicts were hardly willing cargo – but if we choose not to define him that way then we must also reject the efforts by our opposition to use such terms to define the likes of Bong Bong.

We are a compassionate people who will gladly divvy up what we have with those less fortunate, if only they can get here – as we sing in our proudest moments, 'For those who've come across the seas, we've boundless plains to share' – and we know that there is no ‘queue’ as such in a war zone, just people yearning to be free, and so in times like these we need champions like Bong Bong.

We need freedom fighters like Bong Bong to bring us the innocent lives that we are morally bound to rebuild with the bricks and mortar of the human soul, that of love and acceptance, in the hope that might receive the ultimate accolade – forgiveness for the pain we have wrought upon them.

We need noble men like Bong Bong to deliver to our doorstep the bitter harvest of our good intentions, we need people like Bong Bong to risk his life to do what’s right and we need heroes like Bong Bong to remind us that we have laid waste to someone else’s countries for no good reason – lest we ever, ever, forget.

YES, WE CAN! – Well, um, actually maybe we can’t…not yet…later perhaps, but now? Yeah no, er, we’ll get back to you…

2009-09-09T19:14:00.007+08:00

It has come to Elroy’s attention that there has been something of a shakeout in world events in the past 9 months and that George W. Bush been kicked to the kerb and one Barak Hussein Obama, a most unlikely black and white Christian Muslim, been elected by a desperate US population to not be George W. Bush.

Oops! What gives? It’s true that Elroy, ineffable and inerrant sage that he is, once calmly stated that Obama would never make it to the White House due to EOAS (Early Onset Assassination Syndrome) but, now that Obama has managed to navigate his way to some fairly substantial DC real estate, Elroy has had time enough to fully cogitate on the magnitude of these events and is ready to impart his considerable and weighty wisdom concerning the future of the Free World™.

The big question is what really happens at the White House? Elroy asks because that black and white Christian Muslim who runs the place does not appear to be the black and white Christian Muslim who ran towards it. Why? Well, as far as Elroy can tell, there are a 1.5 baker’s dozen possibilities.

1. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who understood that he would have to shift to the right in a pragmatic effort to avoid the second American civil war he thinks might otherwise occur.

2. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who, upon being handed the keys to the White House wine cellar, was taken into a small room to have a few home truths by the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security et al about the extent, effects and responsibilities of American power, both foreign and domestic.

3. Candidate Barak Obama was truly progressive liberal who, upon being handed the keys to the White House wine cellar, suddenly realised that he could make out like a bandit if he became a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests and what he hell do those bleeding heart do-gooder liberal wankers know anyway?

4. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who got some bad advise from some ex-Clinton running lackey dogs of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests on who to hire as his advisors and then allowed himself to be advised by those advisors because President Obama hasn’t actually got a clue what he’s doing.

5. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who, upon being handed the keys to White House wine cellar, quite simply lost his nerve at the thought of all those bitter rednecks clinging to their guns and religion, and not just in Congress, and has become a quivering protoplasm in the face of the Republican Senator’s war dance/

6. Candidate Barak Obama wass a lying bastard who said whatever his progressive liberal base wanted to hear in order to be handed the keys to the White House wine cellar and who had, in reality, only ever been a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests.

7. Candidate Barak Obama is a truly progressive liberal and just soooooooo much smarter than the rest of us that we cannot see the long chess game he is playing, that it will all turn out fine for progressive liberals in the long run and we will be shocked, shocked, I tells ya, that we ever thought he was even capable of being a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests.

8. Candidate Barak Obama believes he is a truly progressive liberal who is, as we speak, enacting a truly progressive liberal agenda for the good of all Americans.

9. Candidate Barak Obama is a truly progressive liberal who genuinely feels that compromise and bipartisanship, meeting the other side of the divide halfway, is absolutely crucial to the effective governing of the country.

10 Candidate Barak Obama is merely shoring up the moderate Republican base for 2012 as he knows his progressive liberals would sooner chew their own legs off than allow President Palin to come to pass.

11. Candidate Obama was a truly progressive liberal who knows he owes his place to the Democratic National Committee and ‘Blue Dog’ democrats and so must temper his socialist instincts in order to keep them onside and get legislation passed.

12. Barack Obama is a committed socialist/communist/fascist who ran as a centrist but who is now implementing plans to turn the USA into the USSA.

13. Candidate Barak Obama is not a truly progressive liberal but a fully paid-for stooge of the New World Order.

14. President Obama is a complete phoney who has never done a thing worth a damn in his entire life and has skated in to the White House on combination of lies, his grandparents money, affirmative action, white guilt, charm and guile.

15. Candidate Barak Obama is, was, and always bought and paid for by Wall Steet in general and Goldman Sachs in particular.

16. Barack Obama is actually Elvis Presley after having been probed by aliens at Rockwell.

17. Candidate Obama is an illegal alien from Kenya who plans to transform the USA into an Islamofascist/communist hellhole via FEMA re-education camps that ‘teach’ his special blend of Sharia law and doctrinaire Marxism.

18. Candidate Barak Obama used blak majik and witchcraft to become the supreme ruler of the world.

19. For yea Obama hath the number of the beast and it is he who be the anti-Christ.

Hmm. Maybe we here at Let’s Ask Elroy!™ should explain ourselves and break these down a little.

1. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who understood that he would have to shift to the right in a pragmatic effort to avoid the second American civil war he thinks might otherwise occur.

Fans of the Interwebs in the USA will have noticed their more, um, rural cousins installing several new gun racks to accommodate the several hundred new guns they wish to transport on the back of their 4x4 SUV pick-up trucks just in case revolution II breaks out while they’re out grabbing a 6-pack at that there licker store.

As Obama has no wish to use his next State Of The Union speech to report that the state of the union is smashed and broken beyond all possible repair and that he is being held hostage on a mountain in Montana, he is seeking to implement his agenda with great skill and diplomacy lest the militias cry havoc, let loose the dogs of war and take their pitchforks for a road trip to D

2. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who, upon being handed the keys to the White House wine cellar, was taken into a small room to have a few home truths by the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security et al about the extent, effects and responsibilities of American power, both foreign and domestic.

Here we enter the dark and sinister world of unknown unknowns. Maybe he was even threatened in some opaque fashion? Shown a copy of his Kenyan birth certificate? Whatever they did, Obama emerged chastened and tamed – turned, in other words, into a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests.

It is entirely possible that the president elect is quietly informed as to the real and absolute truth of how America makes the world work with such lines as ‘Y’remember 9/11 and the WTC? Meet Dick over here, one of his finer efforts’, and ‘George Junior – it’s amazing what a guy’ll do once you show him how his Pappy whacked JFK’ and ‘You ever read about the Businessmen’s Coup attempt back in 1937? The time when DuPont and Ford and all them guys were going to mount a fascist takeover of FDR? Well, guess what…?’ until the President elect says ‘Yeah, alright, you guys just keep on keeping on’ because he now he knows the truth he also how important it is it to keep lying about it.

3. Candidate Barak Obama was truly progressive liberal who, upon being handed the keys to the White House wine cellar, suddenly realised that he could make out like a bandit if he became a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests and what he hell do those bleeding heart do-gooder liberal wankers know anyway?

There is, of course, the chance that candidate Obama realised that here was his big chance to clean up and that a poor black and white Christian Muslim doesn’t get handed these opportunities ever day and he’ be a mug to refuse it and hell, he got here by dint of his own bootstraps so why shouldn’t anyone else, and....

4.Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who got some bad advise from some ex-Clinton running lackey dogs of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests on who to hire as his advisors and then allowed himself to be advised by those advisors because President Obama hasn’t actually got a clue what he’s doing.

Option four says that Obama is the accidental president, that he was just making a trial run ready for 2012 or 2016 and that when he won he panicked, asked Bill and Hilary who they picked to help them and did the same. Certainly the Obama administration is chock full o’ faces who have been quietly propping up the bars of DC since 1999 and waiting for a call, so maybe this is just one of those sequels they make without the lead actor but with the same crew, like the Regan/Bush Jnr show.

5. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who, upon being handed the keys to White House wine cellar, quite simply lost his nerve at the thought of all those bitter rednecks clinging to their guns and religion, and not just in Congress, and has become a quivering protoplasm in the face of the Republican Senator’s war dance.

So is he a lily-livered pussy who is all scared of the Republicans in the House and Congress? Is this why he has allowed a back down over the crucial Employee’s Free Choice Act? Why single-payer healthcare has gone the way of JFK? Why the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are blazing unabated?

Or is he crazy brave enough to stare down the nutters and, say, institute single-payer health care and charge the rich for it, or release the prisoners in Git’mo and Bagram, or end warrantless wiretaps, or…or…or…on the face of it, it doesn’t look good, does it?

6. Candidate Barak Obama wass a lying bastard who said whatever his progressive liberal base wanted to hear in order to be handed the keys to the White House wine cellar and who had, in reality, only ever been a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests.

There is, of course, always the chance that he is complete bollocks and bluer than Rush Limbaugh with no Oxycontin, that he is a Republican stooge who is in place to placate the lefties and make sure that a truly progressive liberal does get to drive the ‘bus.

It’s true that he went to Harvard and rubbed shoulders with the future captains of industry, and so he could be the ultimate triangulation machine – the guy that could get it done with the backing of the left to the satisfaction of the right. Change, but not too much change…

7. Candidate Barak Obama is a truly progressive liberal and just soooooooo much smarter than the rest of us that we cannot see the long chess game he is playing, that it will all turn out fine for progressive liberals in the long run and we will be shocked, shocked, I tells ya, that we ever thought he was even capable of being a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests.

Option seven says that big ol’ brain of his is working just fine and that he is playing the Republicans like monkeys, running rings around them in a game of chess so subtle that the GOP think they are playing draughts. It doesn’t matter that he has caved on some vital issues, the point is that the Repubs are being played and that…that…that will be good when, er…whenever he decides to stop.

Take, for instance, the current healthcare debate. Obama said he wanted a bill on healthcare reform by August, a declaration which sent the Retail Right into a blood boiling frenzy. Conservatives have spent their summer descending on townhall meetings in demented hysterics to demand, loudly and without end, the right to be screwed royally and left to die by the health maintenance organizations they pay so much money to – ‘Give me liberty AND give me death!’ – but now that they have exhausted themselves, and shown themselves to be complete pillocks, Obama has said ‘Oh well, we’ll do it later then’.

Is this rope-a-dope White House style? Was Obama relying on the Dining Room Tables to go utterly ape and show their hand early, thus demonstrating their total inability to understand the issues and effectively dealing themselves out of the game? Is Obama banking, mayhaps, on the more moderate Republicans distancing themselves from the nutters and realizing that the left do have several very good points? We wait and see. Of course, Obama’s game might be so subtle that he never actually reveals his hand at all…

8. Candidate Barak Obama believes he is a truly progressive liberal who is, as we speak, enacting a truly progressive liberal agenda for the good of all Americans.

There is, of course, the possibility that he is completely genuine and that he believes that his legislative agenda is what he promised and that, in time, Americans will realize that he has done, is doing and will do exactly what he said he would. This is, of course, utterly silly and the most ridiculous notion, here but of course we much canvass all possibilities no matter how absurd.

9. Candidate Barak Obama is a truly progressive liberal who genuinely feels that compromise and bipartisanship, meeting the other side of the divide halfway, is absolutely crucial to the effective governing of the country.

Possibility nine postulates Obama knows that, in order to get anything done, deals must be done. His aversion to confrontation and grown-up approach to government have led him to hope that the other side will recognise his due authority and be prepared to also modify their ideas to reflect the new reality on the Hill, that is, a Democrat majority in both houses and a mandate from the American people to enact a more liberal agenda.

10. Candidate Barak Obama is merely shoring up the moderate Republican base for 2012 as he knows his progressive liberals would sooner chew their own legs off than allow President Palin to come to pass.

He knows his base will follow him, unless they manage to organize a viable and widespread third party between now and 2012, and that they will always choose him over a Republican, especially if that Republican is called Palin. The swing voters, however, are not so reliable, and if the GOP manage to nominate a candidate to left of Mussolini then they will be even less so, so the 2012 election campaign starts now. Actually, it started on November the fifth, 2008….

11. Candidate Obama was a truly progressive liberal who knows he owes his place to the Democratic National Committee and ‘Blue Dog’ democrats and so must temper his socialist instincts in order to keep them onside and get legislation passed.

The DNC might as well be Republicans, and the so-called Blue Dogs actually are. The Right have a policy of infiltration; from school boards on up, conservatives make a point of being represented, in one way or another, in every significant institution in America and the Democratic Party is no different.

12. Barack Obama is devious liar who ran as a mild-mannered centrist but who is, in actual fact, a committed socialist/communist/fascist currently implementing his nefarious plans to turn the USA into the USSA.

This through-the-looking-glass, demented world view is expounded on a daily basis by Fox News’ resident cry-baby, the certifiably insane Glenn Beck. It is, of course, completely at odds with all the available evidence, but that has never stopped Glenn before and so the USA is slowly being filled with nutbags convinced that Glenn is 100% correct without ever attempting to define the words ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ or ‘fascist’.

13. Candidate Barak Obama is not a truly progressive liberal but a fully paid-for stooge of the New World Order.

In this scenario, Obama is, was, and always will be a creature of the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, the Carlyle Group, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, the Davos Forum, the frolickers of Bohemia Grove, JP Morgan and whatever other shadowy organizations run the world from behind the curtains.

Recognising that the Bush/Cheney project had maybe gone a little too far too fast, Barak Obama was plucked from obscurity by the NWO to put a friendly face on US hegemony before the world woke up and smelled the tacos, a black and white Christian Muslim guaranteed to placate citizens across the planet while the final stages of the NWO’s grand plan is put into effect.

14. President Obama is a complete phoney who has never done a thing worth a damn in his entire life and has skated in to the White House on combination of lies, his grandparents money, affirmative action, white guilt, charm and guile.

The rationale for this is the apparent ease with Obama floated into Harvard Law, the Illinios Senate and the White House. According to adherents of this theory his grandparents were loaded, he only got into Harvard as an affirmative action candidate, his two books were ghost written by Bill Ayers and that, although he is as black as he is white, he played up his dark side in order to make whitey feel a) sorry for him and b) better about themselves by voting for him.

It is held that everything about Obama is a fraud, that he is just a super-slick conman unable to utter a word without a teleprompter, that he was a completely average student, that he never wrote anything of note in all his time of editing the Harvard Law Review and that never was heard a distinguishing word from The One in all his born days.

15. Candidate Barak Obama is, was, and always bought and paid for by Wall Steet in general and Goldman Sachs in particular.

The evidence for this thesis is everywhere. Like the Bush Jnr and Clinton cabals before it, the Obama administration is livid, rife, rotten with Goldman Sachs alumni. Henry Paulson, former GS CEO and Bush Treasury Secretary, was the trigger man for the biggest heist in human history, and the swindle continues apace, so it really doesn’t matter which party is in power as GS owns the lot.

Ronnie Reagn’s Assistant Secretary of Treasury Paul Craig Roberts was once asked "Does the US Secretary of the Treasury work for the people or does he work for the banking system on Wall Street?" and Roberts said ‘He works for Goldman Sachs.’

16. Barack Obama is actually Elvis Presley after having been probed by aliens at Rockwell.

Somewhere, in the wilds of Montana, there is a lone nutter clinging to his guns who has a blog promoting option 16 and who will happily tell you how Elvis was jumped while visiting Walker Air Force Base by the resident little green men. They then inserted a probe which made Elvis blow up like a balloon before exhibiting all the outward signs of death until he emerged from his cocoon as a suave and charming African American, a result the aliens thought Elvis might appreciate.

17. Candidate Obama is an illegal alien from Kenya who plans to transform the USA into an Islamofascist/communist hellhole via FEMA re-education camps that ‘teach’ his special blend of Sharia law and doctrinaire Marxism.

Option 17 is nuttier than 16. Apparently Obama’s mama left her native Kansas for Kenya to give birth to the lurve chil’ she had created with Kenyan student Barak Obama Snr, at which point Obama Snr hopped on a plane for Hawaii that same day in order to place an ad in the birth announcement pages of the Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Start-Bulletin, and insert a Certificate of Live Birth and Birth Certificate into the medical records of the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children so that his parents could then claim that he was borned in the USA . Or something.

So, having fooled the US into giving their boy citizenship, Obama was then brought up as a Muslim and brainwashed by communists until he realized that he his soul would not rest until he had transformed the USA into an Islamofascist/communist hellhole via FEMA re-education camps that ‘teach’ his special blend of Sharia law and doctrinaire Marxism.

Variants include that idea that Barak Obama Snr was NOT his father, that he WAS born in Hawaii but lost his US citizenship in a card game in Jakarta, that his grandmother is a witchdoctor etc etc (Cont. P 96), but remember – a significant number of Americans BELIEVE THIS TO BE TRUE. I’m scared now.

18. Candidate Barak Obama used blak majik and witchcraft to become the supreme ruler of the world.

Given that his Grandmother is/was a witchdoctor this was not hard, having leaned all the voodoo tricks he might have needed from her by osmosis and by living for a short time in Hawaii, which is in the Pacific and therefore not so far from Haiti.

19. For yea Obama hath the number of the beast and it is he who be the anti-Christ.

Hard to prove but, if true, it would be a bit awkward for the legion of godless lib’ruls if Obama suddenly sprouted horns and a tail, declared himself to be the devil incarnate and cast said lib’ruls into the flaming pit of eternal hellfire. It would, however, lock in the hard-to-reach Satanist vote.

So Obama’s failure to fire could be down to any, or a mixture, of all of the above nineteen scenarios, but what they don’t explain is the Right’s animosity towards him because, if you care to go ‘round again, you will see that there is nothing for them to dislke.

1. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who understood that he would have to shift to the right in a pragmatic effort to avoid the second American civil war he thinks might otherwise occur.

Why wouldn’t this please the Right? They must have understood that elections have consequences and that there would obviously be changes that they didn’t like, so it looks to Elroy like American conservatives have got off quite lightly – he was hoping they might be a little more circumspect and just a tad rueful when the tables eventually and inevitably turned, but irony is not their strongest suit.

New conservative administrations across the world are marked by the radical agendas they claim they have a mandate to implement; Bush, for instance, implemented two No Millionaire Left Behind tax cuts, the PATRIOT Act and two endless wars while the GOP generally sulked, pouted, kicked the chairs and literally told them pesky lib’ruls to go fuck them selves when they expressed doubts over the GOP’s legislative schedule.

Now, however, in line with conservatives’ take-no-prisoners, partisan, fight-to-the-death, no-quarter-given, hard-line, below-the-belt, bloody, punitive and punishing approach to politics, Obama’s attempts to implement his mild agenda Is being met with calls for revolution, armed insurrection, and the wholesale spilling of lib’rul blood.

So the Retail Right rattle their sabres and hang tough, and the chance are it could be working, but the downside is that they might not get to have their second civil war after all, which is a shame because what’s the point of owning a personal arsenal the size of Belgium’s (as part of a well-regulated militia, you understand) if you don’t get to shoot some commies?

2. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who, upon being handed the keys to the White House wine cellar, was taken into a small room to have a few home truths by the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security et al about the extent, effects and responsibilities of American power, both foreign and domestic.

This would be great outcome for conservatives as it would mean that the true power of the state lies within the military/industrial complex, just the way they like it. Can Obama keep America safe? Only if the MIC let him.

3. Candidate Barak Obama was truly progressive liberal who, upon being handed the keys to the White House wine cellar, suddenly realised that he could make out like a bandit if he became a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests and what he hell do those bleeding heart do-gooder liberal wankers know anyway?

They profess to hate ‘flip-floppers’ but there is little the Right like to gloat over more than a leftie who has seen the light and jumped the aisle. Nary a day goes by without them spouting that spurious Churcilll ‘quote’ that goes ‘If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain’, completely oblivious to the fact that Churchill never actually said it – it first turns up as a quip from 19th century French statesman François Guizot – and that it declares all lifelong conservatives to be completely heartless; no, the bit they like is the ‘not a conservative = no brain’ equation.

(Editor’s note: The funniest attempt at making this connection was by Sean Hannity when he said ‘If you’re twenty and not a liberal you don’t have a heart; if you’re forty and conservative, you don’t have a brain.’ O how we laffed.)

For example, a Fox News favorite is one David Horowitz, a former ‘60s student Marxist radical who proves either Guizot of Hannity correct at least once a week when he denounces his erstwhile comrades to the delight of the baying herd. Other notable ideological turncoats include playwright David Mamet, neo-con godfather Irving Kristol and The Gipper himself, Ronnie W. Reagan, so one would think that the 27% of America that still call themselves ‘Republicans’ would be wetting themselves at the thought of welcoming Obama to the dark side, but there you go – they’re a hard lot to please.

4. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who got some bad advise from some ex-Clinton running lackey dogs of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests on who to hire as his advisors and then allowed himself to be advised by those advisors because President Obama is a complete fuckwit hasn’t actually got a clue what he’s doing.

This is a win-win proposition for the legions of evil. If Bill Clinton was the best Republican president the Democrats ever elected (so far) then that was down to his advisors. Indeed, Bill’s strategist/consultant/advisor/guru Dick Morris might not be on the Obama team – yet – but he was, and is, a creature of the GOP, and with ex-Clintonistas like Rahm Emmanuel, Larry Summers and Robert Reich knocking around it’s a case of Change We’ve Actually Seen Before, a situation that should cheer those that fear the establishment of the USSA no end, not least because it would prove the treasured conservative notion that Barak Obama is a complete fuckwit who hasn’t actually got a clue what he’s doing.

5. Candidate Barak Obama was a truly progressive liberal who, upon being handed the keys to White House wine cellar, quite simply lost his nerve at the thought of all those bitter rednecks clinging to their guns and religion, and not just in Congress, and has become a quivering protoplasm in the face of the Republican Senator’s war dance.

This is just Republican business as usual. Their take-no-prisoners, partisan, fight-to-the-death, no-quarter-given, hard-line, below-the-belt, bloody, punitive and punishing approach to governance is just another day at the office GOP and Obama is just the kind of eggheaded, non-confrontational kind of elitist scum that they chew up and spit out before morning prayers, so the GOP should be happy – the pres. Is under his desk in whimpering about the nasty bullies and doing what he’s told or else. Mission accomplished!

6. Candidate Barak Obama wass a lying bastard who said whatever his progressive liberal base wanted to hear in order to be handed the keys to the White House wine cellar and who had, in reality, only ever been a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests.

This should break them out in a skip as means that Obama has always been one of them. It means that he single-handedly pulled the wool over democrats big and small, all of them, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, 62 million voters sucked in by a dyed-in-the-wool running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie who will protect the vested interests of conservative’s corporate overlords and the souls of people one might image conservatives would much rather see burn in hell. So why aren’t they smiling? Who knows?

7. Candidate Barak Obama is a truly progressive liberal and just soooooooo much smarter than the rest of us that we cannot see the long chess game he is playing, that it will all turn out fine for progressive liberals in the long run and we will be shocked, shocked, I tells ya, that we ever thought he was even capable of being a running lackey dog of the bourgeoisie happy to protect the ruling elite’s vested interests.

Again, this really shouldn’t be too much of a problem for conservatives because while Obama is playing his long game, the Republicans are winning their short one. At what point will Obama make his move? At what point will he realise that lulling the opposition into a false sense of security by letting them win is the same as letting them win?

8. Candidate Barak Obama believes he is a truly progressive liberal who is, as we speak, enacting a truly progressive liberal agenda for the good of all Americans.

Another win for conservatives as if this is what Obama thinks is a truly progressive agenda then the conservative have zip to worry about. Obama’s idea of restructuring the financial system is to put it just back as it was before the crash, dollar by taxpayer dollar, and he is merely tinkering with the window dressings of healthcare, although you wouldn’t know it from the wailing and gnashing of teeth coming from the Free Marketeers™; a TRUE truly progressive liberal, on the other hand, would be jailing Wall Street CEOs for fraud and HMO CEOs for murder AND fraud.

9. Candidate Barak Obama is a truly progressive liberal who genuinely feels that compromise and bipartisanship, meeting the other side of the divide halfway, is absolutely crucial to the effective governing of the country.

This is just a gift to conservatives. As The Republican Party’s idea of being ‘bipartisan’ is having a Democrat administration do what the Republicans tell them, Obama’s eagerness to negotiate with them just makes their lives so much easier as they can put down their cudgels and weapons of mass disruption, as per Number Five, snuggle down inside the tent and spend the next four long years torpedoing whatever bills the Dems might send along – by invitation!

10. Candidate Barak Obama is merely shoring up the moderate Republican base for 2012 as he knows his progressive liberals would sooner chew their own legs off than allow President Palin to come to pass.

This still allows the conservative agenda to continue while affording conservatives the pleasure of watching liberals suffer and squirm but still vote Obama in 2012, thus relieving the guilt of those moderates who were ‘forced’ to vote Bush in ’04.

11. Candidate Obama was a truly progressive liberal who knows he owes his place to the Democratic National Committee and ‘Blue Dog’ democrats and so must temper his socialist instincts in order to keep them onside and get legislation passed.

Another win for conservatives, as ‘Blue Dog’ democrats are merely undercover Republicans. As previously noted, it is conservative strategy to infiltrate everything everywhere, from local peace groups through to, well, the Democratic Party, and as Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, is convinced that the Dems could never break through without dragging a few GOP votes over the fence, the Repubs don’t even need to try to sneak their members onto a Democratic Party ticket – Emmanuel invites them!

And they don’t mind – jihad , as we all know, requires martyrdom, and its no different for the Anglo fundies, just a little more symbolic. Consider the strange case of Arlen Specter, a Republican Senator of forty-fours years standing who up and joins the Democrats, just like that, effectively delivering them the prize of a sixty seat filibuster-proof maority.

Why? Because Specter suddenly had a crisis of conscience? Because Specter is such principle-free opportunist that he truly thought he stood a better chance of being re-elected as a democrat? Because he is so deluded that he thought he could get away with it? Or because he is a wily old– curmudgeon who threw himself into the fire in an act of self –sacrifice that will undoubtedly have its rewards so that he could control Obama’s agenda from the inside?

What would you do? Refuse to amend your legislation and have it lose by a vote? Or do what Uncle Arlen suggests? One peculiar facet of this bizarre move is that conspicuous lack of ire it drew from Republicans from sea to shining sea – instead of lynching the traitor that just condemned the USA to the misery of socialism they just shrugged, said ‘Silly old Arlen! Oh well, it’s a free country etc’ and moved back to clobbering whichever democrat had woken up that morning.
And if costs him the 2010 mid-term election, so what? Specter’s no spring chicken – maybe he just wants to live out his twilight years at the expense of a grateful party.

12. Barack Obama is a committed socialist/communist/fascist who ran as a centrist but who is now implementing plans to turn the USA into the USSA.

Number twelve is important to conservatives as it gives their lives meaning. Instead of spending the summer slumped on the couch counting nickels and dimes for bullets and beer, the fact that a radical black communist took over their beloved nation state has had them in state of fevered animation as they swamped townhall meetings to shout that they needed to be heard and held ‘teabag’ protests where they protested the, um right to protest.

This project is unending for conservatives as they see evidence of Obama’s socialism/communism/fascism at every turn. Apparently it is the act of a socialist/communist/fascist traitor to investigate possible war crimes committed by your fellow countrymen, despite the fact that a reluctance to investigate possible war crimes committed by your fellow countrymen is a hallmark of socialist/communist/fascist regimes, and apparently it is also it is the act of a socialist/communist/fascist to attempt to deliver a speech to, sorry, ‘brainwash’ the country’s children concerning the importance of staying in school and getting good grades.

Actually, the DRTs might have a point here – say what you like about socialists/communists, at least they had sensational public education institutions. Capitalists societies, however, like to keep the citizens as stupid as possible, as do fascist societies, which raises the question of whether the retail right have the slightest idea what they are on about and whether they should have, erm, stayed in school.

13. Candidate Barak Obama is not a truly progressive liberal but a fully paid-for stooge of the New World Order.

In this scenario, Obama is, was, and always will be a creature of the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, the Carlyle Group, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, the Davos Forum, the frolickers of Bohemia Grove, JP Morgan and whatever other shadowy organizations run the world from behind the curtains on behalf of Wall Street and the corporatocracy.

As such it represents another win for the GOP whose numbers also make up the membership ranks of the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, the Carlyle Group, the Illuminati, Skull and Bones, the Davos Forum, the frolickers of Bohemia Grove, JP Morgan and whatever other shadowy organizations run the world from behind the curtains on behalf of Wall Street and the corporatocracy.

14. President Obama is a complete phoney who has never done a thing worth a damn in his entire life and has skated in to the White House on combination of lies, his grandparents money, affirmative action, white guilt, charm and guile.

Conservatives enjoy beating this drum as it feds into their preconceived notion that all black people are, by definition, shifty ne’er-do-wells who have not reached any positions of power hey might hold due to any hard work or application on their part.

Furthermore, it proves that affirmative action results in second rate personnel and that racism is dead which means, in turn, that they can continue to be a racist as ever while maintaining the high moral ground, and allows them to assume the victimhood they have spent so ong deriding in others. Slavery? Jim Crow? 300 years of institutionalised inequality? Get over it! There's a black man in the White House! Waaah! No fair!

15. Candidate Barak Obama is, was, and always bought and paid for by Wall Steet in general and Goldman Sachs in particular.

No worries! As capitalism is all about crushing the competition and establishing monopolies conservatives must be delighted at Goldman Sachs’ hi-jinx this last year! Thank god Goldman was able to hire yet another president to cover it’s tracks!

Yes, the GFC was nothing but a dazzling example of the Free Market™ at work as Goldman, like all good capitalist enterprises, sought to eliminate their competitors, a resounding victory for capitalism and capitalists everywhere!

16. Barack Obama is actually Elvis Presley after having been probed by aliens at Rockwell.

A definite win for conservatives as Elvis is, well, Elvis, no matter aliens have been up him and so, being Elvis and never having actually left the building, he will eventually reveal his true identity and, uh huh huh, lead the USA back to sanity with a rousing chorus of An American Trilogy. Honest.

17. Candidate Obama is an illegal alien from Kenya who plans to transform the USA into an Islamofascist/communist hellhole via FEMA re-education camps that ‘teach’ his special blend of Sharia law and doctrinaire Marxism.

Conservatives would be delighted if this was the case as it would prove them right and being right is what they care about most, happy to be locked up in the backwoods of Georgia and subjected to movies by Al-Queada and Mike Moore movies happy so long as their ‘Told you so!’ rights would remain intact.

This tendency is evidenced by the behaviour of Rush Limbaugh who said ‘I hope he fails!’, which means that he is quite prepared to see his country destroyed rather than have Obama be right. What a patriot!

18. Candidate Barak Obama used blak majik and witchcraft to become the supreme ruler of the world.

Conservatives would like this to be the case as it would explain the unexplainable, that is, how a liberal black man became POTUS. As the retail right cannot fathom that free Americans would willingly vote for the likes of Obama, this option makes them feel better as it says that 53% of the country had a spell cast over them, that they were rendered sheeple drones by The One.

The other good thing about 18 is it absolves conservatives from taking any responsibility for the way the world is, it being governed by voodoo and all.

19. For yea Obama hath the number of the beast and it is he who be the anti-Christ.

This would be a fabulous outcome for the loonier Christian conservatives as it hurries along the Rapture when they all get to ascend into heaven with The Naz and zap them muzzies good and proper, once and for all. True it means the end of everyone else on the planet, but hey – gotta support the troops!

So there you go, Kids! Mix ‘n’ match! Whatever Obama is, more and more people are beginning to worry he’s not what they thought he was. Bugger! For Elroy’s part, he's going with #7 right now because he can’t bear the alternatives, although it does weigh heavy on his mind that chess is game where pawns are sacrificed to protect royalty. Sigh.

NEXT!

2009-08-06T17:38:00.003+08:00

Laugh? Elroy nearly voted Labor! Now, friends of Let’s Ask Elroy!™ will know that he tipped that Mighty Malcolm Turnbull would take over the leadership of the Liberal Party of Australia once the troglodytes tired of Brendan ‘The Locum’ Nelson’s bedwetting behavior, and of course Elroy was, naturally, correct.

The Locum was going down faster than Rupert Murdochs’s profits but it was Peter ‘Tip’ Costello’s sterling contribution to deforestation, a yawnathon memoir simultaneously launched at remainder shops throughout a nonplussed nation, that proved too much for The Locum.

He called for a party room spill, a challenge that Mighty Mal bravely took up even knowing Tip was in the mood for, well, just about anything; Tip was always waiting in the wings, sniping from the backbenches and threatening, by his very presence, to make the Liberal Party giddy with joy by announcing his availability for the gig of Lib head Pooh-bah, but as it was Tip shut up and Mighty Mal got the nod.

Elroy was a little off the mark as he didn’t quite gauge Mighty Mal’s ardent opportunism correctly; he thought Mal might wait until everyone else in the Liberal leadership had retired bleeding to their various electorates and the ALP had fucked up in some inevitable and irretrevable manner before shimmering forth, a vision from Vaucluse come to lead the Libs back to some semblance of sense, but the wait was too much for him and Mal is not a man given to hearing the word ‘No’.

Still, Mal was a little wary – what will Tip Costello do next? When will he do it? Oh, if only he would turn it up completely and go write a book someone actually wanted to read, or something, and then…hoopla! Suddenly it was over! Tip had packed his bat and ball and declared that the great unwashed of Higgins would no longer be subject to his tender mercies! Huzzah!

It is indicative of the combative, born-to-rule nature of the Turnbulls that, upon hearing the news that that daddy was in clear, Mal’s son celebrated by donnng a cowboy hat while riding around the room yelling ‘Yeehaw!’ – Elroy nurses the vague suspicion that said scion might spy some opportunities for upward mobility from daddy being PM, not that he needs any, but Elroy is ever so glad to report that daddy proceeded to blow it in a matter of hours.

In a demonstration of cavalier disregard, Mighty Mal’s joy got he better of him. It is said that a good barrister will never ask a question that he doesn’t know the answer to, but Mal obviously missed that day at law school – the day he didn’t miss, however, was the one where they show how to prep a witness.

And so he stitched up a neat little vignette starring the permanently outraged Senator Eric Abetz and a hapless civil service mole called Godwin Grech in which Abetz was shocked, shocked I tells, ya, to hear a faltering Grech stammer that the government was up to no good (We won’t go into how the government was up to no good here – just Google ‘Utegate’ and follow the dots…) and that he had seen the documentary evidence to prove it, documented evidence in the shape of an email which Abetz said he had heard about from a journalist, and which Mal said he has seen, and that was knocked up by a fevered Grech to curry favour with the new boss and save himself from the irrelevancy of opposition.

No matter – Grech’s Oscar™ level performance at the senate estimates committee was riveting as Abetz, staying true to the script, seemingly ripped this ‘admission’ from the very aching soul of a good, loyal and impartial treasury mandarin who could no longer sit by while the government funnelled tax-payer dollars to its special pals.

It ‘surprised’ Abetz no end, and Might Mal stormed onto the nightly news demanding the resignation of the Treasurer, the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, each and every ALP representative alive or dead and the keys to the Lodge, thanks you very much, because it was, huffed Mal predicably, an outrage.

Ignoring the amusing contradictions brought up when remembering the extensive amount of fund-funnelling to business buddies committed by the previous Liberal government in general (and Mighty Mal in particular) because he could, Mighty Mal steamed ahead. The ALP had fucked up in some inevitable and irretrievable manner and they were going to pay, except for one simple thing – it was bollocks, and he knew it was bollocks because he helped make up the bollocks, knew full well that the email they were calling ‘documentary evidence’ was real live, made up, fully forged bollocks and that man he let sell him this pup was unwell of both mind and body.

Mal knew all this but without asking anyone else in his Party apart from, it would seem, Senator Abetz, he hurtled full length into the fray and asked questions he didn’t know the answer to. The fur flew, but only Might Mal is the one with nursing the bald spots because now the whole country knows it was bollocks, and that Mal is the kind of boofhead who will happily kick a clinically depressed and chronically ill man to the kerb via the wheels of the No. 46 to Bondi without a second thought, and so is it is that Mal is now toast.

Of course, Mighty Mal will tell you that he made up nothing, that he was sucked in by a, ahem, 'whistleblower' – one can always trust a conservative to twist a definition – eager to ingratiate himself with the New Order, that said 'whistleblower' had a 'legitimate complaint' and that, well, said whistleblower pwomised that the email was legitimate, really truly-ruly, double-dinks an' everyfing!

But this puts Mal in the uncomfortable position of being either a liar or an idiot, a unusual dilemma for him compounded by the fact he is trying to convince all and sundry of the latter when he has spent a lifetime convincing all comers of his superior intellect. Like all conservatives caught out being dishonest and/or stupid he is playing the victim card, saying that it was nothing to do with him, much, and that the buck stops over there in the psychiatric ward of the Canberra Hospital where Godwin Grech has been rubber-roomed for the duration.

What this petty little contretemps demonstrates is Mal''s monumental ego and lack of judgement. Either he lashed up the email and senate estimates committee script with Grech, Abetz and our old friend 'plausible deniability', or knocked up the senate estimates committee script with Grech and Abetz after he gratefully received Grech's email without too much questioning. Surely, as a barrister, he should know that fabricating evidence is not world's best practice? Does he think that the standard of evidence is lower for the senate, the parliament and the public at large?

Or is this business as usual? Does this kind of sleight of hand go on in the court system all the time? At,best, at the very best, Mighty Mal is guilty of rank opportunism and gullibility, that he wanted to believe that the email was genuine so much that he took Grech at his somewhat shaky word. After all, Grech had been supplying the Liberals with information for years, so why question him now?

Mal may hang on for a while as he is not given to hearing the word ‘No’ and will fight to the death until he wins, or gets bored and moves on – Mal always gets bored and finds something else to do – but right at the moment the future is not looking too chipper. Mighty Mal was always a bit of a risk for a divided and confused Liberal Party – way too wet for some, way too Mal for others – and it looks like they were right. Bull by name and nature he has rampaged through the China shop of political convention using a toxic brew of near complete inexperience and towering arrogance, but it looks like the old lags of the Libs have had enough – the phones, apparently, are ringing.

Including Tip’s! Tip always said he would never challenge for the leadership and that if the Liberals wanted him to do it they would have to give it to him, wrapped up, with a pretty pink bow and a cherry on top, but know that it looks like they will, is it too late? Have the good burghers of Higgins moved on? If only he’d waited a day! Oh, the irony! Poor Pete! His timing remains, as ever, interesting…

But if not he, who? The time ravaged Andrew Robb? Oh dear. The charm free Nick Minchin? Two oh dears. The Evil Ms Bishops? Eww. The avuncular Joe Hockey? Refuses point blank to take it, no matter how many cherries and bows. Tony ‘Mad Monk’ Abbott? Oh please! Wilson ‘Iron Bar’ Tuckey? Make my day!

Yes, the only reason Mal will stay on is there is no one else that could do the job or wants to. Welcome to the wilderness, Liberal Party of Australia! Long may you wander it.

Judge Not Lest Ye Judged.

2009-07-14T15:42:00.006+08:00

Attention all Nutbags of the Retail Right.

Before you carry on with any more whining that 'Maria' Sotomayor is somehow unfit for the bench due to her gender, nationality, cultural identity, empathy, sympathy or anything else, read these quotes:

…when a case comes before me involving, let's say, someone who is an immigrant – and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases – I can't help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn't that long ago when they were in that position…when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, "You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country.

When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. – Samuel Alito coming on all Italian immigrant at his confirmation hearing to sound of Republican silence.

The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible. Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe, and has least support in the churchgoing United States.

I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? – Anton Scalia crashing through the wall between church and state to the sound of the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves.

I have followed this man's career for some time…he is a delightful and warm, intelligent person who has great empathy and a wonderful sense of humor. – Poppy Bush 41 dropped the 'E" word about Clarence Thomas to the sound of distant crickets.

The thing is that conservatives like biased Supremes and 'activist' judges' just fine, so long as their activism is directed in the right, ie their, direction. 'Not only do state-court judges possess the power to "make" common law’ opined Scalia, ‘but they have the immense power to shape the States' constitutions as well’ and without conservative judges 'legislating from the bench', corporate personhood would still be a distant nightmare and the world would have just waved goodbye to President Gore.

However, if the Supremes weren'tprone to the odd bit of interpretation then the unfortunate Terri Schiavo would not have had to go through that pathetic farrago as the letter of the law would have seen dispatched to the great hereafter on the PDQ.

Is Sotomayer biased? Who isn't? Plainly the rest of the Supremes are. Maybe conservatives would prefer the SCOTUS to consist of a series of Hewlett-Packards running MicroSoft ConJustice™ 2.0 that would digitally determine how the 18th Century Constitution would apply in the 21st, but that would mean that the occasional case would go against them. Grrr! Stoopid activist computers!

So he who hath no sin cast the first stone! Judge not lest ye be judged! And stop being such bloody hypocrites.

Mumbai Brawling.

2009-06-03T19:22:00.003+08:00

The Global Financial Clusterfuck and other failures of capitalism, plus eleven years of conservative government Muslim-baiting, has resulted in the outer suburbs of Melbourne being populated by unemployed, desperate and resentful Aussies and the poor migrant, refugee and international student communities they blame.

Anyone with a complexion the dusky side of snow is a terrorist or, at least, a stress-relieving source of income, and so the more dim-witted sons of a sunburnt country have taken to relieving young Indians of their spare cash and accessories with extreme prejudice.

However, now the Indians have had enough, and it appears it's Australia's turn to learn something as the spirit of Ghandi visits Melbourne for the second time in a year. Australian would-be revolutionaries a chance to observe first hand what appears to come naturally to the international student, security guard, convenience shop worker and taxi-driving caste – how to protest.

For the local born community, protest is not that simple – a cause must be decided on and ratified by 2/3 of the organizing committee, posters must be made, permits applied for and granted, police liased with, flyers and badges prepared, parks booked, entertainment laid on, vegie burger stalls and agitprop vendors set up, arsenals prepared, media spruikers interviewed and aired, and plenty of warning must dished out to the community at large as the protest organizers spend weeks massaging their constituency.

If the sun doesn’t shine or they get a better offer the people stay away in droves, but the Indian community have a far more direct approach to achieving their democratic aims with no committee, no posters, no permits, no police liaison, no flyers or badges, no parks booked, no entertainment, no veggie burgers, no propaganda, no media spruiking, no rocks, no molotovs and definitely no warning given –no, when the children of Mother India get pissed off in Melbourne they just go to Flinders Street Station and squat in the road until something happens.

Call them soft but its hard to see Simon and Natasha just plonking themselves down in the middle of the CBD's busiest intersection and refusing to budge– after all, Julia’s got a nut roast on the go in Brunswick and they could murder an ale after three whole hours of saving the planet/whales/refugees/civilisation-as-we-know-it – but that’s what the Indians do, by the thousand, for twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six hours at a stretch, sit down and wait with just a bullhorn and…patience.

Because that’s all you need. 14 reggae bands, 126 speechifying Arts undergraduates and 1583 dodgy mung-bean rissoles might make for a righteous day out, but where has it got anybody? The planet’s still warming, whales are still dying, refugees are still drowning and civilization’s not looking real flash, and no matter how many Action Days Simon and Natasha might attend the powers-that-be don’t seem to pay the slightest bit of attention.

The Indians, however, have worked out what should be the bleeding obvious and, instead of being polite and hopelessly bourgeois, they simply and immediately cause as much havoc as possible and don’t stop until they have. Excellent! Permits? What?

Nothing gives the powers that be more of a reason to go home for a good night’s sleep than a bunch of ferals having a sunny afternoon’s rallying, and nothing makes them yell ‘Fix this fucking NOW!’ more than a few hundred hardy souls camped out smack in the middle of city traffic.

For proof of this, just look at the results: When the Indian Taxi drivers hit the street last year, there was legislation to protect them was passed by the end of the week, and already both sate and federal parliaments are in heated discussion over what to do and legislation is on the way.

Maybe it has less to do with the personal safety of the Indians students and more to do with the safety of the income they represent, but what we do know is that if you want to get noticed you have to put something on the line. The Indian protesters face losing the investment they have made in their education, their livelihoods and their future, they risk deportation and maybe even further attacks from knuckle-dragging skippies fighting the War On Terror™ over here because they can’t be fucked going over there, so surely Simon and Natasha could risk a nights sleep and a nut roast?

The reports are that a few over-enthusiastic suburban brothers-in-arms did join in on Monday night and hurled rocks, got arrested, and generally failed to get the whole passive resistance thang but hey – what do you expect from the police academy? Look, rock-chucking has it’s place, don’t get me wrong, but there must be a place between the 30-minute-march-and-county-faire approach and the blacked-out, ski-masked, all-out anarchist melee for simply sitting down where you will cause the most disruption and refusing to budge until your concerns are addressed.

The Australian authorities are getting a taste of what the poms faced at the end of the Raj – a mass of implacable Hindus, Muslims, Seiks, Buddhists, Hari Krishnas and Christians settling in for the duration, and if the sated middle classes really want change, then this might be the way. After all, Gandhi moved a mountain called the British Empire with nothing but these tactics, so That Nice Mr. Rudd and the fast disintegrating USA should be no problem.

Conversations With A Conservative.

2009-05-28T10:23:00.009+08:00

If you've been wondering where Elroy has been lately, well, the answer is hard at work going undercover in Wingnut World to bring you authentic and real, first hand rightie logic through a series of conversations with his chum Hawkeye® over at View From Above. Hi, Hawkeye®!

They canvassed many subjects – the War on Terror™,, OBL, capitalism, Iraq, Israel, Islam – and so without further ado, here is the first of a few...

On 9/11.

HAWKEYE®: Was it the conservatives in the MSM that blamed Bush for 9/11?

ELROY: No, it wasn't – conservatives blamed OBL.

HAWKEYE®:And they were correct in their assessment.

ELROY: Not according to the FBI or Dick Cheney

HAWKEYE®: The world is an ugly place for sure. But it's not ugly because one man in the White House made tough decisions on how best to prevent another 9/11. It's ugly because guys like Osama bin Laden plot and plan about the best way to kill tens, hundreds, or thousands of innocent people – was it our "arrogance" that caused Osama bin Laden to order the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans?

ELROY: Well, if we allow that it was Osama, I submit that he did it to get the US out of Saudi Arabia, and guess what – it worked!

HAWKEYE®: OBL didn't perpetrate 9/11 "to get the US out of Saudi Arabia", but let me get this straight. On the one hand you want me to believe that OBL used the excuse of U.S. troops in Mecca (which they weren't) to justify 9/11 in order to get the troops out of Saudi Arabia, which you claim forced Rumsfeld to pull our troops out.’

Then, on the other hand, you want me believe that OBL wasn't behind 9/11, even though he admitted to it on several occasions, and which is contrary to your previous assertions. Which is it? Can't have it both ways.’

ELROY: I don’t need to have it both ways – I don’t want it both ways. Here's what happened – following the first Gulf War, US troops were stationed in Medina and Mecca, Saudi Arabia – this is pretty hard to deny, because it’s true. OBL and his Al-Queada buddies demanded their removal – it’s on their web site – then 9/11 happens, OBL gets blamed, the War On Terror™ ensues and US toops are pulled from Medina and Mecca.

However, this doesn’t mean that OBL did it – just that it was assumed he did. Was OBL the fall guy? We know he was a CIA asset. Was removing the troops from Medina and Mecca the pay-off for taking the rap? I don’t know, but there are many unanswered questions about 9/11. Did OBL admit it? Not definitively. Not beyond reasonable doubt. When? Where?

According to Dick Cheney, OBL didn’t perpetrate it at all! ‘We've never made the case, or argued the case that somehow Osama bin Laden was directly involved in 9/11’ said Dick in 2006. ‘That evidence has never been forthcoming.’ 

And according the FBI, OBL didn’t do it. FBI agent Rex Tomb let it slip in 2006 that "9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.’

HAWKEYE®: You misinterpreted Dick Cheney's statement that there was no "smoking gun" connecting OBL to 9/11 as proof that Cheney said "OBL was not responsible" for 9/11.

ELROY: I didn’t misinterpret anything. I quote Cheney as per. It seems pretty clear to me.

He said nothing about a ‘smoking gun’ – that’s YOUR misinterpretation. What is there about ‘We’ve never made the case that somehow OBL was directly involved in 9/1’ that is ambiguous?

Which words in ‘We've never made the case that somehow Osama bin Laden was directly involved in 9/11’ are open to interpretation? 

HAWKEYE®: But that is not what Cheney meant.

ELROY: Well what DID he mean then? Do you know? Have you asked him?

HAWKEYE®: Lack of hard evidence does not necessarily constitute lack of culpability…

ELROY: No, but it doesn’t prove culpability either, yet this is the standard of proof being used for OBL.   

HAWKEYE®: …although it does make prosecution rather difficult…

ELROY  Well yes, thank you, it DOES make prosecution rather difficult, doesn’t it?

HAWKEYE®: …and to suggest otherwise is intellectual dishonesty.

ELROY: As is suggesting that it does. If you walked into a court of law as a prosecution attorney and said, ‘Well, we don’t actually have any hard evidence as such, you honor, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it!’ you’d be up on contempt charges. Not that it stopped Dick, Don and Georgie-boy any! Evidence? Pah! Who needs it? And so we have Afghanistan.

HAWKEYE®: There is plenty of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence to tie OBL to 9/11.’

ELROY: ‘Anecdotal’ evidence is not permissible in a court of law, and any case built solely on circumstantial evidence would collapse. But that’s why Bush went to war I suppose – he didn’t have anything on OBL.  

Don’t you think that if Bush et al had even the barest skerrick of evidence they’d sing it from the highest hilltop? And what, pray is this ‘circumstantial’ evidence anyway? 

And if not OBL, who? I am, however, glad to see you admit there is no evidence for OBL’s complicity in 9/11 –there’s hope for you yet! It’s glimmers of sense like this that make it all worthwhile!   

HAWKEYE®: Although OBL initially denied any involvement; he later claimed responsibility for 9/11 on at least two occasions. For example, in videotape shown on Al Jazeera, October 29, 2004, he said:

‘God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but... As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.’

In an audiotape posted on the Internet in May 2006, OBL said: "[Zacarias Moussaoui] had no connection at all with September 11... I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission." 

ELROY: But are we 110% sure that these are OBL? Really? On what basis? Is the circumstantial evidence you speak of? Furthermore, it could be argued that because OBL had figured by 2004 that the whole world had declared him guilty, he might as well take the rap and get whatever out of it that he could. It’s all possible… 

HAWKEYE®: Osama bin Laden wanted to be a Muslim super-hero. He thought he could do that with the 9/11 attacks. He didn't anticipate that GWB would go after his sorry butt.

ELROY:  Yeah, how’s that ‘gonna catch him dead or alive’ going? What did George say? ‘We don’t really think about him much anymore?’ Yup, y’all really got his sorry butt.

HAWKEYE®: Now he's the super-hero that's hiding out in a cave.

ELROY: Oh, is he? Is that a fact? Or just something you made up? Anyhoo, he was in a cave before 9/11 – maybe he just likes caves. Not that y’all were that interested in catching him anyway – "The goal has never been to get Bin Laden." —General Richard Myers, chairman, US Joint Chiefs of Staff.   ‘I don't know where he is. I just don't spend that much time on him.’ – GWB. 

HAWKEYE®: From his own lips, he vowed to kill any and all Americans long before 9/11... "To kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."

ELROY: Hardly ‘from his own lips’ – this letter has many authors and it was written, not spoken, but anyway…the interesting thing about this document is what it goes on to say after ‘…possible to do it…’ which is ‘in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip’ which, on the 29th of April, 2003, is exactly what happened.   

According to OBL, OBL didn’t do it. Bin Laden says he wasn't behind attacks’ – CNN. ’I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks.’— Usama bin Laden, September 17, 2001 from, as you say, his own lips.

ELROY: Rummy announced the US withdrawal from SA the day before ‘Mission Accomplished!’ and it was that, if anything, that stopped 9/11 from happening again. Who said the US won’t negotiate with terrorists? And who said negotiation doesn't work? 

HAWKEYE®: I hereby appoint you Elroy to negotiate with al-Qaeda. Let me know how that works out, OK? 

ELROY: That job’s done, buddy – see above. And in any case, Al-Qaeda is the least of your problems right now – the Taliban taking Pakistan, now THAT’S a problem.

However, even if was pulled off by OBL, KSM or the tooth fairy, 9/11 was not an act of war; it was an act of terrorism, a job for Interpol and not the Pentagon.

HAWKEYE®: Shooting somebody on the street is a job for Interpol.
Hijacking an airplane is a job for Interpol. Killing thousands of innocents is "war".

ELROY: No, it’s an act of terrorism. ‘War’ must be declared by a nation state, and neither Afghanistan nor Iraq attacked, nor declared, war on the USA, but you are right – killing thousands of innocents is "war". The US has sadly proved this true.

HAWKEYE®: The US treated terrorism like a police matter from 1972 until 2001, and what did it get us?

ELROY: Looks to me like it got you 29 years of relative peace. You caught some bad guys who are now in jail. Life went on.

If a serial killer is on the loose in, say, New York, what do we do? Catch him by police work? Or carpet bomb Manhattan? Have you any idea what the chances of being killed by a terror attack actually are? Less than dying in a car accident, walking across the street, drowning, fire, falling or by being murdered. 5,000 people die in America each year from e-coli poisoning due to the meat industry’s successful lobbying to have abattoir standards relaxed, but is there a war on meat? No.  

However, let’s have a look at what this change in policy has wrought – 4,000 + US military dead, hundreds of thousands more maimed, injured and insane, 1 million + dead Iraqis and Afghans, 4 million + Iraq refugees, a completely de-stabled ME, a US occupation with no end in sight, Islamists a home run from Pakistan’s nuclear armory and a bill of 3 trillion dollars and rising.

HAWKEYE®: It got us 9/11.

ELROY: Did it? Haven’t we already ascertained that there is no way to prove this hypothesis?

HAWKEYE®: Now with the potential for terrorism using WMDs, the stakes are much higher. We cannot wait until an American or European city is smoldering in ruins to start looking for fingerprints. By then, it's too late.

ELROY: You have little choice – you can’t run around nuking whoever it is you think might be wanting to have a pop at you. But no one ever wanted to use WMD on the USA in the first place – this was a fear planted and generated by Bushco in order to go to war, so your wars have increased the chances of the very thing y’all wanted to avoid. Good result!

There are only way to police this eventuality – reduce the rest of the world to pavement or work out why anyone would want to reduce an American or European to smouldering ruins and act to head it off. People, you might be interested to know, do not do these things for fun – they have reasons.

So, did anyone win? Or lose? or is more true to reflect that a conversation is not a winning/losing proposition but it is an activity by which we stimulate our thought processes and get to question both our own assumptions, beliefs and prejudices and those of others, an opportunity to defend positions we hold to be true and to concede them when they are defensible no more? Well?

Whatever, don't forget to tell, or ask, Elroy™!

Good God, Y'all!

2009-04-02T17:19:00.006+08:00

Very good Friend Of Elroy™ Emmanuel has asked Elroy several things several times, but since the administrative arm of the Let’s Ask Elroy!™ editorial taskforce executive saw fit to outsource the ‘reply’ functionality to a prison workshop in a north-west province of Murkistan it could be argued that the punctuality of this service has been marginally compromised.

So while this small but crucial element of Let’s Ask Elroy!™ has it teething problems ameliorated (something to do with thumbscrews), the Let’s Ask Elroy!™ editorial taskforce executive has taken it upon itself to address Emmanuel’s dilemmas and ease his existential disquiet, starting with this simple request:

1. Does god exist or are you a Dawkins espousing atheist?

Elroy likes old Dickie Dawkins well enough, but the problem with Dick is that he is a little too ambivalent, a tad too equivocal and shy for Elroy's tastes – why can’t he just make his mind? Why can’t he just say what he really thinks?

So Elroy is happy to declare that God does not exist, but having said that it all depends on what your definition of ‘God is – that’s right, God is relative. However, if you mean God as defined by doctrinaire Christianity, God as defined in his best seller the Bible and the question of whether it was fiction or non-fiction then no, God does not exist, God does not have a big white beard, God did not create the Earth in six days, God does not love Elroy, Jesus is not God's son and neither Elroy's life nor anyone else’s is preordained by Him.

Elroy gave up on Christianity at about ten years old when the local vicar took his class for Religious Education. Vicar Stamford was a groovy, sleeve-rolled young Anglican minister intent on dragging Christianity into the 20th Century and showing to the youth that the Bible was real, and so to that end he thought it was a good idea to admit to its faults. Oops!

‘When was Jesus born?’ he asked the class and so Elroy, always a sucker for the low-hanging fruit, stuck his hand up.

‘Me sir, no sir, me sir, me sir, sir, me!’

‘Yes! That boy! What’s the answer?’

‘Sir sir, Christmas sir, twenty-fifth of December sir!’

This was a shoe in. Elroy had made his stage debut in a nativity play as a sheep at kinder and had been starring in them ever since in every role possible – donkey, cow, ox – so if there was any question he knew the answer to, it was this one.

‘No!’ cried a triumphant Vicar Stamford’, ‘Wrong answer!’

Vicar Stamford was delighted with the classes reaction as he could now go on to prove how the Bible was a living, breathing document, but how could that answer be wrong? And if not then, when?

‘We think’ he continued ‘it was some time in October’.

What? He doesn’t even actually know? And that was that – Elroy figured that if the Church couldn’t get that bit right, how much more of their message was nonsense? And how much more was it prepared to lie about? If the Bible is the truth then it’s the truth, he thought, but don’t tell Elroy it’s the truth and then say it isn’t, especially after years of all that ‘It’s a sin to tell a lie’ routine. After that, chemical chance and random chaos made a lot more sense because at least no one was swearing blind that something was true when they knew full well it wasn’t.

However, it’s actually hard to know what parts of the Bible are true and what aren’t as it has many authors – it is a book not just written and edited by committee but by many committees, megalomaniacs, dreamers, charlatans and vested interests over the centuries, and Elroy can’t help wondering what happened to bits that were left out. What’s wrong with the gospel according to Thomas? Or Judas? Surely we should be given ALL the ‘facts’?

The Bible is a worthy enough tome, but it does seem to all things to all comers – it contradicts itself to such a degree that the Rastafarians use it to prove that Ethiopians are the lost tribe of Israel while the Klu Klux Klan use it to prove they have the God-given right to kill them. The Bible, we are told, is the inerrant and literal word of God and we must obey its every word – we can’t, apparently, ‘pick and choose’ – but even the most extreme fundamentalist draws the line at selling their daughters into slavery or stoning their neighbour to death for wearing a nice wool blend suit or eating a cheese burger (See The Book of Deuteronomy for details).

The Anglicans, among others, decided over time that this hardcore fundamentalism was repelling new generations and it thought it could attract the young ‘uns by updating the message, but what they really needed to update was the way the message was delivered – it wasn’t what was being preached in the chilly old damp-ridden, mouse-infested churches that was the problem, just that it was being preached in chilly old damp-ridden, mouse-infested churches.

It took the radical fundamentalist Baptists of the USA to exploit youth’s innate superficiality and wrap up their cold, hard, unforgiving God in a bunch of bells and whistles, color and movement, while the Anglicans thought that merely a softer, more metaphorical, more understanding God would fill the pews of their chilly old damp-ridden, mouse-infested churches but they were, as Hillsong has so emphatically proved, wrong, and yet again form triumphs over content.

Meanwhile, creationism has gone all PC and is now known as Intelligent Design, but that immediately throws up the question ‘Who designed the designer? The whole ID argument is really just an exercise in arrogance – its proponents just cannot accept that their magnificent selves could possibly have come about accident so they seek a explanation that they can cope with like, for some reason, an invisible and infallible sky being.

Why this make them feel better Elroy doesn’t know – he’s quite happy knowing that life is empty and meaningless and that our planet is but one of billions of others, and he’s more than happy with the notion that chemicals are capable of reorganising themselves in a billion different ways order to survive, and he’s more than happy with the idea that he is a collection of those chemicals.

Does this make Elroy any less moral than his religious peers? Do they have a monopoly on morality? No. Much as they might like to argue otherwise, the idea that the prohibition of murder, theft, adultery etc was a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition does conveniently ignore the tens of thousands of years of civilisation that went before and the fact that mankind has only got as far as it has due to co-operatio.

Still, the proposition that God is relative is easily proved by just counting how many religions there are in the world, not to mention those that have been. Their devotees will tell you that theirs is the one true path, but they can’t all be right – they can, however, all be wrong.

The most problematic of these are the children of Abraham, a triumvirate of trouble that is the cause of so much misery, suffering, pain and death, but as Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all branches of the same tree, why they can’t get it together and be friends? Celebrate the many things they have in common and not the things they don’t? What the fuck, says Elroy, is their problem?

It’s been done before. There are periods in history when Jews and Muslims lived cheek by jowl in glorious epochs of cultured learning, learning and so is it not possible for the Jews and Muslims to realize that their enmity is based only on some bizarre religious self-loathing and some real estate issues?

Actually, in the end they might have to, as Israel’s refusal to contemplate a two-state solution can only ever lead to an inevitable to a one-state solution and, the with the Palestinian birth rate being so much higher than the Israeli one, a one-state solution will mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Conversely, the Christians and the Jews were at each other’s throats for centuries, but now look at them, bosom buddies, the richest Christian county in the world bankroll the only Jewish one with billions upon billions of USD, but it must be noted that the Christians adoption of Israel as it’s BFF is somewhat cynical – the Christians are only making nice with Israel until Israel eventually crushes Palestine, because it is only when the Jews are in control of the entire region that Jesus can come back and kill every motherfucker on the block that doesn’t agree with him, Jews included.

Really, the monotheists really have to stop wrecking the place, but with the the Christians and, by proxy, the Jews bombing the living bejesus out the Muslims, peace is getting further away as Daisy Cutters and Apache Gunship Helicopters are hardly going to convince the Muslims roll over and say ‘Gee! You’re right! What was were we thinking?’

Argue all you want, says Elroy, but do it like the rest of us over a bottle of claret and stop fucking up the world for those who do not buy into your nuttiness – you are not the only people on Earth.

That doesn’t mean that there is nothing out there and nothing going on that we do not understand – indeed, the more science investigates the more it discovers it doesn’t know, but that’s fine – the only real absolute is that it is absolutely wrong to believe in absolutes. Psychics, for instance, do some crazy stuff that is, on the face of it, unexplainable, but that doesn’t mean they are frauds anymore than they have transcended the plane of mortality, it just means that it is unexplainable.

Do John Edward and his cohorts really talk to the dead or are they just master magicians? If it’s all fraud then it’s a conspiracy on a mammoth scale, and if it’s not then maybe they have tapped into some sort of telepathic facility humans have lost contact with over the years – after all, animals do some spooky stuff too, so why not us? Or maybe Edward et al ARE talking to the dead – all we know is that there is something going on, but does that prove the existence of God? No, it just proves that we can’t explain it – a known unknown.

God, in the end, is whatever you want him/her/it to be. God is nature, God is the universe, God is a bloke with a big white beard who writes best sellers and has an uncanny knack for designing and constructing bio-mechanisms to a strict deadine, God is Allah, God is Buddha, God is the couch at the bottom of Elroy’s garden, God is a necessary invention, God is you and God is Elroy, so is there a God? If you want there to be one, yes there is. If you don’t, no there isn’t, and you’re not allowed to shoot me for saying so.

Flat n' all that.

2009-01-23T16:24:00.003+08:00

HI kids! As a part of the new service a certain amount of outsourcing will occur, starting with this rather rib-ticklesome essay on the dreaded Thomas Friedman. He's something of a smug bugger who writes for the New York Times who, being reviled by both left and right alike, one might imagine to be somewhere near the truth, but no – Elroy's never liked him, and after this you won't do. Fuck him.

Now, should I merely link to it? Or reporduce the whole thing? Please advise, and meanwhile enjoy:

FLAT N ALL THAT.

2009-01-21T17:54:00.000+08:00

Well, it’s been a while but here we are – back.

Elroy has made a new years resolution to post often and not, as is his wont, write ream upon ream on a subject until either the situation has resolved itself or changed completely, or the interwebs crashes because of the word count. No, the new Let’s Ask Elroy!™ will be full of up-to-the-second thoughts and ponderings, links, quotes and just…more. Hooray!

On a personal note, Elroy would like to extend an apology to Emannuel, a reader from Elroy’s hometown who made some very kind comments and asked some very pertinent questions. Elroy did attempt to reply – he wrote it down and everything – but it has only just come to the attention to his dedicated team of Interwebs manipulators that, for reasons unknown, it never made it onto the screen/website as such and instead disappeared into the cyber-ether after being posted. Grrr! Stoopid Cyber-ether!

So sorry Emannuel, and please don’t take it personally – the team noticed the omission because Mad Dog logged in to agree with you, and so Elroy says ‘Ta everso!’ to him, too and begs Emmanuel’s forgiveness. Elroy’s sorry, really, and will reply again shortly.

Meanwhile, onward and upward – more posts, little ones, big ones, links, other people's posts, whatever – welcome to the all new looking Let's Ask Elroy!™

His Word Is His Bond.

2009-01-21T17:44:00.002+08:00

So, what’s been happening? I believe that a Republican took the White House in November – indeed, the landlord gave him the keys just today – so let's have a look at how that went down....yes...I see....gee, he pulls a crowd, doesn't he?...yes...hmmm...and...that's it! $160 million gone down the Potomac!

Yes, it has been the cause of much wailing and gnashing and teeth, that bill. $160 m! Four times more than Bush's 2005 bash! It's an outrage! etc, except of course it's all bollocks. Obama's inaugaration actually cost $42 m, a tidy sum I'll grant you, but still less that Bush's $45 m, so where does the $160 m come from? Well, for Obama's costs, New York's Daily News helpfully added the full and as yet unknown costs of security and threw in the lethally ambiguous 'could approach', as in 'costs could approach $160 m' which is where the figure comes from. That's right kids, they made it up. Well, not quite...

Given that Obama's $45m and Bush's $42 was raised privately, the security is what the tax-payer springs for and in 2005 it was a healthy $115 m – so the full cost of Bush soiree was actually a paltry $157 m, give or take a balloon or two.

Now, either the Daily News, FOX et al knew this and deliberately skewed the sums, or they were just pulling it out of...the air, but either way it shows a duplicitousness that the Pres is going to be treated to in spades over the next eight years – good job he's not a leftie or things could get really ugly.

On the other hand there is no mention of how much the White House rent is, and Elroy certainly didn't see Obama handing over a security deposit at the inauguration, so we can only assume that his word is his bond.

Socialist Dis-ease!

2008-11-05T09:32:00.003+08:00

Palin/McCain have whacked Obama upside the head with any amount of tall tales and untruths since the Straight Talk Express™ got gassed up and ready to roll. ‘He’s inexperienced!’ He’s a secret Muslim!’ ‘He’s a terrorist!’ ‘He’s a Muslim terrorist!’ ‘He’s a vote rigger!’ ‘He’s an Indonesian!’ and the latest ––He’s an inexperienced secret Muslim terrorist vote rigging Indonesian SOCIALIST!’

Now, don’t think for a moment that the moneyed elites of the USA don’t believe in socialism – it’s just that they believe in for themselves. The poor folk can have capitalism, at gunpoint if necessary, as what the rich like to do is privatize gain and socialize loss, but this meme has gotten the odd couple a little traction with lately, as inspired by Obama’s alteration with Joe the Plumber, that Barak Obama is a socialist; however, it’s all a bit late because the jig is, more or less, up. Rampaging hordes of Bolsheviks have overrun previously redder-than-redneck states and plastered the hammer and sickle over Old Glory from sea to shining sea while Palin/McCain are engaged in a final dance of death by irrelevancy, pulling out of more and more states as they hunker down in Pennsylvania, their best last hope, betting the farm that working class whites will be too racist to vote for the black man and too stupid to vote for themselves; however, the comprehensive demolition of the American Dream™ by the USA’s ‘elected’ criminals and their coterie of assorted miscreants has awoken the great unwashed to a terrible truth – that the promises of the last thirty years were complete bollocks and that life doesn’t have to be this hard.

Like a six-year-old figuring out that there ain’t no Sanity Clause, suddenly they have realized that the lazy fuckers who couldn’t be bothered to pull themselves up by their bootstraps are them, that they have been swindled out of their retirements, their homes, their jobs, their health and their kids’ futures by an establishment that should have known better and who did, in actual fact know better – they knew better than Johnny Subprime and Suzy Foodstamps that they would make out like bandits while everyone else whistled Dixie for their lo-fat petrochemical by-product – and the teeming mass and ain’t too happy about it.

When Grumbleguts accuses Obama of being a socialist, many fervently hope that Grumbleguts is, for once, telling the truth – Americans, or at least a crucial majority of them, have had a gutful of conservative ‘individual responsibility’, particularly when they are being held individually responsible for maintaining the lifestyles to which Wall Street wish to remain accustomed; now when they hear Sean Hannity splutter ‘We're going to become European socialists, we're going to be France, and wave the white flag of surrender, and we're going to nationalize health care and we're going to spread, redistribute the wealth, that's our patriotic duty’ many are thinking ‘Good!’, ‘Why not?’ and ‘About time!’

Americans are, quite frankly, a mess of contradictions. For instance, they have always boasted of being the most technologically advanced and modern of cultures while brandishing an allegiance to a vengeful God that Europe ditched just after the Mayflower heaved-to in Plymouth Harbor; they deny and decry the concept of Darwinism and the origin of the species but celebrate Social Darwinism and the origin of squillionaires, and they revel in being borned in the USA and a turbo-charged patriotism but deeply resent having to contribute financially to the country’s physical well being, up-ending the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s proposal that property is theft and declaring instead that taxes are theft – of property.

This is why the French are considered the USA’s enemy No.1 – the ruling elite are terrified that the star spangled suckers from the Land of the Free® might learn the truth about their continental cousins and their tax-happy ways, that they might discover the French, for a mere three percent more tax than is squeezed out of Johnny Subprime, enjoy free universal healthcare, free childcare, free universities (all of them, even the posh ones) and four months maternity leave, thirty days mandatory holiday and unlimited sick days, all on full pay, that it must be possible to live in an industrial and/or post-industrial nation without having to put the preservation of shareholders’ rights above those of their own children, the sanctity of the Free Market™ over that of their own health or throw starving citizens out onto the street.

It has for years been crucial to American power that US citizens remain ignorant of places such as la belle France, places where the entire automotive industry is not for sale on e-bay. where working more than thirty-five hours a week is illegal, where they have, after long and detailed study, noticed that eating cheap processed food will kill you, where unions are strong and proud, where the peasants understand that handing over their modest wealth to the captains of industry in the hope that this aristocracy, once they have done every other conceivable thing with it, might not invest it in infrastructure and production capacity after all and so do not give them the option and where any attempts to mess with these vital elements of daily life are regularly met with flaming riots and armed insurrection. and so Johnny Subprime is told tales of snobbery, snails and cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

But the captives of the Home of the Brave have much more in common with their Gallic counterparts than they realize; they are both, despite each displaying varying veneers of sophistication, have elements which are deeply racist, coarse, vulgar and violent and, most importantly, both gained their freedom via bloody revolution – indeed, the French bankrolled the American Revolution as a means of annoying the English, and the French though it such a hoot that they had a crack at it themselves helped, ironically, by the wretched effect the American frolic had on King Louis’ coffers – but the great difference, however, is that the French have not forgotten how their freedoms were achieved and as ready to lob half a brick in defense of the Republic as ever.

Or the yanks could take a peek at the Danish way of doing stuff. The Danes, without bragging about it to the world at interminable length, have developed a patriotism that relies less on singing about lapel pins and more on actually being a united people with a combination of free market individuality and welfare state collectivism they call a very post-modern ‘Flexicuirty’.

There’s something in it for everyone; 85% of workers are on collective agreements worked out on the job or across the town’s bosses, and those bosses can flex their muscle and feel superior because they can hire and fire at will with no redundancy payments and can raise or cut their worker’s hours from week to week, so long as the workers average a, get this, 37 hour week.
But what’s in it for the workers? Well, if you do get fired, dole payments are up to 90% of your previous wage and you become immediately eligible for government-financed retraining and/or education to train you for a new gig, and employers and unions have agreed to give employed workers the right to leave their job temporarily on 85% pay to undertake relevant training.
On the family front, new mums get up to 29 weeks of paid maternity leave and daddies get five weeks paternity leave from a fund financed jointly by all employers, while the state provides free child care so mothers can combine work and parenting, and teachers and child care workers are treated with the respect normally reserved for clergymen, not real estate brokers.

Not that any of this is really socialism – it is merely using the power of the state to provide a bottom line of existence for their citizens so that they are free to create opportunity and happy, fulfilling lives, what the vindicated Keynesians among us call a ‘mixed economy’ a very popular and successful system of organization for a good fifty years after the last capitalist clusterfuck – but the baying hordes of the Republican base do not or cannot recognize that it was this kind of society that their precious founding fathers had in mind I the first place, not mention various subsequent heroes of the conservative movement.

A socialist? Thomas Jefferson? By modern GOP standards, absolutely! ‘Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property’ he wrote to James Madison in 1785, ‘is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.’

And how about Roosevelt? No, not the communist FDR – his Republican uncle! ‘I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective’ said Teddy before hitting it right between he eyes and sending Grover Norquist off to blub to his mommy with ‘…a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.’ A Republican death tax! Woo hoo!

Who next? What other traitors can we dredge up? Oh no! Come on down, WW2 hero and father of the American middle class, Dwight D. Eisenhower! Whaddaya like, Ike? ‘Every dollar spent by the government must be paid for either by taxes or by more borrowing with greater debt. The only way to make more tax cuts now is to have bigger and bigger deficits and to borrow more and more money. Either we or our children will have to bear the burden of this debt. This is one kind of chicken that always comes home to roost.’ Wow! Roosting chickens? Sounds like Barack Obama and Malcolm X! Got any more? ‘An unwise tax cutter, my fellow citizens, is no real friend of the taxpayer.’

Golly! Jefferson? Roosevelt I? Eisenhower? Who else we can get to round out this gang of four? Well, when Ronnie Ray-gun passed the earned income tax credit for low-income workers that hiked take-home pay above poverty levels and reduced the impact of payroll taxes he said ‘It's the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress’

Of course, it must be mention that it was Ronnie who doubled payroll tax on the lower orders in the first place and set this whole ‘Let them eat caviar!’ ball rolling for the rich, but even he had the top tax rate set at 50%! And Eisenhower hit ‘em with 91%!!! Seeing as Obama only wants to return it from the current 35% to Clinton’s 39%, I should expect the loyal Republicans are relived to be well shot of those wretched communist anti-Americans Ike and Ron.

But Grumbleguts has a handle on history too, and he is now telling us that he is FDR to Obama’s Herbert Hoover, which would make him, McCain, the socialist! What the…? Conservatives hate FDR more than Karl Marx, as Rush Limbaugh said ‘Roosevelt is dead. His policies may live on, but we’re in the process of doing something about that as well!’ and for Obama to be Hoover then Obama would have to be of the party that created the clusterfuck, but that’s…oh nevermind, McCain is liable to say just about anything now, no matter how bizaare, so best not to worry too much. Unless…

Palin says that ‘Now is not the time to start experimenting with socialism!’, but that’s strange because The People’s Democratic Socialist Republic Of Alaskanistan has been experimenting with it for some years now, and with great success. For all their bluster about being the last frontier full of bootstrap pullin’ rugged individuals, Alaska’s very existence is due to the largesse of the Federal government whose funding accounts for 80% of it budget and who gives it $2 for every $1 Alaskanistan coughs up in that nasty tax stuff.

Meanwhile Palin has stuck the oil companies with a windfall profit tax which is then mail to every man, woman and moose in the state, not to mention a couple more thousand in state goodies…now, let me see…employment dependent on the federal government…redistribution of oil wealth…yup, it seems the biggest socialist around right now is none other than…Governor Sarah Palin!

And if anymore irony could be possible, it turns out that Sarah and her hubby have for years been involved with the Alaska Independence Party, a motley crew of separatists who have sworn blind to relieve themselves of the ‘lower forty-eight’ no matter what, which makes them revolutionary separatist socialist terrorists and leaves us wondering what they will spend their remaining pocket money on.

And as the sun sets on the McCain’s campaign and career, his advertising in these dying days is getting kind of, well, sad and desperate. Now it turns out that being a secret Muslim is OK – hell, the USA was founded on the freedom of religion – and being a terrorist ain’t so bad as, ‘y’know, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and being Muslim terrorist, well, in this day and age that’s a legitimate lifestyle choice, isn’t t? Is he a vote rigger? Oh,…who isn’t these days, and as for being an Indonesian, gosh – we’ve all been to Bali too. Socialist? No more than Teddy Roosevelt and Ike Eisenhower!

No, the MCain campaign has given up on all these and returned to where they started, back to before it hired a tyrannical housewife who says she can stare down the world but who cannot stare down her own teenage daughter, back to a simpler world where Barack just doesn’t have the runs on the board, where he just doesn’t have the experience.

But it’s sadder than that – in his last ad McCain is even throwing Palin’s 2012 presidential run under the wheezing wheels of the Straight Talk Express™ as he implores voters that it’s not even as if Obama won’t be a good president one day, it’s just that he’s not ready…’yet’.

‘Yet.’

‘Give me one go, just one go on the bike and I don’t give a %^$# who gets to ride it next time. Hire ‘That one’ next time – he’d be good next time – but please, please, hire me now. I deserve it. Because I said so. I’m John McCain, and I don’t care anymore. Look, I‘m begging now. Begging. Is that what you want of your war veterans? Get off my @*^$ lawn!....’

Socialism. It’s what saved capitalism from itself in the ‘30s and what will save it again now. We all know that socialism is what works when all else fails and that America will embrace it again ¬– as Winton Churchill said, ‘In the end, America will do the right thing . . . after she's exhausted all other possibilities’.

Beyond The Palin.

2008-11-05T07:47:00.005+08:00

There has been much high dudgeon at Let’s Ask Elroy!™ as we, the LAE Editorial Taskforce struggle to pin the guv’nor down on everything that has been up – the rise and fall of Ice Queen of Nowhereville, Alaska, the rise and rise of Barak Obama, the fall, rise and fall of John ‘Grumbleguts’ McCaiin and the falling, falling, ever falling western capitalism, otherwise known as the End Of The World As We Know It®, who will win, why, what will happen if they do, or don’t, and a host of other intellectual and philosophical conundrums intentions, inventions, interventions, introspections, contentions and contraventions that have Elroy’s head fair exploding with informational tidbits of every dimension.

The thing is that as soon as something happens something else does, and Elroy is such a dann completist and perfectionist that the LAE™ Nerve HQ is nose high with waste paper as the definitive say on the future of the free world is written, rewritten and re-rewritten for you, our dear reader’s, edification and education; however, as it looks as if election day will come and go with Elroy still chewing his crayon in despair, the Editorial Taskforce has taken it upon themselves to sort through the entrails of 568 reams of Reflex and attempt to approximate his intentions.

We know that it is now unfashionable to have a crack at the Thriller From Wasilla – dissing Sarah Palin is sooooooooooo October – but hell, what’s to lose? Palin was originally a stroke of brilliance, a malevolent act of evil genius by the Bush/McCain campaign team; with McCain supplying the privileged-scion-of-the-establishment-with-a-prodigious-ability-to-drink-fuck-and-be-rescued-by-daddy part of the equation (go here for a good low low-down on the John McCain story), Palin completed the candidate by being a folk-ready yokel whose main claim to power is an uncanny ability to mangle the English language and the belief that all you need to know about the world you can learn in Fuckbucket, Idaho.

The hardcore GOP faithful initially had concerns about Grumbleguts’ ‘maverick’ status – they thought this temerity to challenge the lock-step status quo meant he was maybe just a touch too lib’rul – so the McCain campaign hired a ‘leader’ with the redneck touch to counter this paranoia, a Washington cleanskin whose hands were not smothered in the crimson currently coursing from erstwhile titans of Wall Street, a conservative everywoman and a sop to enraged Hilla-crats, a dedicated hockey mom who got into politics because, gosh durn it, those politicians obviously jus’ don’t how to run a railroad.

Never mind the litany of her gross mismanagement, abuses of power, maniacal spending, tax-raising, bribery, dereliction of duty, hypocrisy, deceit, extreme religious convictions and terminological inexactitudes that have characterized her time as mayor of the snow-bound speck she turned from sleepy Santa stopover to debt-ridden, dead drunk and drug-fucked dump, and her general lording it up as Governor of Alaska – and if you’ve missed it there’s a handy-dandy fact-sheet available here – the fact that her actions in these endeavours manifestly contradict everything she is now espousing does not in anyway preclude her from high office – in fact, by GOP standards it made her most eminently suitable.

Palin coasted into Alaskan high office by challenging the cosy little den of corruption enjoyed by the Republican incumbents – she was a ‘reformer’ which meant, by biting the hand that fed her, she was a ‘maverick’ too, but she soon leant how to manipulate her newly acquired power with the best of them. McCain, of course, never wanted her on the ticket – he wanted fellow namby-pamby bed-wetter and sometime Democrat Joe Lieberman to be his VP ¬– but to demonstrate just what a ‘maverick’ he really wasn’t he rolled over like a big old houn’ dawg and allowed the top GOPsters to have their wicked way, and so we have been subjected to the Palin/McCain roadshow, a ‘team of mavericks’, if such a thing is not a contradiction in terms, promising to overthrow Washington and git some Wasilla kinda’ thinkin’ in there, you betcha!

And if you’re wondering what ‘Wasilla kinda’ thinkin’’ is, look no further than Palin’s, um, novel interpretation of the first amendment. According to Saint Sarah, her rights are being trampled if anyone criticizes her calling Barak Obama a secret Muslim Marxist terrorist, that ‘free speech’ means she be allowed to say whatever she likes about whoever she likes and be unchallenged – Obama’s free speech right to defend himself do not, apparently, count.

Meanwhile, The Palin/McCain double act of accelerating erraticism got funnier by the day; in the face of a global governmental effort to bring the four horsemen of the economic apocalypse down at the second or third fence by indulging in massive Keynesian deficit pump-priming and public spending, the Ice Queen of Nowhere, AL, promised to balance the budget. Now they think of it! At just the moment where deficit spending is required, after however many years when deficit spending wasn’t required but done anyway – ‘Reagan’ snarled Dick Cheney in 2002 over a lunch of live puppy and barbequed welfare dependent, ‘proved deficits don’t matter’ – she wants to somehow pay off the ten, count ‘em, ten trillion dollar debt!

Then they called for more regulation for the financial system while exhorting government to ‘git out the way!’, with no hint of irony, and generally put themselves in the bizarre position of being in opposition to their own party – ‘Throw the bums out!’ out they cry, hoping that no-one will notice that they are themselves the bums in question, while that other Christian fundamentalist’s fundamentalist, the New English ‘Texan’ rube who has winked, mugged and howdy-doodied his way though eight years of economic, human and constitutional carnage is, yet again, AWOL., safely gaffa-taped and stashed under the White House sink.

The Palin/McCain show has been a train-wreck of epic proportions, like watching Grandpa Simpson in a remake of ‘Fargo’, but as we get closer to ‘the day’ the wheels of the Straight Talk Express™ are a-wobbling more than somewhat. The have opted for a strange kind of populism which stands up for the rights of millionaires to hang on their cash while the people at their rallies don’t know if they if they will have homes to go back to, but the irony is that if Grumbleguts had just had the courage of the convictions that made him a ‘maverick’ in the first place, like the opposition to the Bush tax-cuts, torture and, in these weird economic times it might have got him over the top with all those fence-straddlin’ independents and vacillating undecideds, and rejecting the bailout would have made him a hero without risking anything as there was no way that wasn’t going to pass.

However, as Grumbleguts is ultimately an opportunist cruising down the path of least resistance, he thew those convictions under the wheels of the Straight Talk Express™ and joined the barking mad Palinites bid for lowest common denominator. Mixed messages be damned, they turn the fruits of the cherished meritocracy into the detested ‘intellectual elite’, where having an education is some crime against humanity and there is something clever about being stupid, and pledge undying allegiance to the unborn while not giving a flying fuck about what happens after God’s miracle has occurred and the now all-too-born is living in a car and eating out of dumpsters, all of which has but the most one-eyed punter smelling several dead and festering rats.

And as the Straight Talk Express™ swerves off the campaign highway and ploughs flaming into the ditch of electoral oblivion, Palin has done what she has always done, and what she accuses Barack Obama of doing, and stuck her finger into the air to see which way the political wind blows. As a result she has gone rouge and is now deliberately ignoring and contradicting whatever McCain’s people tell her people but, as can be seen from her history in Alaska, this should come as no surprise. ‘I’m not doing this for nought’ she told the ABC, and while some McCain staffers told the media other things, like she is a ‘Diva’ and a ‘Whack job, there can be no doubt that she is a also megalomaniac who now sees herself as deserving of the top job and so is setting herself up for a tilt in 2012.

This will at least give her a chance to come to terms with the real world and the evil it contains. In another example of free speech being, as Dubya would have it, just a bit too free, she took a personal call from France’s President Sarkozy in the last days of the campaign and spoke freely about how dangerous is hunting with Dick Cheney, how much fun is shooting baby seals from a helicopter, how hot is Carla Bruni and how ace was Hustler’s soft porn video’ documentary’ Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, a conversation broadcast across the airwaves by the Montreal radio station CKOI-FM because she was not talking to Sarkozy – she was talking to the Maked Avengers, two Montreal radio pranksters. ‘But it’s a radio station in France!’ she can be heard telling the aide who had relieved her of the phone. Grrr! Stoopid first amendment! Needs to whopped upside it's head with the censorship stick – hell, it worked for the Wasilla public library!

Who do Americans want answering the ‘phone at 3AM? Someone who can tell when they are talking to comedians.

But Palin is not the only everyperson out on the make on the trail – somewhere along the line there materialized out of nowhere the phenomenon of Joe The Plumber, an average Johnny Subprime who nailed a doorknocking Obama on his tax plans and how they would effect the business Joe was about to buy. Grumbleguts was delighted by this and made Joe an overnight sensation; Joe was symbolic of all that the McCain campaign represents, which quickly became ironic indeed as it turned out that Joe’s name was not Joe, he is not actually a plumber, he had a much chance of buying the business he worked for as Elroy does of buying General Electric, he is a registered Republican and is related to the same Charles Keating who got McCain into so much hot snot over the Savings and Loan scandal of the late ‘80s that cost US taxpayers billions. Again.

Ah well, you can’t say McCain doesn’t help the working man – Joe now has a book coming out, a record deal, an agent and plans to run for congress in 2010 – he’s so busy he can’t be fucked turning up to Grumbleguts’ rallies, leaving Grumbleguts to yell ‘Come on up, Joe the Plumber!’ to a bewildered, embarrassed and silent smattering of die-hards; never mind, perhaps he can phone it in.

And meanwhile the more sober and serious conservative intellectuals, if such a thing is not a contradiction in terms, are shaking their heads in despair, a small coterie which grows larger every morning and who, as the loonies take charge, spend their waking hours paraphrasing both erstwhile GOP high priest Ronnie Ray-gun and goddamn Democrat LBJ. ‘I didn’t leave the Republican Party – the Republican Party left me’ they mutter into their triple single malts, and ‘There goes the entire country for several generations….’ as they slide off the vote...for Obama. Even Fox News,, with the obvious exceptions of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, is busy sliding over to the Democrat side of things…Rupert Murdoch does not like being on the losing side.

Ah, what a shame. Poor pl' Grumbleguts. Yet we find no tears on Elroy’s manuscript...

The King Is Dead – Long Live The President!

2008-09-22T10:11:00.004+08:00

And so it came to pass that the post-election crisis that has seen the Liberal Party flounder in and a by whatever measure of public opinion one cares to name caused by Dr Brendan ‘The Locum’ Nelson scoring spectacular own goals with the bullet riddled feet wrenched from his own copious jawbone with such priceless acts of political absurdity as loudly demanding that the government follow a certain course of action that he then, with his very next breath, declared that he would never follow were he ever Prime Minister, is over; The Locum, the ex-ALP Liberal Party try-hard that Libs had suckered into being ‘leader’ while they indulged in hissy-fits various, stabbed each other in the back and licked their wounds, has been sent back to where he so rightfully belongs, i.e. the backbenches, to contemplate what it’s like to be had while the rest of the chaps get on with being serious again.

Yes, it’s all change as Big Mal Turnbull, the Valcuse battler squillionaire barrister, merchant banker and scourge of concerned conservatives everywhere proves that money can, indeed, buy anything if one tries, and has, enough. Big Mal tried to purchase the presidency when he hijacked the Australian Republican Movement and, when that little balloon was punctured by Mal’s nemesis, the erstwhile Liberal and extremely conservative Prime Minister ‘Honest’ John Howard, Mal popped out and bought himself a seat in the House of Representatives with an eye to becoming PM himself. Now it's his party, which he'll buy if he has to, Ambitious? Mal? He will be king, goddamn it! Whatever it takes.

Surprised? Not if you read Let’s Ask Elroy!™, but will Mal make it all the way to The Lodge? Not so fast, Elroy, not so fast. For a start there is the man himself, a gung-ho hip-slinger who shoots first and finds out who’s dead later and who also flirted with the ALP when it suited him; Big Mal is a lone wolf who has all the propensity for consensus and collaboration as Pol Pot, is what other electorates in other places call a ‘maverick’, is a bull-dozer who sweeps all before him, colleagues and all.

And this will not please his peers – remember, even though The Locum’s poll ratings were lower than his shoe size, and he is not a big man, Big Mal only got four (4), count ‘em, four more votes than The Locum, so it’s either fight against every fibre of his being and – eww! – consult with his colleagues or spend the next year making the eventual ascension of The Smirking Wimp a mere formality.

And who, pray, be The Smirking Wimp? Why, it’s none other than the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma and available in hardcopy from that remainder shop near the station, Peter Costello! It has occurred to Elroy that he who dares not has not, as yet, actually exited stage right – he is still mooching around the backbenches, possibly sharing play-lunch with The Locum, and taking solace from the tales of such titans that played the long game and spent their years in the wilderness as Winston Churchill, Bob Menzies and – eek! – John Howard himself.

It took eons for these legislative leviathans’ parties to whack themselves on their collective foreheads and see the light, so stay tuned – The Wimp is going nowhere but the members’ bar to wait for the Liberals’ faceless men to come beg, nay plead, nay, demand that the smirkster lead them to victory come whenever.
Mal has ambition and cash to burn, but his head is just as super-heated who has only just arrived; he has only been in parliament four years – our own Obama/Palin – while The Wimp is a lot more battle-scarred and has endured plenty of downtime in the house in which to study his well-thumbed Machiavelli.

Costello maybe lazy, he may suffer from delusions of grandeur and a sense of entitlement that would make Prince Charles squirm, but he is not entirely stupid; he knew there would be a bloodbath if the Liberals lost the election and so has contrived, via the excuse that he was ‘working on his memoirs’, to remain above the fray and await the call when all other contenders are dead in a ditch.

If there is one thing The Smirking Wimp hates more than the Australian workforce it is Honest John Winston Howard, and he will be buggered if he will let Johnny deprive him of his birthright. Revenge being a dish best served chilled with a light Chianti, the Whimpy one is merely on ice – waiting, waiting, waiting – as the fat lady has not yet even finished her lunch. Watch this space.

S-S-S-SARAH!

2008-09-10T14:20:00.000+08:00

What? I din' say nothin'!

The Axis Of Evidence!

2008-08-20T15:06:00.000+08:00

It strikes Elroy that there is a certain amount of hypocrisy abroad in the world, and that double standards abound on some very, very big topics which annoy Elroy more than somewhat. What counts for one issue does not matter for another, so in the name of consistency, truth, justice and the humanist way, Elroy would like to iron out a few of these wrinkles and make the case for applying principles in a manner which is, well, principled.

So, what are the issues? Well, in no particular order, here are three big ones that more or less define the post-modern condition, the axis of evidence that spill from one into the next – the Iraq War, Global Warming and 9/11.

Nothing much then, just the most volatile, contentious and partisan, bi-partisan, cross-partisan and non-partisan subjects of public debate currently on the table, so what’s the problem?

The problem, dear reader, is one of approach, of truth, of working out the who-what-why-where-when of it all. Let’s take the Iraq War. We were told, back in 2002, that Iraq was a threat that could not be denied or ignored, that the cost of doing nothing was far greater than the cost of doing something and, if we didn’t act now, the cost of acting then would be too much too bear, that humanity could not afford the risk, after all, with all those WMD with Saddam, the future of the entire planet was at stake etc etc, blah blah blah, waddaya waddaya, and the naysayers and doves who argued and asked for proof, who found experts that knew full well Saddam had as many WMD as the Easter Bunny, were shunned, ignored, sidelined and ridiculed.

So many people, faced with what they were told was incontrovertible proof that world was in eminent peril, went along with the invasion and occupation of Iraq – shame that it was completely bogus, but that’s not the point – the point is that the threat was too, too great and so literally untold billions of dollars have been spent to mitigate said threat.

Which brings us to another issue which has some similarities with the Iraq war in that it is also a threat that cannot be denied or ignored, that the cost of doing nothing about it is far greater than the cost of doing something and, if we don’t act now, the cost of acting then will be too much too bear, that humanity could not afford the risk because, after all, the future of the entire planet is at stake and we are faced with incontrovertible proof that world was in peril, but the people that sold us this logic to go to war with the WMD menace are the very ones that deny the existence of this other highly pressing subject.

The climate change deniers, those that were the head cheerleaders for war, take all the arguments that the peaceniks used to talk the hawks out of combat – the financial cost, the human cost, the lack of verifiable scientific evidence – and use it to beat environmentalists over the head, despite the remarkable volte face it requires.

The logic used to argue for action against global warming is the same as was used to prosecute the Iraq war, but for some reason those that once urged haste urge caution, and visa versa, but there is a crucial difference – the WMD of Saddam Hussein, if they ever actually existed, which they didn’t, could never have actually turned the lights out from pole to pole, whereas global warming actually can.

Another feature of those intent on lightly poaching the globe in its juices is their sudden expertise on all things climatic; even the most rationally challenged blogger has become ofay with the intricacies of climatologising, and one can hardly peek at a conservative website these days without being barraged by arcane scientific data of the most intricate and obscure variety which desperately tries to prove that it’s all a big con put up by evil, tree-hugging climatologists hell-bent on retaining their funding and living it large at the tax-payers trough.

‘It’s a conspiracy!’ cry these devotees of Newton and Galileo who also generally exhibit a distinctly unscientific allegiance to an all-powerfull, all-seeing, all-knowing unknowable ‘creator’, ‘They’re just after the cash!’, while spurning any suggestion that the Iraq war was set up in part as the mother of all boondoggles for the military/industrial complex. They also whine that they are merely asking for proof, that they have found experts who know full well that the planet is getting colder, and that the are being shunned, ignored, sidelined and ridiculed, yet if the anti-war mob got the kind of media coverage the climate change sceptics have been accorded there would still be running water on the Tigris.

Indeed, one of their ‘experts’, the ‘mathematician’ (cue approving nods) Mr David Evans, has been widely quoted as whining that ‘The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990’, but when one takes into consideration that the entire global GDP is approximately $64 trillion, that works out to more or less $3 billion per year which, when spread across all 6-odd billion, of us is chump change!

$3 billion a year for a whole planet? Where else are you going to get a bargain like that? It’s certainly better value than the warlords plan for global preservation, currently running at $3.5 billion per week.

Naturally there is nothing to prove the climatologist/research complex conspiracy theory, but so what? That just shows you how crafty them there scientists are, but not all scientists you understand – the scientists that deny the reality of global warming are totally altruistic and not really in the pay of big oil. Like our friend Mr Evans, many are not actually climate scientists either, but never mind – they’re clever, that’s what counts, and that’s what makes them eminently quotable.

However, when it comes to the third corner of our trio of tribulation, science is suddenly back in its box and Osama Bin Laden’s true believers return to their faith-based approach to investigation and mercilessly mock those campaigning to discover the truth about 9/11; the ‘troofers’, as they are so sneeringly referred to, have many quite reasonable points to make about 9/11 and what really happened that fateful morn, but their opponents are having none of it – the troofers are as batshit crazy to them as the The Lavoisier Group are to Friends Of The Earth and the US Marine Corp appear to Code Pink.

Suddenly quoting experts, real experts, honest-to-god physicists, civil engineers, architects, jet pilots, demolition riggers, military personnel of every stripe and the fundamental laws of Newton and Galileo is cause for much scoffing and derision, as one is precluded from using any such evidence unless one actually has the relevant doctorate and not even then.

There are many ostensibly sane people who argue that they are not advocating a conspiracy theory so much as viable hypothesises that attempt to include all of the known facts, that are merely asking for proof, and they have found experts who know full well that buildings do not drop straight down through the path of most resistance without help, but they are being shunned, ignored, sidelined and ridiculed.

Of course, like the anti-war movement, if the troofers were granted the same amount of media oxygen as the climate change deniers – there are more docos that go out of their way to slam down the former next president of the United States on the telly than Australian soap operas, all in the name of free speech, doncha know – there would likely be a run on pitchforks as a million man mob advanced on the Capitol Hill with menace aforethought, but those that bleat about scheming weathermen are too busy yelling about tin-foil hats and Elvis driving the Roswell spaceships to care, or notice the irony.

Another problem is that these issues do not break along partisan lines. There are many lefties who originally supported the ousting of Saddam Hussein ¬¬¬but who are committed environmentalists, committed environmentalists who repudiate the alternative 9/11 propositions, pro-war advocates who agree that 9/11 is not all it seems, anti-war global warming sceptics, pro-war troofers and all stops inbetween; indeed, the one common bond they have is that the tactics that they complain are used on them are the exact same ones they use on everyone else.

And so here we are, where evidence is permissible unless it isn’t, the laws of physics are immutable until they aren’t and that cold, hard science is the ultimate arbiter unless God is, where groups that demand to be heard demand others aren’t, where experts aren’t experts unless they are, or not, where quoting said experts is legitimate or proscribed, where the interwebs is either a vital conduit for the free flow of information or a free-for-all cesspool of errant nonsense open to every miscreant nutter to stagger down the pike.

But does it matter? So what if these disparate bands of hard-disk jockeys go adjective and verb at each other? Well, in a word, yes, because if 9/11 was not perpetrated by 19 malcontent Saudis then the entire Bush presidency becomes even more illegitimate than it already is, if that’s at all possible, and because the case for the Iraq war, proven or otherwise, could have been solved in ways other than wholesale slaughter had Dick Cheney not been in charge, if it had to be solved at all.

It was successfully argued that there was no alternative to the chaos, poverty, misery, ignorance, a dark furture for the youth, instability on a generational scale and general death that the Coalition of the Willing™ has visited on Mesopotamia and that, without immediate action, chaos, poverty, misery, ignorance, a dark future for the youth, instability on a generational scale and death in general would be visited upon us.

Well, it turns out that not acting on the so-called ‘threat’ of Saddam Hussein would have actually brought about a wave of wealth, happiness, wisdom, a future for the children and life in general, as would averting global warming. Indeed, NOT averting global warming could well bring chaos, poverty, misery, ignorance, a dark future for the youth, instability on a generational scale and general death in general while action will bring wealth, happiness, wisdom, a bright future for the children and life in general. And if it doesn’t, well, it can’t hurt. Can it? We don’t even have the quaint old ‘diplomacy’ option on this one, so can we risk not doing it?

Can avoiding climate change cause chaos, poverty, misery, ignorance, a dark future for the youth, instability on a generational scale and general death? Surely cutting down on the use of fossil fuels can only help mankind? Anyone out there care to argue the opposite? Elroy assures you that all evidence will be heard and listened to, and challenged where applicable, if you can promise to do the same.

All we, the world, need is the will and the decency to hear the case for and against war, for and against global warming, for and against the origins of 9/11, soberly, sincerely, dispassionately and without regard to our own petty biases and beliefs to ascertain the truth and stop the endless churn of the axis of evidence before we all fry for one reason or the another.

You Hate Macs? I Hate PCs.

2008-07-16T13:27:00.007+08:00

A while ago, The Grauniad newspaper in England published a vindictive, scurrilous and unprovoked attack on Apple Mac users by a man obviously suffering from several psychological disorders. Now, Mac users do not particularly seek or invite such abuse – we are more than happy to be left alone to get with the higher cerebral cortex functions that make us tick – and we certainly do not make such unwarranted assaults on PC users. We normally don't bother attempting to reply either, but this time Elroy has had enough. Please, take in Charlie Booker's ill-considered savaging and then savour Elroy's erudite and comprehensive demolition of same.

I Hate Macs
By Charlie Booker.

Unless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head encased in a block of concrete, with a blindfold tied round it, in the dark - unless you have been doing that, you surely can't have failed to notice the current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing massive loss of resistance. While I don't have anything against shameless promotion per se (after all, within these very brackets I'm promoting my own BBC4 show, which starts tonight at 10pm), there is something infuriating about this particular blitz. In the ads, Webb plays a Mac while Mitchell adopts the mantle of a PC. We know this because they say so right at the start of the ad.

"Hello, I'm a Mac," says Webb.

"And I'm a PC," adds Mitchell.

They then perform a small comic vignette aimed at highlighting the differences between the two computers. So in one, the PC has a "nasty virus" that makes him sneeze like a plague victim; in another, he keeps freezing up and having to reboot. This is a subtle way of saying PCs are unreliable. Mitchell, incidentally, is wearing a nerdy, conservative suit throughout, while Webb is dressed in laid-back contemporary casual wear. This is a subtle way of saying Macs are cool.

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Cue 10 years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because "they are just better". Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul - that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn't really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a big deal about PCs being associated with "work stuff" (Boo! Offices! Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently better at "fun stuff". How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Better at "fun stuff", my arse. The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games available exclusively for the PC, then compare that with the sort of rubbish you get on the Mac. Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal "adventure" in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, the first shoot-'em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac's relationship with "fun".

Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. Of course, that hasn't stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the ads do to PCs. Besides, that's what we PC owners are like - unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you'll excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash coming.

This week: Charlie watched some episodes of Larry Sanders (on his PC). He played the customised Fawlty Towers map for Counterstrike (on his PC). He listened to the Windows startup jingle every 10 minutes as his PC repeatedly rebooted itself.

However, Elroy has not let him get away with such libel. Ahem...

I Hate PCs
By Elroy

PC users don’t use Macs – they wear them. While Mac users waft around their expansive white loft conversions reading Baudelaire and Keats the PC element eke out drab little lives in their parents’ houses in Dagenham and Hull, the highlight of their miserable existence being a Saturday morning computer swap-meet where they buy arcane bits of compu-gizzards from another bespectacled lard-arses and then scurry home like fretting moles to, yet again, pull apart their long suffering odes to beige in order to make it half as fast as a Mac ten years its senior.

And it must be noted that, on that self-same Saturday morning, the Mac user is settling into his second Notting Hill ‘Latte while gazing into the adoring eyes of the very handmaiden of God whose image Mr. PC just spent three days failing to download. I guess it’s all a matter of choice.

PC users are always bleating that Macs are too expensive, but here’s a little secret: do you know how us superior beings afford our Macs? By having more productive hours in our day. And how do we achieve that? By not having our noses poked under the hood of our CPU for most of it. The savings made by not constantly buying obscure little plug-ins and other nasty little shards of silicon to make render our computers operative allows the Mac owner the luxury of seeing daylight on occasion, but it’s also true that the Mac pays for itself because of the invaluable WriteBook 1.9, a nifty app that effortlessly knocks out searing indictments of our times while one is taking a light lunch on the terrace, tomes which happily cover the cost one’s thirteenth century Tuscan monastery. Ah, the dignity of honest labour.

I hate PCs and their users because both are stubborn, righteous, boring, annoying and ugly both inside and out. They are unstable masochists who spit out the serial numbers of their SAD Pf54u364iX fatherboards along with generous amounts of spittle and last night’s Hawaiian Supreme, impotent and frustrated little drones who dare to berate me about the inadequacy of my very being because I choose to use a machine that works while they ferret away on computers that are so insecure that they have to ask the user to verify the action at every little teeny single step. I hate them, utterly and completely.

And I hate Charlie. I hate how he purports to be a man of the people, championing ‘loveable’ contraptions against the crushing might of an imaginary elite, as if the world’s PC ‘enthusiasts’ were being rounded up into re-education camps and trained to love the one true workstation, and I hate how, like all true fascists, he really knows that the exact opposite is true.

Every populist demagogue knows there is immense power in the tyranny of the masses and Charlie cynically manipulates it for all he’s worth, trying to convince us that PC users are but good and noble folk battling the sinister forces of the Mac-black pack, but PC users are not the rugged cyber-warriors of Charlie’s fond imaginings – they are cyber-trainspotters. When Mac users swish by in the first class carriage of a Eurostar Class 373 heading for a mini-break in Avignon, only the huddled masses on Gillingham Station know that they are not headed for Brussells because they have noted that the train is not a Class 373/1. These people own PCs.

Charlies’s notion of PC user as underdog is somewhat smudged by fact that Ubernerd squillionare siver-spooner and corporate monopolist William Henry Gates III had to license the best bits of Windows from Apple anyway. For all his ‘genius’ he turned out to be a follower and, furthermore, being as imitation is no longer the sincerest form of flattery but a devious form of intellectual copyright infringement, Apple had to sue Billy for his blatant theft of the other bits he thought he’d just pain steal. Even so, Mac users must still suffer the relentless abuse and prejudices of an army of PC dweebs who do as they are instructed by Billy-boy and Big Blue, a beige brigade who, although they have everything, still whine, even though PC users have Macs to thank for their very existence.

The Nazis thought they were victims too and, talking of fascists, it really does require both some heavy-duty wielding of unelected power and some seismic style shafting of the US Anti-trust laws to have the government take you down for running a monopoly – what was that about elites again?

So Charlie depicts the braying mob as poor, quivering underlings repressed by the privileged haut monde but, far from being an elite, it is Mac users who are oppressed by the common herd – the Apple Mac is the black man of computers, a status reflected by their users’ preferred shade of costume. Macs are a tiny minority who are shunned and ignored by software developers and the Establishment at large but, like other subjugated cultures, they are the engine room of creation; just as Al Jolson and Vanilla Ice made their mark by appropriating black culture, so IBM-compatibles have gained a foothold in the wider world by a gruesome aping of the Mac visage – ‘Windows’, so-named because it goes ‘Crash!’, was no accident.

This deliberate attempt to cash in on the hard work performed by those innovative iconoclasts over Apple has now given us shops crammed with a plethora of grotesque Mac-inated PCs, slightly funk’ed-up looking CPUs that that have grown cyber-sideburns and are screaming ‘Dude! I’m nearly a Mac!’ in a sad attempt to fool the gullible and ill-informed that it will perform as well as the real thing.. Like those coppers that used to dress up as hippies to pass unnoticed during love-ins and peace rallies, the PC is desperately trying to be ‘groovy, maaan!’, but real hipsters know when beige is in the house and what really lurks below the blueberry paint job.

But so what if mainstream software developers despise the Mac? Who needs them? This week’s brand new Mac operating system, the one that Apple promises might still even be current by Tuesday next, now comes bundled with the simply divine application suite EliteWanker 3.0 including not only the latest WriteBook update but also MakeMovie 1.9 and GongWinner Pro 2.0! This may mean building an extension to one’s Loire Valley Château to house all the Oscars, the Bookers, the Pulitzers and Nobel prizes heading one’s way, but such is the price of fun.

PCs may well be the ‘ramshackle computers of the people’; citizens of the former East German Republic will tell you that they had a similar description for their national car, but now that they have other driving options the Trabant has curiously fallen from favour. Fancy that! However, I’m sure some PC krauts still shuffle their decaying Dells around in otherwise unloved Trabbies which are, like their PCs, customised ‘into oblivion’ (if only), although a Trabant with a spoiler, mag wheels and a hood scoop is still, at the end of the day, a Trabant. See: silk purse/pig’s ear. Verstehen Sie?

When Mac users breakfast on Catalonian muesli and triple-fermented Tibetan yak yoghurt in their steel and platinum meal preparation zones, the toaster that sits next to their Mac works. It gleams, it is wildly expensive and it makes good toast. Hot and brown. Yum. However, this toast would not be good enough for PC users, as they could not eat a slice of lightly browned organic mung-bean and flaxseed Sour Dough unless had been cooked in a toaster lovingly reconstructed from the guts of thirty-nine other dead toasters retrieved from various car-boot sales that only works if you slap it.

Actually, they couldn’t eat organic mung-bean and flaxseed Sour Dough at all because they can’t afford it ¬– they spend all of what passes for a disposable income on spare toaster parts and going to toaster building conventions, and anyway, they are not aware and they do not care that any other form of bread other than Wonderwhite exists which is fine by me – the quicker they all die of bowel cancer the better.

But really, what is the glory in putting together a machine from scrap if it inherently and invariably fails to perform its function? Surely the victory in producing an item from rubbish is to make one that actually works? I am aware that it can, in theory, be achieved, but the only PCs that ever run for any reasonable amount of time, i.e. over 30 minutes, are buried in pre-loved pizza boxes, owned by fanatical caffeine-addled insomniacs and filled with so-called ‘games’, the loading of which has necessitated removing from the hard disc such extraneous fripperies as anything approaching anything useful.

This is what passes for ‘fun’ in the land of the Big Blue ¬– the ability to crack the ninety-ninth level of SmackaMac 2: Death to the MachinePeople and bring the magic bong back to the Gatesmeister, a skill which might buy heaps of Kudos on gameloser.com and impress the Pizza delivery guy, a close personal friend of the family by now, and but it’s uses in the real world, i.e. outside the bedroom, are limited. In that real world, where Mac users dwell in neo-modern expressions of urban dissonance with harbour views, fun is booting up one’s Porche and heading off for a meeting with one’s publisher to choose exactly which legendary Hollywood director will be allowed to film one’s latest WriteBook generated novel before calling Orlando, and maybe Nicole, to share a couple of the driest of martinis and enjoy some particularly challenging but ultimately satisfying performance art.

Do they insist that PC users join them? No, they do not. They leave the PC users at home to continue booting up their CPUs, again, bump into their parents accidentally on the way to the toilet, call up for another Hawaiian Supreme and settle in for a long night attempting to reach that ninety-ninth level which, unbeknownst to them, does not actually exist. Which world did I choose? James, warm up the Boxter!

It is a common conceit that dogs look like their owners, or owners look like their dogs, and while this is debatable it cannot be denied that the phenomenon is also true with computers. Witness, if you will, the sleek disposition of the slim, simple, elegant and uncluttered Apple Mac and the beret-bearing sophisticates that utilize them, versus the clumpy, knob laden and indomitably beige PC and the cardiganed, raincoated tragics who call it ‘friend’.

Even heath issues are in play! Mac users radiate a certain glow, a fine fettle born of bio-dynamic tofu enemas while PC users seem to enjoy a permanent sniffle, always dabbing at their bright red noses with Mum’s damp hanky and swallowing buckets of Payless Vitamin C.; likewise, PCs spend 24/7 quaking in fear that a malevolent teenager in Xingtao province with a broadband connection and a bad attitude will choose that day to unleash a virus that will instantly turn the world’s PCs to landfill while Macs merely issue a languorous yawn of an AM and set about saving the planet, unencumbered by worries that they might catch cyber-cold because no one writes malicious code for them – to know Macs is to love them and their masters.

Mac users create things – PC users create things to create things with. Eventually. God willing. After they’ve rebooted. Again. After they’ve played Exterminate: Zlad of the Pluuud Nexus 1.9. Again. Macs are for getting round to writing novels on while PCs are ostensibly to enable the enhancement of the possibility of thinking about maybe getting round to writing novels on. If the thing can stay booted that long. Whatever. No matter how much PC users soup up their wheezing crates, they will never be able to run EliteWanker 3.0 as it is resolutely not cross-platform for the simple reason that PC users have nothing to say. PC users have nothing to say so they spend their time in cyber-worlds, spending real money on things that don’t exist, for fuck’s sake, rebuilding their softdrives and rebooting. Again.

If Macs are, as Charlie asserts, the Fisher-Price Activity Center of the computer world then PCs are the plastic Meccano; flimsy, fiddly, irritating and fruitless ‘projects’ which never look like they do on the box and which require their constructors’ constant attentions. Look, us kids blessed with the Fisher-Price Activity Centers had our the right side of our brains nourished, resulting in our holistic approach to life, our grasp of the abstract, of language, art and music; the children of Meccano, however, were saturated in left-brain activity which promoted their linear, concrete thinking and encouraged them to delight in making fundamentally useless things with little bits and pieces, an experience which admittedly set them up perfectly for a life time of transistorised tinkering.

PC users love switches, knobs, potentiometers, sliders, actuators, whatever; these simple devices serve as distractions from actually getting on with some work, but the only Mac owners are interested in is the one that turns the G7 on, and they kind of loose interest in that after the first day or two because, quite frankly, they never need to use it again. Their machines just sit and purr, ready to spit out a chick-lit pot-boiler any time their black-clad, goateed, running lackey-dog-of-the-bourgeoisie gets around to opening WriteBook after all their other exciting and lucrative projects have been fully realised.

Like Macs, Fisher-Price Activity Centers are a means to an end whereas PCs and Meccano are a means in themselves. The sons of Gates never really ever got over that Meccano stage of pre-adolescence, leaving them with the exasperating latent desire to fuck with stuff. This truth is vehemently denied by the tech-anoraks, but it explains why they constantly refuse to act in their own rational self-interest. I mean, why anyone would drive a Robin Reliant when a Lamborghini is available little extra cost unless the act of driving is not really his or her primary concern?

Sigmund Freud, a Mac-man if ever there was one, would have had a chuckle or two over Charlie’s wild-eyed screed, not for its dangerously unhinged tone so much as how it goes to prove Sigmund utterly correct. PC users types also have some very serious personal identification issues; they suffer from either the unearned high self-esteem of the typical bully who thinks himself superior to those he torments, or the low self-esteem of the perennial victim who has to imitate his tormenter to bolster his self-worth – I don’t know which yet; maybe I should get around to using that AutoDoctorate function? – and they pretty much wear their penis envy on their sleeves as their obsession over ‘whose is bigger’ is hard to hide. They, and particularly Charlie, their self-appointed ‘spokesman’, sputters with incandescent rage and indignation at the idea that someone else’s ‘rig’ might be more powerful than theirs, their very manhood threatened to the core by the thought that someone else may have more RAM. It’s very sad.

Denial is another trait easily identifiable in poor old Charlie and his acolytes; the Apple Macintosh is, by all know criteria, the superior machine, and faced with this threat to their collective ego they do the only thing they can do – deny its truth, and rationalise it away by whining that the Mac must be the lesser consumer durable because it doesn’t have two buttons on its mouse or some such pettiness. Bugger the fact that the Mac does what it’s told when its told to do it, THE PC’S GOT TWO MOUSE BUTTONS! Why do PC owners get so mad with Macs? Why, its reaction formation of course! According to Siggy, PC owners that froth at the mouth in their commendation of Macs are merely demonstrating their own inferiority! Wow! It all makes sense! See what you can do with a Mac? Intelligently examine the evidence. What can you do with a PC? Um…

Or is it projection instead? Maybe its projection as well! Let’s have a look. Do PC users accuse Mac users of the very crimes they commit themselves? Yes? Bingo! Projection! Or, if you prefer, hypocrisy. PC users like to paint Mac lovers some sort of pack of corporate drones while maintaining the conceit that they themselves are all mavericks and iconoclasts, crazy young kids livin’ for the now because they prefer to acquire their hardware from the tip, but don’t forget kids, IBM-style edifices are not called clones for nothing.

Before computers had really taken the world hostage I had an extended stay in hospital, and during this ordeal I was befriended by a nurse named Ian. He had an extensive Jazz collection on vinyl and video, and would stop by at dinnertime, just as my favourite show came on the telly, to tell me about it. Well, when I say tell me about it I mean tell me about how he had catalogued it, on index cards which crossed-referenced each track with what musician in any given year on label X etc etc. The filing cabinets that held it took up more room than the records themselves. I asked him if ever actually listened to the records and he looked confused, upset, and gave me a quizzical glance. Listen to them? I obviously didn’t get it, so he started telling me all over again. I sat back and dreamt of the morgue.

When I saw Ian again not long ago he informed me that he was still living at his mum’s and that he was in the process of transferring his index system onto his new computer. It was a PC. He had just started to explain which programme he was using, and how much extra RAM it required, when I affected an escape; I understand that Ian was out of the Intensive Care Unit and taking solids foods shortly after, but I also understand that the suicide rate amongst the staff in the ICU rose sharply in that time. Ian remains, to this day, the world’s most boring man. Ian owns a PC.

Mac users never preach to anyone that did not express an interest, yet PC users are worse than Christians. They evangelize about a subject that they insist is fact but is, in essence, based on faith; ‘Better pray this works’ say the nerds before booting up, again, and Mac users are constantly having their languid Chardonnay and sex-fuelled Sundays interrupted by a knock on the door from two cyber-losers in burger-stained neckties asking if said Mac user had heard the good news about Vista, donks who are greeted with the Zen Buddhist calm typical of our people and wished well with their spiritual journey, after which the Mac users return peacefully to their tantrical pursuits.

Charlie Booker is correct on one count – the Mac ads are devastatingly accurate, and the fact that he so cheerfully identifies with such a pack of drab saps indicates a mental illness for more worrying than any suffered by the clear-eyed and level headed Macsters. Indeed, apart from either the narcissism or a pathological self-hatred, and penis envy, denial, reaction formation and projection previously mentioned, Charlie is quite obviously suffering from an anti-social personality disorder that sees him regard negative personality traits as positives, the Millwall FC ‘No one likes us – we don’t care!’ approach to computing, but his victimhood is a grossly misplaced – IBM and Microsoft are not exactly what one might describe as vulnerable to exploitation or abuse from larger entities.

Much as Charlie Booker may like to flatter himself, PC users are not idiosyncratic; just like people who say ‘I’m so zany!’ and ‘I’m bonkers, me!’ are invariably found to be completely sane and utterly dull, PC users are not eccentric or quirky mavericks but common or garden drones of the most dismal hue. He denies that people define themselves by the technology they choose because that would mean he defines himself as a bland, dreary, faceless member of the great unwashed, but in pretending to revel in being unreliable and unfair he has done just that – defined himself by the technology he chooses and demonstrated an unhealthy external locus of control by taking on the characteristics of a computer that is notoriously unreliable and run on software declared by the courts to be manifestly unfair.

Mac users, on the other hand, exhibit an internal locus of control by defining the ‘personality’ of their chosen technologies – Macs are designed by the people that use them, they are machines created for baby-boom hippies by baby-boom hippies, reliable, fair and true iconoclasts who live nice lives in the hippest digs with great food and greater drink, beautiful lovers and A grade recreational pharmaceuticals. They are independently wealthy, well read, well respected, fulfilled, creative, prolific and spiritually at one with the universe, and if that makes them wankers it’s a small price to pay. Now, excuse me while I move the bed to opposite the windows and adjust some bamboo flutes to maximise the flow of chi.

A Frank And Thorough Exchange Of Views.

2008-07-11T18:36:00.002+08:00

Yeah, Elroy knows, but he's been busy. If you tuned in for Just Say No!, the latest from your one and only favorite interwebs wundkind, Elroy is sad to relate that it had to be recalled urgently due to some fatal flaws and errors in logic and reasoning. The mistake was made in production and the appropriate minion has been duly sacrificed, but not before offering an abject and groveling apology to all and sundry, and Elroy hopes you can accept with the same good grace that he sadly failed to muster.

Meanwhile he has been locking horns with The Arctic Fox, so take a peek at the goings-on here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and, of course, here, and report back with your scores or join the fray!

Iran! Iran – So Far Aw-a-a-y!

2008-06-17T17:06:00.002+08:00

Did Iran this about the USA?

'Hopefully the...leadership will take a different position than the one they've taken in the past, which is basically, who cares what the free world says, we're going to — we'll go our own way.'

Did the USA say this about Iran?

'Human rights are being extensively violated...setting up secret prisons, abducting persons, trials and secret punishments without any regard to due process, extensive tappings of telephone conversations, intercepting private mail and frequent summons to police and security centers have become commonplace and prevalent.'

Answers to the comments section please...

Want to save the world? Vote McCain!

2008-05-13T17:09:00.007+08:00

Uh oh! Elroy’s blown a fuse! What’s happened? Has he fallen into a bottomless pit of someone else's money? Has he come good part two of the ol’ ‘If you’re not a socialist when you’re sixteen you don’t have a heart…’ canard? Or have the passionate arguments of committed and idealistic conservatives finally won the day in the great marketplace of ideas?

No, it’s worse – he has been taking the advice of Rush Limbaugh, the Republican propagandist who makes Benito Mussolini look like a member of Code Pink and who has been exhorting his millions of foam-frothing followers, ‘free-thinking’ fundamentalists who call themselves ‘Dittoheads’ without a shred of irony, to commit executing his pet plan for knobbling the Democratic Party – ‘Operation Chaos’ (Full range of merchandise available here)

In a Oxycontin-induced haze of deluded grandeur, El Rushbo is the puppet master of a campaign that requires his hapless, dyed-in-the-wool conservative disciples to register as Democrats and vote for Hillary Clinton in the primaries in order to keep her in the race and cause a Democratic presidential candidate smackdown fight to the death with Barak Obama at the Democratic autumn convention, resulting in the complete implosion of the Democratic Party and never-ending Republican Party domination. Ah, jus’ doncha lurve conservatives’ love and respect for the democratic process?

But as two can play at that game, Elroy is launching Operation Annihilation whereby he hereby encourages members of the Democratic Party to vote for McCain in the general election ¬to ensure the complete destruction of the Republican Party and the never-ending enlightenment of Democratic domination. If democracy is a now a war, then strategic, long-term planning and sacrifices are going to be necessary to achieve one’s objectives.

When Bubba Clinton ambled off the world stage in 2000, the USA was in a parlous state. The US economy was in surplus, the world was more or less at peace and the Democrats were looking like they were going to continue the peace and prosperity scare well into the 21st Century – thank god then that George W. Bush true and righteous minions were on hand to, er, appropriate the 2000 presidential election and return the country to its natural condition of fear, death, debt, corruption and control in amounts far greater than have ever been seen outside of a combination of Zimbabwe, Argentina and North Korea courtesy of the single-minded commitment of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and their ideological drones.

The trouble is that 7.5 years of the great project later, it still isn’t finished. The supposedly successful whack-a-mole strategy, the manly ‘surge’, has ensured that the various Iraqi militias and insurgent groups are well-rested, armed, financed and ready to take on the US and each other with a renewed vigour that will, in Elroy’s esteemed opinion, leave the past five years look like a ice-creams and lollipops all round and, as the USA will not have the manpower to deal with it, they will be left with two politically ugly options: pull out completely or institute the draft.

On the economic front, the Dubya’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ has resulted in the impoverishment of thousands, if not millions, of his ‘fellow Americans’ as the neo-con dream of complete deregulation raped, pillaged and left for dead the real estate market of Townsville USA, and his friends in high places managed to gut and ship to China and Mexico what was left of America’s once mighty industrial muscle. Recession is being kept at bay, it seems, by the power of prayer alone as John and Jane Doe work a sixth job to pay off the credit cards while the War-o-meter keeps ticking over at a rate of three hundred and sixty-odd million borrowed dollars every, single, bloodstained, day.

The problem is that the US is delicately poised on the edge of an abyss the likes of which have never been seen in any generation, and the Republicans know it – that’s why they have put mad, bad and older-than-the-hills, John ‘Insane’ McCain up as their candidate. Hopefully the electorate will know a nutbag when they see one and vote accordingly, thus ushering some poor, hapless Democrat (a chick or a coon would do nicely) to take the rap and leave the Grand Old Party to fight another day.

The whole thing, people, is a trap. Do you honesty think that the Republicans would have put up such a motley crew of cranks and nutters as candidates if they thought there was Jew’s chance in Palestine that he might become POTUS? Mitt Romney? The dumb-as-a-brick millionaire member of a bizarre magic underpants cult which only 100 years ago was as toxic to Johnny Button-shoe as Islam is today? Mike Huckabee? The completely fucking loony Baptist preacher who thinks the wall between church and state is an open-plan renovation opportunity? John McCain? The irascible old philanderer who is willing to say anything, absolutely any-180º-volteface-on-everything-he-ever-held-dear thing that might get him over the line after being beaten by his sworn enemy, oops, new best friend GWB, in order to get the nod?

Bollocks. If the GOP wanted a serious candidate there are plenty, well, a few serious, intelligent and telegenic Republicans out there who would have been more than happy to become President of the United States if the job was worth having, but guess what? It ain’t, not this time, so resist I say, fight the power! Subvert the dominant paradigm! Get mad as hell! Don’t take it anymore! I exhort all Democrats, please, resist your better instincts, do not act according to your beliefs, vote against your immediate interests!

When Elroy was a mere slip of a lad, his despairing parents attempted to beat into him the idea that it was incumbent on him to clean up his mess after him; he took no notice, naturally, as he was not the leader of the free world at the time, but the concept continues to haunt him to this day now that the US presidential elections draw close and so he has seen the wisdom of his old folks’ ways and how they should applied.

The point is that the US and, as a result the rest of the world, is going to hell very fast in a very large handbasket thanks to thirty years of Free Market™ madness, but if we are ever to banish this nuttiness forever we must let its architects finish the job. If the Democratic Party get up in 2008 they will be blamed the entire farrago, for the destruction of the world economy and the loss of Iraq to a Shiite theocracy which then screws the US for that ol’ light sweet crude, so vote McCain and make sure that the bucket o’ shite lands on him and not Obama.

Even Hillary knows this! She is giving Obama the irrits just to have something to do while playing the long game of letting Barak be the patsy so she can come in to clean up the mess in 2012. Naturally, the GOP is in the hunt as well; Karl Rove and the rest of the neo-con cabal are looking to this very strategy to regain the White House next time around, so it is imperative that the forces of good do not get sucked into ending the torture of the interminable Bush years and thinking of the future.

So join Operation Annihilation and hold the GOP accountable – give McCain the chance to live up to his election promise to stick with Iraq no matter what or, even better, to withdraw the troops himself, demonstrate just how much he does or doesn’t know about economics depending on what day it is, and generally inflict Four More Years!™ of the Bush agenda on the world and by doing so completely and utterly destroy the Republican Party for at least two generations or more.

Yes, the only way out for Planet Earth is to make sure that the GOP are buried forever, so if you want to save the world – vote McCain! You know it don’t make sense.

The First 100-Odd Days Of Opposition – Oh, The Hypocrisy!

2008-04-04T15:48:00.013+08:00

And oh how they laughed, the happy people! It’s been somewhat of a riot down here – Elroy has been drunk for months – as we celebrate the end of Honest John Howard and his pack of mewling scaredy-cat and the installation of the grown-ups. Talk about funny – who knew the Liberals were such good comics?

The humorous antics started immediately after the smoke had cleared from the Liberal Party HQ and Honest John was found in the wreckage to be the only the second ever Australian Prime Minister to lose his seat – indeed, many uncharitable and downright un-Australian communists were seen to snigger mightily, yea, and to guffaw out loud at the mess the Libs had gotten themselves into.

Y’see, when he was PM, coalition backbenchers were struck dumb with terror at the thought of the Man of Steel wandering off to the Twilight Home for Politically Expended and begged him to stay on forever in to eternity, amen, and so he did. ‘I will remain the leader of my party’, Howard intoned in his finest Jim Hacker, ‘for as long as my party wants me to’, a declaration of loyalty that was but a cunningly disguised challenge from the semantics master for the gutless wankers to come and get him if they dared.

However, as the ALP seemed committed to experimenting with leaders guaranteed to keep them further from the treasury benches than the Citizens Electoral Council – the avuncular oaf, the sneering union machine man and the complete fucking lunatic – no Lib dreamed that the Howard Reich could ever end.

But the ALP would not remain Rudderless for ever, and when faced with the proposition that a mandarin-speaking mandarin from Queensland here to help the socialists turn the wide brown land into the People’s Republic of Kevinstan was playing Honest John for a putz at every turn, the Liberal Party did actually gird their loins and gave Honest John his marching orders.

Yup, the Liberals, smelling their own blood in the air, decided to make a stand on the line in the sand on the land and to rescue the party from electoral oblivion, to hand the Prime Ministership over to the man that had spent the last ten years nagging Howard for it, treasurer Pouty Peter Costello, and so with steely determinism the inner sanctum stomped right up to Dear Leader and, um, suggested very politely, not in anyway that might upset the greatest Prime Minister the world has ever seen, ever, and yes that does include Disraeli, Churchill and Thatcher, that if he could just maybe see his way clear to, well, maybe toddling off a little, in the nicest possible way, well, gosh, that would be super. If it was OK with him, that is. They didn’t want so seem ungrateful or anything, it was just that, well…

Absolute and unequivocal! Sort of. ‘Unfortunately, you know, he wasn’t told that he should go’ mumbled rightist henchlacky Andrew Robb when he hoped no-one was watching (They were – he did it on telly) ‘he was told that that people thought in Cabinet that he should move on, but it was ultimately his decision.’

And as Honest John is a man who knows a weasel word when he sees it, he took that decision in a way only conservatives know how – with total disregard for the wishes of his compadres and all four eyes glued on his personal posterity. This was a do-or-die, death or glory strategy based on the ultimate conceit that the Australian people would be so outraged that the Liberal Party had kicked him out then they would vote Labor and so really he was doing the party a favour…or something…

Ah well, as Howie is such a cricket tragic it should not have come as any great surprise that he would attempt to make the parliamentary Wisden’s with a record-breaking comeback and election tally, but it was not to be. The only consolation for the broken and shattered party he left behind is that he made the record books as the only other PM to be rejected by his own electorate.

But why should Howard have been expected to act as a team player? The whole concept just reeks of socialism. No, in putting his himself ahead of the party he was taking a principled stand for the fundamental tenet of modern conservatism – self-interest. How could he have ever done otherwise?

Anyhow, now that his eleven years of iron fisted discipline was over and the party a fractured shadow of its former self, who would want the poisoned chalice of party leadership now? Certainly not Poutey Pete! No, he had decided that, although it was his turn on the bike, now that the front forks were bent and the tyres were blown, and that some other bloke had the map, well, he just wasn’t that interested any more. Bzzt! Next!

So who else? Surely this was time for Malcolm Turnbull to step up and bellow ‘Outa-my-way-I’m-a-comin’-through’ to the quivering saps in the party room and propel the Libs fifty years forward into the 21st Century, no? No! Even after the drubbing, the shellacking, the bollocking that the coalition has handed in 2007, somehow they did not read the writing just about everywhere and managed to organize a contest between Mal, their only possible choice, one of the more barking mad conservatives and a third who really doesn’t mind whose side he is on so long as it’s all about him.

Yup, just when we thought we were all laughed out, Tony Abbott, the man who explained his outright asininity on the telly as “Shit happens’, who told his opposite number after a televised debate that he was half an hour late for that she was talking ‘Bullshit’, who said a dying man who had devoted the last years of his life to securing compensation for thousands of people mortally injured by one corporation’s conscious negligence indulged in ‘stunts’ and was not ‘pure of heart’, and did all this while on the campaign trail, this guy, Abbott, and here’s the punch line, said he would be a fine choice as leader because he had ‘Good people skills’.

Oh my lord, that really is comedy gold! The other guy was another of Elroy’s faves, the good Doctor Brendan Nelson, but it didn’t really matter because the thing was a foregone conclusion, right? The Libs would realize that electorate had swung decisively left and that they should seek a more centrist road, not?

Again, no! Out of party modernizer, far-right thug and Dr I-am-but-what-you-want-me-to-be, they chose…the Doc! It seems that Thoroughly Modern Mal jumped the gun and started spouting incendiary socialist propaganda by suggesting that the government apologize to the indigenous population and sign the Kyoto Protocol in a wanton betrayal of bedrock conservative principles that left hard-right Senate king maker Nick Minchin no choice but to stitch him up by carving out a deal with West Australian Liberal Party throwbacks to vote for Brendan to ‘lead’ as a puppet for the rapidly dwindling Howard faction.

So he scraped in by the merest of margins, but how is Brendan Nelson, now known as The Locum due to the fact that he is the a medical practitioner whose presence is temporary, and the rest of the conservative cause traveling now that they are Betty’s loyal opposition?

Well, the hilarity continues unabated as the Liberals discover the wisdom of the old saw ‘Be careful what you wish for’, what goes around comes around and what one does while high on hubris can tend to return for a spate of bum biting.

Let us, for instance, take those two core conservative beliefs that left Thoroughly Modern Malcolm cooling his heels for a week or so – Kyoto and the ‘Sorry’ thing. After years of Liberal’s staunch denials that whitey had ever done anything but hold the aborigines welfare in highest regard, The Locum paid his dues to his backers with these words: ‘We formally offer an apology to those Aboriginal people…’, obviously a searing rebuttal to That Nice Mr. Rudd’s pathetic capitulation to the bleeding-heart inner-city ‘indigenous lobby and a vindication of Minchin’s faith, and ‘I can now say to you that we will support the ratification of the Kyoto protocol’ is a likewise defiant stance guaranteed to thrill the heart

But it didn’t stop there! Nuclear power? Gone! Gay rights? In! Workchoices, the policy the Liberal Party died in a ditch for? No more! That’s right – five immovable pillars of policy that defined the Liberals at the 2007 elections, five policies that Honest John hung his hat on, five policies that were considered integral, core to the fabric of modern Australia conservatism – poof! Gone with what wind? The breeze of the ALP storming into the 21st Century.

And what’s also hilarious about all of this is that The Locum was the conservative faction’s leader of choice! Imagine if they had chosen Turnbull! They’d be fighting over voters with the Greens! Oh, it’s just so much fun! The Liberals have elected a wet that they thought was a dry to keep out a wet! That the Right still have so much influence is pretty strange seeing as how it was they who were crushed in November, but that’s the Liberal Party for you. Such is the animosity for the only guy that can save them, Big Mal, that they elected as their leader someone who used to be a card-carrying member of the ALP!

Liberals are, however, pretty good at holding their tongues for the sake of power. The wet faction were under the jackboot heel of the party whip and Honest John for over a decade, so now that it’s their turn to be in the ascendance, will the right shut up for a while? No, it seems that if they can’t be heard, interminably, to the exclusion of all others, the dry-hards just don’t show up.

It’s obvious who used to call the shots in the party room because we are now faced with the unedifying spectacle of Costello nodding off on the backbenches while perusing the situations vacant column and Dolly Downer whining because question time nearly interfered with his teeing off on a couple of rounds with Mark Vaile, the ex-National Party leader and therefore ex-Deputy Prime Minister but supposedly current Member for Lynne who has just distinguished himself by spruiking for Liberal Party sugar-daddy ServCorp in sunny Bahrain while he was supposed to be in House of Reps earning his paltry $127,000 p.a.

Never mind! The Locum was on the case! ‘Had he consulted me about this before he had gone’ the leader of the opposition offered most politely, ‘I most certainly would have advised him in the strongest possible terms that it wasn't appropriate for him to be overseas’. That’s the way, Doc! You tell him! Those wayward backbenchers always respond well to a bit of party discipline! You really do run a tight ship! Good job Vaile didn’t ask you, then!

Politicians are like dogs and horses – they smell fear and instinctively know who commands respect. As conservative pollies in particular like nothing more than having a hard man at the helm, the Liberals just titter at The Locum’s ‘advice’ – if that is a sample of his ‘strongest possible terms’ then some long lunches loom – indeed, there seems little reason to go into work ever again.

Still, spare a tear for poor Mark Vaile – it’s not his fault. In a typical display of conservative abrogation of responsibility, Dolly Downer went into bat for him –although one might consider that, at the moment, Vaile would be better of being defended by Ivan Milat – and begged for understanding. ‘I would go easy on him myself’ sniveled Dolly, himself currently odd-jobbing on talk radio and suffering near terminal ennui with the entire democratic process, ‘It’s easy to sneer [but]….he has lost over $100,000 in income’ Right. Just to be clear then, politics is all about serving the public – it is not, repeat, not about the money.

But this was possibly a rort too far for Mark – even Liberal kingmaker Nick Minchin was grumpy. ‘‘If he's going to be in parliament, his job is to represent his constituents’ Nick harrumphed before taking a swipe at all the other recalcitrant Libs mooching about the place, ‘it's approaching the point where they need to indicate their intentions as to whether they're going to stay and serve out the three years or retire at some point in this term.’
Ooh! Put up or shut up slackers, or Nick will punish you severely by making you leader!

Mark Vaile, being a good country boy who is not going to get kicked around like a ute-tied heeler by no city-slickin’ chardonnayists, fought back valiantly b accusing Rudd of wandering the globe with some dodgy Chinese outfit who no one had ever heard of except, it transpired, oops, John Howard and Vaile’s boss-at-the-time John Anderson. Oops! Yes, when some photos were pulled in rabbit-type stylee out of the parliamentary titfer of aforementioned unknown dodgy Chinamen having a jolly old knees-up with the cream of coalition leadership, poor Markie went all quiet. Oh, coalition ¬– is there nothing you can’t fuck up?

(The forces of conservatism are wary of Rudd’s fascination with China – who can forget Dolly Downer’s petulant pouting over Kevvie’s speechifying in full-on Mandarinese, where Dolly sulked that Kev was ‘show off’ and that he, Dolly, could pull the same trick in French if he felt like it, which he did and in doing so immediately proved that he couldn’t – but they can’t escape the fact it was they, not Labor, that had President XXXXX address the entire Australian parliament on the same weekend as George W. Bush, sending the message that the Chinese regime was a-okay with the west despite being a bunch of commies and all.

Well, when I say entire Australian Parliament, I mean the entire Australian Parliament minus Bob Brown and Karen Nettle, the two Green senators whose notions of free-speech were considered to a little too free for the governments liking and so were barred from entering the House of Representatives. Long live democracy!)

But the suspicion that all Liberal Party MPs have an irony bypass on completion of the membership forms was confirmed when a somewhat tipsy Dolly Downer, caught bunking off parliament, again, this time to lunch with another of his super-duper pals, simpered in his own defense ‘"For me, as an Opposition backbencher, to spend one afternoon not listening to Julia Gillard's childish ranting and party politicking in an era when Rudd promised new standards, on reflection, I think I was better off having lunch’

What is Dolly saying here? That the numerous pontifications he delivered during his eleven looong years as Foreign Minister (and a most humorous short but oh so sweet spell as Opposition Leader back in the day) should have been stopped if only Honest John had the ticker to implement his rarely seen and quickly forgotten Parliamentary Code of Conduct? That Dolly’s boring drones were quite OK but, well, it’s a disgrace to let those others carry on like, well, like him? Does he have absolutely no shame? And is it any wonder that he is feeling somewhat, er, redundant?

Elroy is no stranger to Dolly Downer’s peculiar notions of democracy, and even now in abject defeat his hubris know no bounds. ‘The way Question Time works’ he opined the next day, ‘is that the 50 per cent of the questions are asked of Government ministers by Government backbenchers written in ministers' offices - and they just berate the Opposition,’
Well, who knew? Um…Dolly. Again, after spending years of fielding softball Dorothy Dixers from fawning backbenchers too terrified to put a white shoe out of line and, er, berating the opposition, suddenly the very system that gave him all he has is simply now not good enough. And this man was in charge?

But his whinge-a-thon was not finished yet! ‘ And the other 50 per cent of questions are organized by the Opposition frontbench. So if you are an Opposition backbencher you just sit there.’ Oh, for fuck’s sake! He left the front bench! Himself! Of his own volition! And did we ever see him agitating for a change in procedure when he was on the frontbench? Working to kill off Dorothy? To give backbenchers more of a say? Maybe even to reintroduce the practice of backbenchers being able to ask supplementary questions, a bit of random democracy that Honest John shut down when it became a tad to tricky? No. Dolly was, of course, as the grave on the matter of backbench participation when it was his turn to wax lyrical on the achievements, such as the were, of the Liberal government. What a surprise!

And that is not the first time that this its-alright-when-we-do-it-but-beyond-the pale-when-they-do-it sniveling has been heard on the trembling bottom lips of our erstwhile overlords; indeed, on the historic occasion of the first day of parliament’s momentous ‘Sorry’ speech, the Liberal opposition were shocked, shocked I tells ya, when a couple of Labor staffers joined hundreds of others in the Great Hall of Parliament House and around the country in turning their backs on The Locum during the harangue that was his reply to That Nice Mr. Rudd, in which he said that Whitey had, sniff, had had a hard time too, that really the abos had done all right out of colonization, that they were removed from their parents for their own good and that they really should be grateful etc etc..

It was a pathetic sop to those blood-skulling bastards that had voted him Head Poobah and who wanted some dripping flesh for their considerable trouble; for his part, The Locum looked more like a man delivering his last speech as leader than his first, and he did so with all the sincerity of Honest John Howard telling the country that there would never ever be a GST because the irony is that The Locum is a wet, he agrees with the apology, yet he was elected to support the dark side. Sorry! Did we say irony? We meant hypocrisy. Ah, Brendan – is there nothing you won’t sell out for?

The Locum is still the leader of the opposition...oh, hang on – what time is it? – but once it's safe to go back into the water, Thoroughly Modern Mal will be rinsing his Speedos, polishing his board and waiting for the starter's gun for the Liberal Party Iron Man contest to begin. There even has been talk up north of a new force in Australian politics, a new conservative party that would take in the remnants of One Nation and its more insane off-shoots, the nuttier Nationals and the barking mad Right rump of the Liberals, leaving the small ‘l’ libs, the North Shore doctors wives and others with nowhere to turn but the all-inclusive broad church of the ALP and driving the left-left into the welcoming foliage of The Greens.

Anyhoo, that some insignificant little Labor apparatchiks could disrespect the upholder of all that is great and good was an outrage, naturally, for the foot soldiers of decency, and so the call came for the perpetrators to be shot at dawn. No questions. Liberal moppet and Gen X attack puppy Sophie Mirabella zeroed in on their antics and called the act ‘disgusting’, although how she’d know is something of a mystery as she didn’t even bother to show up.

But along with the rest of the Upholders of Family Values, she also reserved her opinion on the contempt shown by fellow Liberal grunt Chris Pearce, a spiffing cove who somewhat blunted Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition attack on those pathetic pinko penpushers when he, after deigning to grace the House of Reps with his presence, proceeded to spend the entirety of That Nice Mr. Rudd’s landmark monologue leisurely reading last month’s Better Homes Than Theirs or some such glossy inconsequential. Fabulous! Glad to see those conservative double standards survived the election onslaught intact.

And despite the fact that many on the Keepers of Public Morality’s benches were not in slightest bit sort for anything, al all, ever, they were nevertheless consumed with rage that writing the apology they had spent eleven dreary years avoiding, denying and ignoring was, get this, taking too long! ‘If this is indicative of the way the Government is going to run the Parliament’ fumilated Joe Hockey to no one in particular, ‘then it says that this Government is arrogant in the very early days of its term in office’. This is a hoot for three reasons; one, the ALP had actually done in 3 months what the Libs couldn’t do in 1322; two, that he dead-paned the word ‘arrogant’ as if his mob were the model of humility and three, that he still thinks the Liberals’ opinion actually counts for anything.

The opposition has been raising a few giggles on the subject of running parliament too. For instance, after eleven long years of having the Speaker of the House jammed firmly up their collective orifice the Liberals blathered on about how they hoped the new one would improve parliamentary standards and be a beacon of impartiality, i.e. be better than the last one that let the Libs run amok with impunity. It’s all very well for the Liberal Party to ignore and pervert the democratic process, but the ALP? Goodness gracious! They’re just oiks!

And subvert and pervert the democratic process they did! The Locum can squawk about the need to consult the coalition on important issues, there was never any of that from the Liberals in power; senate committees were given next to no time to discuss major pieces of legislation, the considerable blame of all and any ministerial cock-ups was routinely transferred onto the nearest public servant, ministerial statements were avoided in favour of unilateral statements by the PM to sycophants like Lawsy or Jonesy lest they be, gasp, debated by parliament!

The arcane delights parliamentary sitting days has also grabbed the psyche the ex-ministers on the opposition benches and, despite the fact that they reduced the number of sitting days during their extended tenure, they were apoplectic that the Rudd administration had declared that parliament sit on Fridays, but not necessarily with a government quorum present, in order for backbenchers to speak and advance their private members’ bills. Again, ignoring calls for a quorum to be present was all in a day’s work for the coalition when in power, but now, well, it just won’t do, and so the Liberal/Nationals displayed the respect for parliamentary standards and procedure by mounting a three-ring circus in the house complete with fire-breathers, clowns, acrobats, trained animals and cardboard cut-outs in protest at this manifestly unparliamentary measure.

Now, one might have thought that the likes of backbencher Dolly Downer would welcome the opportunity to be heard, especially considering how he was deeply concerned that ‘the questions…asked of Government ministers by Government backbenchers [are] written in ministers' offices’ and that as an ‘opposition backbencher you just sit there’ but on the other hand, considering his enthusiasm for the longer lunch and few rounds with his trusty nine-iron, Dolly is probably less concerned about preserving parliamentary procedure and more about preserving his long weekend.

Still, the new speaker has cracked down on the asking wide-open Dorothy Dixers which give the government to opportunity to grandstand with a pre-packaged reply, which will no doubt please the deeply un-ironic Liberals no end, as would also the return of the highly democratic practice of allowing MPs supplementary questions. However, as Howard banished this to the same pit of infamy as his ‘Ministerial Code of Conduct’ it is unlikely that it will eventuate, and so the coalition can just ruminate on the proposition that they really should be more careful what they wish for.

Like pension policy. The Liberals were on a real winner here – cutting a yearly lump sum payment to carers and the disabled introduced as an election ploy by the then coalition government in 2004. It’s an outrage! Something must be done! Who will think of the children?! Now, it’s always amusing to see the conservatives cast themselves as hand-wringing bleeding hearts and champions of the downtrodden – ‘Pick on someone your own size’ wept The Locum – but even more amusingly, it all fell apart as quickly as it popped up.

Bear in mind that the idea of altering the payment was never actually budget policy; it was a leak, and if Elroy remembers rightly the Howard government were always somewhat reluctant to discuss budget policy before its official launch – chattier ministers were known to extraordinarily rendered to the back backbench for discussing such matters – but no matter! The opposition had themselves some red hot, ironclad conjecture and rumour and they were going to use it!

It took a few days until Parliament sat again and the PM could straighten the matter out, and this was cause for even more howls from the coalition as they accused Labor of being a one man band under the jackboot of the Ruddster while forgetting the reign of terror they themselves had lived under for the past eleven years. Indeed, Honest John featured heavily when Tony Abbott got the laughs rolling in Question Time as he attempted to shame the government by referring to Howard’s empathy to towards the underprivileged. ‘John Howard, the former prime minister’ sucked Tone, ‘he was never one to boast about his compassion credentials’ – um, there’s a reason for that, Tony – ‘He just delivered, that's what he did, he just delivered’. Tony was quiet about exactly what is was that Howard ‘delivered’, but Elroy can’t help thinking about Honest John’s moves in 2002 to throw the disabled off the Disability Support Pension and onto the dole.

But the attack continued with The Locum exhorting That Nice Mr. Rudd to, sob, ‘walk a mile in their shoes!’ and to guarantee the payment. ‘OK’ said Rudd, pretty much straight away, ‘I give an absolute guarantee that those carers will not be a dollar worse off as a result of the budget’. There. Settled. No?

‘Will these lump sum payments be made, yes or no?’ bellowed Abbott? Well, the government acquiesced and agreed, but not before reminding the coalition that this put the government ahead of the opposition when they were in power. ‘If re-elected’ reads the then government’s somewhat optimistic propaganda ‘the Coalition Government will consider continuing to pay these bonuses depending on the economic circumstances of the time.’ Uh oh! Elroy reckons that sounds a tad non-core! So, just to recap, a rumour that the opposition would never have dignified with an answer on a position that the government never held but the opposition did was refuted. Good. Got that straight then.

And so with that in mind, consider the unedifying spectacle of The Locum crying over That Nasty Mr Rudd heartlessly handing over a $5000 ‘Baby Bonus’ to aboriginal mothers who obviously can’t cope with having that much cash all one hit. Unfortunately for what was left of is credibility, he somehow not only forget that it was his government that introduced said bonus four years ago but also that he was whining about the possible disappearance of that carer’s bonus four days ago. ‘The measure of a caring prime minister’ he had simpered, ‘is the extent to which he will reach out to people to make sure their meagre family budgets are secure’ but that, apparently, only counts if you’re white – aborigines can’t be trusted to budget.

As the Liberal Party is the party of individual choice and personal responsibility, an organization committed to reducing the influence of the nanny state on the lives of over-regulated citizens, it brings yet a another wry smile to one’s dial when they recommend, um, increasing the influence of the nanny state on the lives of over-regulated citizens. The coalition’s quarantine-the-dole strategy is a one-size-fits-all imposition on every aborigine in the Northern Territory, regardless of their ability to manage their finances or not, which ties them and Centrelink in a forty miles of red tape and mostly benefits Coles and Woolworth’s, as the grocery duopoly is given preferential treatment when it comes to shopping vouchers – so much for championing small business and choice.

The coalition further proved it was committed to creating work for aborigines by firing them all from the CEDP program so that the money could be quarantine, and the proof that this move is inherently racist is that they had to suspend the Racial Discrimination Act to do it. But it’s OK ¬– bad whiteys will also be subjected to these restrictions, although they will be managed on a case-by-case basis because they are obviously the exception and not the norm.

What else was there? Oh, that’s right – the Liberals whining that Rudd’s child-minding arrangements for his son at The Lodge as he changed school were to be funded by the tax-payer, conveniently forgetting that Howard impounded renovated Kirribilli House on the pretext that his offspring should not be subjected to the same iniquity, multi-millions spent because Howard, or more likely Janette, quite frankly just didn’t want to live in Canberra, and that it was all about them can be proved by simply looking at what they did when the kiddies left home – Janette and John stayed in Sydney.

There has also been some argy-bargy concerning the freedom of press as conservatives are now up in arms at suggestions that maybe some of the right’s more barking mad right-wing commentators have lost their currency due to the country’s lurch to the left. This is evidence of a deeply held canard and their conspiracy paranoia – that the press is controlled by the left and that rich white Christians are a persecuted minority. Its not, and they aren't, but as these simple truths do not fit into their preferred story so they are denied at great lengths and at great volume, and we must continue to put up with the fevered bleatings of Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman etc and forget about the eleven years of hearing conservatives moan about how the press are against them and how lefties like Robert Manne, David Marr et al should shut the fuck up,

Indeed, the ABC has obviously been a hot-bed of revolutionary Marxist-Leninists for many years, full of communists who have sought nothing less than the violent overthrow of the fascist Howard regime for the past eleven years, despite the Liberals’ repeated attempts to cleanse it of such seditionists and stack the board with higher minded individuals. But the ABC’s urban guerillas can throw down their arms now that Labor are in power, safe in the knowledge that their mission is complete, and the Liberals can rest happy that they have had one of their dearest wishes granted and that, at last, the ABC reflects the attitudes of the government of the day.

What’s that? The Liberals still want to privatize the ABC? But that would mean that it always reflect the attitudes of the conservative parties, whether they were in power in not! Gosh! Maybe those Libs ain’t so dumb after all! Mean and tricky maybe – conniving, manipulative, mendacious, self-serving, deluded and conceited certainly – but stupid? No, not if your definition of ‘intelligence’ is ‘rat cunning’.

But are we finished? Oh, no! Once upon a time there was the ‘mandate’, an inviolate charter granted by the electorate that cannot, repeat, cannot be usurped by such insignificant scabs on the edge of the democratic process as the opposition. The Liberals claimed a mandate to introduce the GST, a claim that Elroy could happily dispute if he felt like it, and they then claimed that an accidental senate majority was a mandate to introduce the WorkChoices, legislation they never dared to go to an election with; however, now that Labor emphatically has won an election where their intention to scrap WorkChoices was front and centre, suddenly Labor don’t have mandate!

And if that doesn’t make you dizzy enough, apparently the coalition do have a mandate to stop the WorkChoices rollback on account of an accidental left -over senate majority that they lose in July when the, um, newly elected senators move in to take their seats. As elected. To rollback WorkChoices. Hmm. Oh well. However, as noted previously, the opposition have stuck to their philosophical guns and decided to let the centerpiece of the raison detre go to the wall regardless, but they have found some other uses for their senate majority which play to matters just as close their hearts as stripping the proles of their working conditions.

Yes, now that, they have decided that labour market ‘flexibility’ is all way to hard despite their claims of economic superiority – remember how nasty unions were going to raise wages and fuel inflation while responsible WorkChoices was going to raise wages and…and…? – Ah well, as they’ve only got until July before they become even more irrelevant than they are now, they have decided to concentrate on cleaning out the trough and beating up the darkies.

Upon finding themselves in the unlikely and undeserved possession of a senate majority in 2005, the coalition set about knobbling Labor’s attempts to set up select senate committees on the grounds of fiscal responsibility; however, mindful of ways to supplement their paltry $127,000 pa now that they have lost their tickets-to-ride on the supplementary gravy train but still have that oh-so-handy-but-soon-to-expire key to the senate cash box, they suddenly found a renewed interest in select committees and granted themselves three in the in the first two days of sitting to do work quite within the scope of the current standing committees. This means that they get to pocket the $14,000 paid to the committee chair and prove that fiscal responsibility is relative to whether or not you are a coalition senator in opposition.

The other matter they are willing to die in a ditch for is the all-important culture war that Howard bravely fought against the communists, specifically indigenous affairs. The coalition may have rolled over on the ‘Sorry’ business but so what – it was only symbolic – but the idea that the Labor government might mess with the coalition’s Northern Territory ‘Intervention’ policy, a piece of legislation that can cause solid, tangible, concrete and demonstrable harm to aboriginal people, well, that is just a bridge too far, and so they will continue to fight this last crucial battle in the culture war in the senate until they are led away a-wailing and a-gnashing all the while.

But the show rolls on! Another of Elroy’s favorites is the ‘Ancient history’ whinge. It is a well-known fact that any major change to an economy or governmental policies takes an estimated seven to ten years to flush through the system, and political parties rely on some sort of fiscal skeleton being found a-dangling up the back of the treasurer’s filing closet to renege on any election promises they didn’t like; indeed, John Howard showed his mastery of this shifty little ruse when he used some highly creative accounting to come up with Labor’s ‘ten billion dollar black hole’ to inflict his now infamous ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ promises on a bemused nation back in ’96 when ten billion meant something.

Now of course, everything is different. To flog what little life there might be left in Peter Costello’s much loved ‘finely-tuned racing car’ analogy, the coalition have handed the keys to a Ferrari of an economy to Labor, and if they crash, well, there’s only Labor to blame – never mind that the coalition haven’t put any petrol in it since 1996, that the brake linings are shot, that the steering fluid is gone, the oil has never been checked and the only reason it is still moving is that it is rolling down hill in neutral with the wind behind it, none of which help when it is heading for a brick wall Made In The USA.

Yes, according to The Locum any mention of anything pre-26/11/2007 is ‘ancient history’ and off limits, although the ten billion dollar black hole still gets a mention whenever an erstwhile government MP spends more than 2.4 minutes on the television. Funny that – but I guess that’s just another example of that good old ‘personal responsibility’ conservatives always bang on about right after they’ve finished with the ten billion dollar black hole.

Wages have been quite a rich source of mirth over the past couple of weeks; as we read before, wage rises are only non-inflationary when the coalition hand them out and, yet, again, suddenly The Locum and Thoroughly Modern Mal are weeping bitter tears of 1958 Chateau Latour for the plight of the underclass they spent so long subjugating.

After many tedious years of high decibel carrying-on about how any wage increase for hard-grafting gutterslugs would inflate the economy like a helium blimp, there is now much concern and hand wringing all round as the forces of darkness pretend to care if their Afghani cleaner scores an extra twenty bucks a week courtesy of the humourously named Fair Pay Commission, conveniently forgetting that these are the very people that, only four months ago, the Liberals were trying to rob of their rights and conditions, the same saps that Honest John was demanding enter into ‘negotiations’ with a boss who is more than eager to cut his costs by all and any means either necessary or available.

Such heart! And unemployment? Pah! Here’s something Elroy has learnt about unemployment – it’s a good thing! It’s a good thing, and the idea that it’s a bad thing, well, that was just a lie. Unless it’s not, in which case it isn’t. Or something. Elroy remembers seeing a big bank head honcho on the telly not long ago explain that twenty years ago, when the government said there were plenty of c, well, that was a complete fib; there wasn’t plenty of jobs and there was way too many punters looking for them but now, now it’s different, now there REALLY are plenty of jobs if only people could be bothered looking, so could we? Pretty please? Because I know we lied before, but now…

In fact, Thoroughly Modern Mal becomes Thoroughly Post-Modern Mal on this sticky point. Elroy heard the former Liberal government whine about how we needed improvements in productivity, but it looks like productivity was bad thing because it led to unemployment. Hmm. That wasn’t the story in 1996 to 2007 – then anybody without a job was merely a parasite leeching off the lifeblood of society – but according to Post-Modern Mal, it now seems that those slackers and bludgers that the Liberals had so much fun whacking around the head were doing us all a favour, as full employment means employing a bunch of duds and nuff-nuffs who wouldn’t know a day’s work if it bit them and therefore dragging productivity down to zero.

Yes, because the coalition was really the friend of the downtrodden all along, we find that what looked like an eleven-year hammock driven snooze-a-thon was in which they did nothing but roll like Uncle Scrooge McDuck in a Money Bin full of Chinese mining cash and ignore secondary and tertiary pubic education was really a go-getting strategy aimed at providing work for all and damn the productivity levels.

And oh God, there’s so much more – after years of complaining about the sound of high-flyin’ lefties ‘running down Australia’ and carping ex-Prime Ministers, John Howard had to slink off to Washington DC to find anyone dull enough to put up with him snivelling about his unjust ousting and so, in front of such similar ex-luminaries as Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz John Bolton and other sympathetic about-to-be has-beens at the American Enterprise Institute, John Winston Howard became a carping ex-Prime Minister running down Australia.

Ah, well. They were his guys, his audience, his homies – Rudd may have stolen his gig back home but the Bushistas would never call Kevvie a ‘Man Of Steel’. Would they? Fast forward three weeks and what do we see?

Reporter: Is Mr Rudd the new Man Of Steel?
GWB: Heck, yeah!

John Howard fair pummelled the lectern over Our Kev’s dastardly intention to withdraw troops from Iraq when he gave his speech to the American Enterprise Institute at the start of the month, which must have made Liberal Party henchman Andrew Robb choke on his truffle and lark’s egg soufflé as he had been talking to the US about Howard’s intention to do this very thing nine months before, but now that Rudd was fer it, he wuz ag’in it!

Sadly for poor ol’ Johnny, however, the yanks are nothing if not practical and tend to take a ‘The king is dead ¬– long live the king!’ approach to regime change, and so when the Kruddster told George II about said intentions Shrub said that it was jus’ fine with him. ‘He’s a man of his word’ said Dubya, ‘and it shows that we are being successful.’

In the non-descript suburban social club in inner city Leichhardt where John Howard was enduring his testimonial dinner, Johnny mulled over the full meaning of Paul Keating’s portentous quote ‘There is nothing quite as ‘ex’ as an ex-Prime Minister’.

Maybe Howard should have thought through his legacy and the long-term ramifications of his vice-hard grip on his party and the national debate, but thinking things through was never the Liberal’s strong point. Indeed, it turns out that the Liberal’s strong point was throwing money around in ever-increasing amounts and, despite being nominally small-government conservatives, it seems that the greatest economic managers on the planet certainly knew how to use tax-payers funds to great advantage; the only problem for the rest of us was that this advantage was theirs.

Despite having claimed the scalp of Sports Minister Ros Kelly for distributing grants via a white board, the Liberal/National government managed to jack the amount of ‘discretionary grants’, that is grants that are within the gift of a minister, up from $729 million’s worth in 2004 to $9.1 billion’s worth in 2008 with $4.5 billion of that splashed out in the last year, and this from the greatest financial managers the country has ever seen, the small government conservatives who were fighting inflation caused by their eleven years of hammockin’ by over stimulating the economy. Err, right.

Still, now that the government have a mandate to exterminate WorkChoices (or not, depending on your stripe), the opposition have agreed to support them or, to be more exact, not going to oppose them, one may have expected the Liberals to do what they said they would do. Hah!

One has to remember that the slippery semantic stylings of John Winston Howard have had a profound effect on the soul of the Liberals and that they now seem unable to take an ethical and unequivocal stand on anything. Just as they have jettisoned everything they had ever held dear in order to make themselves more palatable to the people, this duplicitous streak in the Liberals means that nothing they say can be taken at face value; in 2000, ex-Northern Territory Nationals’ Chief Minister Shane Stone famously called them ‘Mean, tricky and out of touch’, and this was proved to be as true today when industrial relations minister Julia Gillard called on the opposition to never again put their precious unfair dismissal laws into action.

This idea, that the opposition should be true to their word, sent them into apoplexy. How dare the government ambush them like this! There they were, not opposing the legislation, agreeing, in fact, that the electorate had demanded that it happen because the electorate was obviously too dim to understand that having no rights at work was a GOOD thing, and those scum-sucking communists wanted them, the guardians of all things decent, to make their repudiation of a policy so unpopular it had cost them power a core promise! Why, the very nerve! It would go against their entire ethos not to double back and perform a flippy-floppy 180º U-turn with pike whenever they thought the could get away with it! Who did the Labor Party think they were, anyway? The government?

Then there is the general grumbling that Rudd isn’t a plain speaking man o’ the people, which of course has those that have spent the past eleven years trying to decipher the triple-speak that passed for public discourse as it emanated from Howard in a series obfuscations, distortions manipulations, PR spin and flat-out terminological inexactitudes collapsed on the floor in hysterics – Rudd-speak’ the opposition call it, but it must be confusing to them merely because it is vaguely penetrable.
Elroy always enjoys a bit of deadpan humour and so looks forward to when The Locum starts on his ‘Rudd is a control freak’ routine, insisting that Kev likes to micromanage every aspect of government while ignoring the eleven years of Howard dictatorship that has left The Locum’s party so completely bereft of direction and leadership, so, if I may, rudderless, and then compounding the irony by whining about Rudd going overseas on his first official tour when he should be in Canberra micromanaging everything.

And The Locum wasn’t finished there! He went on to give Kevvie a hard time for meeting ‘celebrities’ like, er, George Bush, Hillary Clinton and Ben Bernanke while doing his international rounds, probably because the bushes Brendan is meeting on his domestic version of the Grand Tour are more flora to Kev's fauna, although arguably more articulate, and still Nelson appeared to be oblivious to his erstwhile boss’s embarrassing habit of popping up at every major (and minor) sports event played between 1996 ¬– 2007 for a photo op with the winners, the losers and anyone else who might be assessed as suitably impressive to the battlers down on Struggle Street.

The Locum then beseeched Ruddy, with a nod and a wink, to look up Led Zeppelin while in ol’ Blighty and tell them that it’s been a long time since rock ‘n’ roll down here in God’s Own Sunburnt Wide Brown Land because, although it’s bad for Mr. Rudd to press the flesh of the great and good if they are the leaders of the Free World™, it's good if they are superannuated devil worshipping degenerates. ‘You don't need to meet all the celebrities…you need to go to Washington, you need to see the key leaders, including the financial leaders’ The Locum grumbled. Later in the day, however, he was cracking hearty wuth ‘The big issue – and I really think this is important for Mr. Rudd – when he's in London (is) he's got to get to Led Zeppelin management and talk those guys into coming to Australia.’

Look, it's good to see that The Locum is getting the hang of his position's comic possibilities, but it seems that irony and self-depreciating humour is now the exclusive domain of the Liberal Party (who'da thunked it?) as That Nice Mr. Rudd managed o get himself into all sorts of hot water with a suddenly po-faced Brendan when Kevvie 'saluted' Dubya at NATO. '"Well I think it's conduct unbecoming of an Australian Prime Minister' The Locum pontificated, 'and Mr Rudd appears to conduct himself in one manner when he thinks the television is upon him and another when it is not.'

It is obvious, then, that Nelson had a deprived childhood free of both jolly banter and the works of A.A. Milne, as it is equally obvious to those who knows those flows of prose that Rudd was merely quoting Milne in kind. We refer of course to the story of Bad Sir Brian Botanty which, the more Elroy thinks about it, is a fine allegory for Bush's colonial adventures and which, as no one is really looking, Elroy is going print in full for your edification and delight.

Bad Sir Brian Botany

Sir Brian had a battleaxe with great big knobs on;
He went among the villagers and bopped them on the head.
On Wednesday and Saturday, but mostly on the latter day,
He called at all the cottages, and this is what he said:

"I am Sir Brian!" (ting-ling)
"I am Sir Brian!" (rat-tat)
"I am Sir Brian, as bold as lion -
Take that! - and that! - and that!"

Sir Brian had a pair of boots with great big spurs on,
A fighting pair of which he was particularly fond.
On Tuesday and on Friday, just to make the street look tidy,
He'd collect the passing villagers and kick them in the pond.

"I am Sir Brian!" (sper-lash!)
"I am Sir Brian!" (sper-losh!)
"I am Sir Brian, as bold as lion -
"Is anyone else for a was?"

Sir Brian woke one morning, and he couldn't find his battleaxe;
He walked into the village in his second pair of boots.
He had gone a hundred paces, when the street was full of faces,
And the villagers were round him with ironical salutes.

"You are Sir Brian? Indeed!"
"You are Sir Brian? Dear, dear!"
"You are Sir Brian, as bold as a lion?"
"Delighted to meet you here!"

Sir Brian went on a journey, and he found a lot of duckweed:
They pulled him out and dried him, and they blipped him on the head.
They took him by the breeches, and they hurled him into ditches,
And they pushed him under waterfalls and this is what they said:

"You are Sir Brian - don't laugh,"
"You are Sir Brian - don't cry"
"You are Sir Brian, as bold as a lion"
"Sir Brian, the lion, good-bye!"

Sir Brian struggled home again, and chopped up his battleaxe,
Sir Brian took his fighting boots, and threw them in the fire.
He is quite a different person now he hasn't got his spurs on,
And he goes about hte village as B. Botany, Esquire.

"I am Sir Brian? Oh, no!'"
" I am Sir Brian? Who's he?"
"I haven't got any title, I'm Botany"
"Plain Mr Botany (B)."

Did you hear that, Doctor? Do you get it now? 'Ironical salutes'. I rests me case, m'lud. Elroy is planning a series of benefit concerts to raise funds to send The Locum a copy of When We Where Very Young and Now We Are Six; they might be a little over his head but he'll soon have plenty of time to study the subtleties of the text as is looks like Pouty Pete's chums are begging him to take the lead as the anti-Turnbull forces panic about Brendan falling at a fence any day now and leaving the field clear for Thoroughly Modern Mal to romp home. They are obviously scared that if The Locum represents the choice of the party's right then Mal won't be contemplating an amalgamation with the Nationals so much as with the Socialist Alliance, but as The Locum knows which side is buttering his parliamentary bread he has asked, nay, begged Pouty and Dolly to stay on lest he gets roughed p by the beastly Mal. Laugh? Elroy nearly voted Liberal!

There’s been other stuff, lots of other stuff, but as Elroy feels that if he doesn’t end soon the Liberal Party will have ceased to be. Indeed, with their poll numbers hovering down around their knees and The Locum’s preferred Prime Minister numbers barely bigger that his shoe size (and he is not a big man), the Nationals’ Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce push to amalgamate with the Libs, which The Locum has endorsed in a do-or-die effort to do, well, something, this demise might be more imminent than anyone supposes.

Meanwhile, we shall keep a-rolling in the aisles at the Liberals hi-jinx as they continue to sell the Howard legacy down the Swanee and whine at any behaviour by the Labor party that is in any way reminiscent of the way they had comported themselves when smug and fat and corpulent with power.

Australia is a much sadder, badder and madder place than it was in 1996; the people are poor, scared, and wondering when the riches that the Liberals have been boasting about were going to trickle down to them, but now that they find that the party is over and they are footing the bill they are getting angry. The conservatives can bluster and puff all they like but their days are not numbered, they are over, as the people start to comprehend the size and nature of the con that has been perpetrated on them and demand that the new crowd do something, anything, about it.

What really irks the Liberal Party is that Rudd is actually getting things done and showing them up to be the bunch of high-talking, low-achieving, greed-infested parasites that ever sucked the public teat and, not because they pretend that the well-known political axiom which holds that any power one grants ones self will be used by one’s successors does not apply to the Libs, and not because they pretended that these powers were vital to the country’s well-being when bringing them in; no, they are the definition of hypocrisy because they pretend that they have jettisoned just about every tenet of a philosophy which they once held so dear, tenets that those in the reality-based community know they will bring back if ever given half a chance.

Having said that, all that, at great length to nobody in particular, the 21st Century ALP are as much in thrall to the economic voodoo of Milton Friedman as Honest John's mob, so the hope is that they might just a little more circumspect with the spoils. The Washington Consensus is still firmly in place and Labor are just as prone to hypocrisies as the Liberals, it's just that this is not the article to point them out. No, right now it's time to kick the corpse of the Howard Government around a bit, a lot, after 11 years of their pernicious evil, because hey! – that's what free speech in a democracy is all about.

Albert Langer for President!

'Ola NOLA!

2008-02-05T11:31:00.000+08:00

Gather Ye Now Among Thy Tribes!

2007-12-23T11:59:00.000+08:00

As it is deemed appropriate at this time of year to engage in hypocritical acts of piety, Let's Ask Elroy!™ humbly offers the follwing biblical tract for your consideration. In keeping with all religious zealots, Let's Ask Elroy!™ bears absolutely no responsibility for the following, nor credit for it, just to say that it is without possible doubt 110% true.

From the Book of Kevin:

Gather ye now among thy tribes and among thy families and then shalt thou rest, for the year runneth its course. Put aside therefore thy labours and place thy trust in thy investments, and possibly thy investments in thy trust.

For it came to pass that there were great changes in the land. For John was their leader, yea even unto eleven years and the land was covered in darkness and darkness was upon the face of the deep and there were troubles in the land without number, and there was war. And the money-lenders cranketh up rates, despite John’s claim that he keepeth them from being cranked. For John was old and weak and thought only of the past, and he was sore afraid and his confusion was manifold. And he knoweth not what to do.

And John sayeth unto Peter, ‘You are the anointed one. You will take my place. So get thee hence and wait.’ And Peter goeth ‘Why promiseth thou me this? And why, having promised, deliverest thou not? For we have had this conversation before and it shitteth me.’

And John smiled. And did nothing. For he knew that Peter pulleth not the skin from a rice pudding, and that he doeth nothing and abideth his time, which was fruitless.

But John gathereth about him the Pharisees and he spake unto them, saying ‘Bretheren, there shall be a reckoning. And mighty shall be our victory over those who oppose us. For we have found an infidel in Queensland and his name is Haneef and he is a healer of the sick. And he shall be deported without trial. For there will be no trial. For there will be no charges. For he has done nothing wrong. And he is not the infidel.'

And the people saw this. And they shook their heads. And yea, though John be old and hopeless, he walketh still each morning in the suit of track, and he waveth to his people. And his people waveth back. But after John passeth by, his people turneth each to the other and they sayeth each privately ‘lo, he looketh a great tool.’

But the scribes saw not. Nor did they write. For they mostly contemplateth the Lillies of the field and the Marshes and the Warnies and the Abletts and the Judds. For obsesseth they with sport. For those who record events in the land are concerned with the line that is bottom. For that is the way it works for ever and ever. Amen.

So the scribes sensed not what the people knew. But there was anger in the land. For the people haveth John up to here.

For there were those who would come across the sea and they were placed in the centre that is detention.

And there were those who were in the land since time immemorial and John spoke not to them.

But John spoke freely to others. For he told them stories. For example he told them there were unbelievers, who would attack the land. And John said they numbered many millions and would smite us, for they were evil and full of hate and we were the lamb of God and had done nothing. For John gave his people a fridge magnet.

For John faileth to understand the metaphor of the burning Bush.

For there was also a plague which causeth the land to become warmer.

And this was a huge surprise.

For this was not understood by science until thirty years previously.

But John denieth this three times. For John calleth this a drought. But the people suspecteth something more permanent. For they worked on the land. And neither were they born yesterday. Nor cometh they down with the last shower. For there was no shower.

For who was John kidding?

And there was great confusion in the land and the people were sore afraid.

And then John introduced new laws; that man might profit not from his own work but from the work of others.

And the people sayeth to John ‘John. You are great and have all power and are wise and we wish to use the band that is called broad.’

And John shruggeth his shoulders and spake unto the people as follows; ‘What band is it that is called broad. I know nothing about any such band. Now begone, as I have to call George. ‘

And the people giveth up. For they knew that cometh the reckoning, fixeth up they John in spades.

And there was a crack of thunder and a mighty wind and lo, there was a light in the east. A bright light. And there were three wise women. And they were Julia and Penny and Nicola.

And they came upon a house in Canberra and they said ‘Prepare ye. For a child will be born, whose name shall be called Kevin. And even though he perhaps be not thy saviour, he be something to be going on with.’

And great hosannas rang out and booths opened for the reckoning, and great was the polling therein. And there was slide of land and he that is called Kerry announceth a swing to the ABC. For verily it was so. And the people looked at their work and saw that it was good.

For John was defeated and lost, and ebbeth he and his kind like the tide. And lo, Peter had a note from his mother and was excused leadership duties. And electeth they Brendan, who knoweth fanny adams and who loveth Brendan with all his heart.

And so it was that Kevin became a leader. And he spake unto his people and they fell into a swound for Kevin haveth many qualities but he hath not brevity.

For the people did not need a lecture. For they understood the problems. For they put Kevin there, rather than the other way round.

But the three wise women saw. And they took Kevin out the back and explaineth they things very firmly to Kevin. ‘Kevin’ they said. ‘There is a time to every purpose. A time for speaking and a time for shutting thy face. We will give you a signal. For boreth ye not thy people.’

And Kevin recogniseth that he had fallen among friends and he was pleased. For he had learnt to read signals.

And the people rested. For it was a time of feasting and gift-giving and crippling debt. They would eat and drink. For they would need to be ready for work when they got back.

For the place was a shambles.

From The Book of Kevin 12; 15-73; The Gospel According to the Crikey Psephological Observation Unit.

Praise be! Let's Ask Elroy¡™ will be back real soon with something he thought up himself so please, don't go away!

So. Farewell then...

2007-11-24T20:50:00.000+08:00

So. Farewell then, John Winston Howard.
You have had such fun
You and your agenda
That made Robert Menzies
Look like Hugo Chavez
But the ride
Is over

It all started
On the waterfront
Your first try at
Usurping democracy
It didn’t work but
Never mind
Better luck next time, hey?

You helped start a war
Because a Texan Bush
Told you that a bad man
Tried to kill his daddy
And that the bad man had nasty
Toys given to him
By his daddy’s friends

But it would be alright
Because no one liked
The bad man anyway
And the people
Would welcome you with flowers
And embrace your ‘democracy’
Or else

Five years later
You have killed the bad man
And eight hundred thousand
Of his oppressed people
Four million more
Are homeless
And the nasty toys are nowhere to be found

Then a bunch of those people
Whose country you bombed
Got on a boat
And came to stay
Because, they thought
The enemy of my enemy
Is my friend

But you put them on
Another boat and
Played football with them
Until the election was won
‘We will decide who enters our country
And the circumstances in which they come’
You pouted

Your bottom lip trembled
As you solemnly swore
That they had thrown their children
Overboard
They hadn’t
But you didn’t know
You never watched the video

And those people that you
Kidnapped spent
Years being boiled and
Beaten in the desert
Before someone decided
That they were really refugees
All along

And then we found out you
Gave three hundred million bucks
To the bad man
You were here at war with!
Our dollars blew up
Their homes and our troops!
Oops!

An Australian citizen
Was left to rot
And be tortured
In a foreign jail
Indefinitely
But you said nothing
To the Texan Bush

As you are
A lawyer
I have two words
For you
‘Habeus’
And
‘Corpus’

But it wasn’t your fault
You didn’t know
Nobody told you
And you didn’t say
They had
In so many
words

And what about the time
You deported that doctor
Because his cousin
Knew a bloke that
Knew a guy
That…
Oh, never mind.

And what about the time
You deported those people
Because they
Spoke funny
They were Australian citizens
But don’t you worry
About that!

And when your brother
Was found to be about
To leave his workers
Broke
The government stumped up
Blood is thicker
Than principle

Then you decided
That the only way
To compete
With China
Was to compete
With China
With our wages

And for some reason
We are not allowed
To collectively bargain
With an independent arbitrator
Tell me
How do you like
The parliamentary Remuneration Tribunal?

But wait – there’s more
So much more
The barrels of Pork
The ‘government’ adveritising’
The anti-terror laws
But unlike the list
Time is not endless

So. Farewell then, John Winston Howard
And farewell to your lies
Your weasel words
Your obfuscation
May you retire
To a nursing home
Exposed by A Current Affair

Do it! Do it NOW!

2007-11-24T11:11:00.000+08:00

For all those wavering today I urge you to go for the K-Ruddster, not that you should be in any doubt as to your intentions one way or the oher by this late stage in the game. Why? I'll let our good friends at Crikey.com explain – this as good a reason as any:

'A vote to return the Government is a vote for maximum risk. The risk of more-of-the-same policies when policy flourish is badly needed. The risk of a bitter leadership bunfight within a year or less as senior ministers attempt to get even with John Howard for inflicting on them the unnecessary pain of the past few months.

The increasing risk of overweening moments from ministers like Abbott, Downer, Ruddock and Minchin (and Howard) on their last laps. And the risk of more hubris-infected decisions as the culture wars are fought to their denouement by an ideologically-driven government heading towards its 14th year under the same tired leadership.

A vote for Labor is a vote for least risk. Economic policy will be cautious, industrial relations policy will be benign, foreign policy will be prudent and social change will be incremental but interesting.

This will be a pragmatic government setting out to establish the platform for 14 years in power, not the other way round. The biggest risk in electing a Rudd government is that they don't unveil some flair and foresight. The risk to Australia of returning a Howard government is far greater than the risk of giving the other mob a go.'

That makes sense to me, so time to go forth and do your democratic duty1

Proctect Us From The Protectors!

2007-11-21T13:09:00.000+08:00

The Australian Federal Government is there to protect us from unscrupulous behaviour, or should that now be 'protect' us because, according to current Health minister and ex-lay Catholic priest, ex-boxer Tony 'Mad Monk' Abbott there is a difference between 'Protections' and ' "Protections" '. Unfortunately it is not entirely clear what that difference is, so let's have a look at what happened exactly.

'I accept that certain “protections” - in inverted commas - are not what they were.'

Elroy is sad to report that the Mad Monk did actually do the "inverted commas" thing with his fingers, which actually makes it worse for him as that now indispensable facet of 21st Century conversation usually denotes 'so-called' or 'supposed, a'euphemism' of some sort, and is generally accompanied with a degree of eye-rolling; it gives the distinct impression that he didn't think workers should have had protections in the first place, that they were for wusses and namby-pamby nanny-staters who wouldn't know a hard day's work if it offered them an AWA.

'That whole raft of regulation expressed in awards that sometimes ran into hundreds, even thousands of pages, I accept that that has largely gone.'

There. The regulations that govern worker's awards that were built up over decades of pressure and struggle by the workers themselves are gone. Largely.

'I accept that. I accept that the Industrial Relations Commission doesn’t have the same power to reach into the nook and cranny of every business that it used to have. I accept that.'

To Elroy, this says that employers are now free of the scrutiny once imposed by the IRC and that without it they are free to abuse their workers. It's pretty clear and unequivocal, and the day after Abbott said it he was unrepentant – indeed, he went on telly to defend what he termed his 'excellent remarks' by saying that the protections lost were 'counter-productive' and 'pseudo protections', but he still will not say what those protections are. Holiday loadings? Unfair dismissal? What?

I really don't understand what the Libs are on about. Abbott said it and he even said that he said it and, what's more, that it was jolly good thing to say!

But suddenly he has freaked out, having realised that telling the truth is not a great idea for the coalition, and is blaming everyone else! For what he said! This from the party of personal responsibility! But I suppose he couldn't have really said what he said because Liberal Party Prime Minister 'Honest' John Howard said so. 'Tony Abbott did not say that protection had been taken away for workers.' Oh. I see. Silly Elroy.

Abbott is now saying that a video of him saying what he said was 'doctored' and ‘edited’ (it wasn't) and that he was, as conservatives always seem to be (according to conservatives), taken out of context (he wasn't). Word to the wise, Tony – if you're going to say that you have been taken out of context then you need say what the correct context is, and this you are yet to do. Still, Elroy is nothing but helpful so he's going to help you out. The Monkster says that the rest of his comment helps explain what he was on about, so lets have a peek.

'But in the end, the best protection for the worker who feels he or she might be under pressure at his job is the chance of another job, the chance of a better job. That is the best protection. Not going off to some judge or Industrial Commission that might order your employer, who you don’t like and he doesn’t like you, to keep you in an unhappy partnership forever.

So that is the best protection that we can give people, the protection of an abundance of jobs, the protection of an economy which is crying out for more workers'

Yes, the Mad Monk says that he was trying to make the point that the best 'protection' (my inverted commas) is the opportunity to get another job, to just walk out and get another job elsewhere. He tells us that there are plenty of jobs and people need to get over this idea that they are entitled to a job for life, not because it is no longer possible to do that thanks to the coalition's deregulated and 'flexible' labour market but because a job for life is no longer necessary – who needs a safety net? The market will provide!

Ok, lets call him on it. He's a youngish man (he turned fifty a fortnight ago), as is Treasurer Peter 'Smirk' Costello, Defence Minister Brendan 'Which side am I on?’ Nelson et al, with a solid future (he certainly isn't going to starve) and,as he said, he has the best protection a working man could want – the opportunity of picking up one of the myriad of jobs that are dangling out there like so much fruit and maybe even make more money.

So, as one of the 'protections' lost to over the years was the right to most of one's redundancy pay – the government reduced companies' bottom line legal requirement for paying out downsized and sacked workers to eight weeks pay, no matter how much they were actually owed – so Elroy challenges Abbott and all his little friends who are about to find themselves a-twiddling their thumbs come the 25th of November to reduce the amount of super he draws after leaving Canberra to the equivalent of what the great unwashed are now entitled to as a safety net – eight weeks pay.

The official argument is that politicians deserve their massive pensions because they have given up what could have been a prosperous career to, sob, serve the public, and that 'quality people' basically need to be bribed to do it with a more than fair salary, a 'pay peanuts – get monkeys' philosophy that means that our average elected representatives receive a base wage of $127,000, well over twice the national average wage of $52,000, for their time and trouble.

However, Elroy remembers conservative line that was run against a nurses' wage claim which basically said that paying nurses too much would mean that the profession would attract 'the wrong kind of people', that is people who were in it for the money, but Elroy says that if that argument is good enough for the nurses then surely it also applies to politicians – after all, we wouldn't want mere careerists in our Parliaments would we? Men and women who go into a job just for the money?

It was traditionally the parties of the left that agitated for members of parliament to be paid as their members were far more likely to be blue-collar comrades who could not afford to take time off from t'mill to gallivant down the Halls of Power – however, as it was deemed that means testing this would obviously be an insufferable impingement on the wealthy's natural born right to suck up whatever share of resources they can possibly get away with, it also meant that we have the unedifying spectacle of more-than-comfy Multi-millionaire merchant banker Malcolm Turnbull hoovering up the paltry parliamentary stipend and add it to his already groaning money pit, mopping up what for him is basically claret money. Just like Bill Gates and Tiger Woods don't do what they do to keep the banks off their backs, Malcolm Turnbull is not in politics for the cash; no, what drives careerists like Abbott and dilettantes like Mal is far worse than mere mammon.

It may be true that high level bureaucrats get paid even more than politicians, and it is argued that maybe they deserve it because they do not get the pollies’ super chubby life-time pensions and other outrageous perks and lurks – although the politicians use the mandarins’ hefty whack to cry poor and remind the population of their selfless martyrdom – but the Honourable Members get a perk that very few invisible pen-pusher ever manage to muster, the ultimate aphrodisiac – power.

Yes, that's the cruel reality of modern politics – they don't just do it for the money! In fact, for the amount of power, prestige, kudos, clout and opportunities to clean up in a private corporate sector so cruelly denied a member's obviously superior talents for so long it is quite probable that a lot of them would do it for nothing but, as this would swing us back 100 years or so, Elroy proposes that MPs be put on pay scale and super benefits equal to nurses, teachers, emergency services workers etc. After all, they are all public servants – although nurses, teachers and emergency service workers do actually have recognizable qualifications relevant to their occupations – to do their jobs – and none of them have the access to the power and wealth generating possibilities that await any left-out legislators.

This could have many benefits; it could make sure that nurses, teachers and emergency service workers etc, get paid a reasonable amount and would keep the pollies from becoming their own class – there’d be nothing like rifling the shrapnel jar for tram fare to bring their thinking into line with mainstream concerns.

So why should Abbott and his chums be allowed to bludge off the taxpayer into their dotage? Why do they need the "protection" offered by the Remuneration Tribunal and its wildly generous superannuation scheme? After all, who gets a job for life?

Not the workers. Not anymore. Who gets paid a more than comfortable living wage for doing nothing? Not the unemployed, who the ruling elites now openly admit were lied to for the past twenty years when they were told that the only reason they had no job was that they were too lazy. Abbott even had a term for anyone picky enough to want to choose what it is they do with their life – ‘Job snobs.’

No, the only people who, if they happen to lose their comfy gig, get compensated with a lifetime of supreme taxpayer largesse are politician after merely eight years service are politicians, whether or not they go on to live a full and rapacious life revealing state secrets to the corporate concern that bought what principles said pollie might have ever had, so when they waltz out of Parliament House with a fist full of enough super to keep the Grange flowing until the great division bell rings forth in the hereafter, wait an hour and take a fabulously well paid 'consultancy' with whatever private enterprise is closest to the portfolio he has just left hanging in mid-air, they should lose their eight weeks worth.

But the notion that politicians should be subjected to the rules they devise for the rest of us does not sit well with the Mad Monk, nor is he too enamoured of the bootless and unhorsed’s stubborn refusal to fully appreciate his noble sacrifice.

‘They expect their MPs to be celebrities and, at the same time, just like them.’

What’s up Tony? Here’s the news, darl; we don’t expect our MPs to be celebrities – we’d be more than happy to never have to see you at all, to be safe in the knowledge that you are somewhere performing your thankless tasks, for which you are so handsomely remunerated, in the blissful anonymity you so obviously crave – to be, as you say, just like us.

But no, you are thrust, nay, forced, nay, dragged kicking and screaming by galloping horses in front of those prying cameras to explain yourself to the churlish mob. Poor Tone. But I’m interested in why Abbott thinks that being an, um, ‘celebrity’ somehow precludes one from being normal or, as he suggests, ‘just like us’. Are the two really mutually exclusive? And if so, how has he solved his dilemma? Has he remained a normal Joe? Or is he indeed a complete wanker?

But wait! There’s more! In the same breath he continues with

‘…to be content with a fraction of the earnings of corporate high-flyers..'

Golly! This statement presupposes the fact that Tony is of such superior mettle that corporate high-flying was his for the taking, although there is nothing to substantiate this apart from his monstrosity of an ego.

‘while working seven days a week in a hyper-responsible job.’

What? Like every other poor bastard on an AWA? Seven day weeks are nothing unusual anymore thanks to your party’s labour market ‘reforms’ so stop whining and get on with it! And, quite honestly, how is being a politician ‘hyper-responsible’? How is it any more responsible than a thousand other occupations like running a hospital emergency department, a school or a fire department?

As far as Elroy can tell, politicians and particularly conservative politicians take no responsibility whatsoever! Look at the travesties that have occurred over the life of the Liberal government since 1996 – the Waterfront dispute, the Tampa crisis, the Pacific Solution, Woomera and Baxter, DIMIA catastrophes, the Iraq fucking War, AWB, WorkChoices, the Lib/Nat pork barrel, the NT Intervention, David Hicks, the list goes on – and show me one pollie who has ever put their hand up for any of them.

None of our elected servants has ever got up, put down his magnum of Grange and said ‘Yup, that was all my fault, I completely fucked it up and I hereby resign and surrender any rights I may have to my superannuation. I have let myself down, my party down, but most importantly I have let the country down – I don’t deserve anything but your anger and disappointment and I will now dedicated my life outside of the government to righting the wrongs I have committed. Thank you.'

No, what actually happens is they get promoted, moved sideways or sent to arduous locations like Rome or London, but when we remember what Tony really wants to be doing, flying high in a corporate sky, then it all makes sense because this is the standard of responsibility of the corporate world.

Actually, it isn’t. The standard of responsibility in the corporate world is for CEOs to fuck off with more money than can be contained in a fleet of Airbus 380s and put your feet up on a tropical isle and/or 300-room mansion of your choice, which explains why Abbott is so disgruntled. Fuck-up politicians get to say ‘My staff never told me’ and keep their job; fuck-up CEOs get to say ‘My Swiss bank account number is…’ and keep the cash.

But a good whinge never goes astray, and our Tony doesn’t let us down as he puts on his best Jewish grandmother/Joan of Arc hat and grizzles thus:

‘Nothing but the best is good enough from Australian politicians and, the better it becomes, the more zealously voters reserve their right to raise their expectations.’

Wow! Imagine being expected to be good at your job! And that ‘the better it becomes, the more zealously voters reserve their right to raise their expectations’ bit? In the real world we call it ‘productivity’. What a pity Tony’s not on an AWA.

Hey! There’s an idea! AWAs for the pollies! Performance based pay! Individually negotiate a base income, somewhere around $30,000 depending on the individual’s ability to haggle, and then pay bonuses base on pre-determined outcomes and the success of the policies they are proposing.

For instance, if the Minister for Aged Health has a policy to provide X amount of nursing home beds then those beds must eventuate, otherwise the Minister will be out of pocket – that should focus their attention on getting it right – but I’ve got a feeling that they’re going to stay with the decisions of the Remuneration Tribunal, an ‘independent’ three member board featuring such disinterested corporate lapdogs as owner of 2UE, director of BHP and chairman of Energy Australia John Conde. This statutory government body constitutes nothing less than a centralized wage-fixing system, a concept that is very bad for us but apparently tolerable for them. Poor politicians – what they go through!

But dear Tony is not finished with his petard just yet. Not only is he somewhat miffed at having to produce satisfactory results for his employer (Oh! The injustice of it all!), but Abbott is also of the opinion that the seething multitude whom he was called to serve are just plain ungrateful as they contemplate swapping those stout chaps that are performing such great and sterling work as flogging the country off to all comers for a bunch of pinko, rabble-rousing neophytes who think that inflation is something that happens to fund raising balloons.

He is truly mystified by the great uwashed’s disinclination to sing hosannas and re-elect the Liberals for yet another interminable term of office with an 100% majority in both houses and grumbled that the government was being robbed “of the usual reward for being good at its job', forgetting that if 50.001% of the electorate decided that the government wasn’t that good at its job, well, it was goodnight Charlie – not that such an eventuality would see the Mad Monk trotting down to Centrelink mind you, it would just mean that he would have to sit on the…wait for it…opposition benches, and this is obviously beyond the pale. Him! Tony Abbott! Condemned, as former Labor Foreign Minister Gareth ‘Gareth’ Evans called ‘the irrelevancy of opposition’! For shame!

So if this thankless task is just too much for effort for not enough pay, here’s an idea, Tony – don’t do it! Remember what you said?

'But in the end, the best protection for the worker who feels he or she might be under pressure at his job is the chance of another job, the chance of a better job. That is the best protection. Not going off to some judge or Industrial Commission that might order your employer, who you don’t like and he doesn’t like you, to keep you in an unhappy partnership forever.’

So poor Tony’s obviously under pressure at his job, but he won’t be needing the ‘protection’ afforded him by the Remuneration Tribunal –if he finds that his employer doesn’t like him, and on Saturday we’ll find out if that’s the case, he can just fuck off and drive a front-end loader around the open-cut bauxite mines of the wild West in splendid isolation! And it pays better too! Or will that not be quite his speed? Oh my god! He’s not a job snob is he?

Needless to say Tony was born with a full 40-place silver service cutlery set in his capacious gob, and his sense of entitlement is second only to that of Imelda Marcos – if he is what stands between us and the ravages of the free fucking markets then, please, god, protect us from the protectors.

Fascist Watch – One More Minute To Midnight.

2007-10-31T11:09:00.000+08:00

As the USA gets in ever more of a tizzy about ‘Islamofascists’ in general and Iranian ones in particular, attention starts to turn to what exactly is fascism and who, if anybody, is really the fascist now. The bombs are lobbed into both sides of the trenches as the Right point to the Left’s propensity for collectivisation, what the Right sneer at as ‘group-think’ but, quite honestly, on balance it’s not looking good for ol’ Uncle Sam.

The defenders of the status quo, the neo-con nutbags currently trying to rationalize their insanity in the Middle East by suggesting they commit more, claim that they are the true defenders of freedom and, in a text-book demonstration of Fruedian projection, accuse the left of being the heirs of Adolf and Benito.

As ‘evidence’ they squeal that liberals must be fascists because, well, they are vegetarians, they like organic food, and Hitler was a vegetarian wasn’t he? There you go then! Case closed! Indeed, the publisher’s blurb for the forthcoming and highly anticipated tome ‘Liberal Fascism’, a promisingly puzzling screed by Fox News darling and conservative ‘humorist’ Jonah Goldberg which was supposed to be published in April 2005 but whose current release date is now January 2008 and waiting, mentions liberals’ love of free health care and guaranteed jobs, supported abortion, euthanasia, public education, gun control, state-funded aged pensions and a racial quota system in their universities while hating inherited wealth, smoking and the free market as proof of lefties’ desire for totalitarian rule.

Jonah’s somewhat flimsy analogy appears to be premised on the notion that Mussolini was a former socialist and the Nazi Party’s full name is Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or, for the less Krautian among us, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, which apparently means that anyone vaguely progressive must be a fascist! Well, if that makes Elroy a jackbooted blackshirt then show him the way to the next Beirkeller! Who would want to live in a society where people were educated, healthy and employed? Baby-eating fascists! And, of course, liberal leftie treehuggers.

Goldberg happily ignores, or WILL happily ignore, the fact that he once said ‘If someone isn't advocating the murder of millions of people in gas chambers and a global Reich for the White Man you shouldn't assume he's a Nazi and you should know it's pretty damn evil to call him one’, and will attempt to turn white into black; however, as that release date become ever more elusive, Elroy wonders whether Jonah’s little literary sleight of hand is proving just a little tad trickier to perform than originally intended when he started to spend his advance, purely because it is a load of bollocks, and as witness for the defense we present good old Benito Mussolini himself. ‘Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed’ he bloviated in 1932’s The Doctrines Of Fascism ‘to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere’. There. And he should know.

Such are the tactics of the right, from Anne Coulter to David Horowitz and, to be fair, such are the tactics of the left; they concentrate of fascism’s more unpleasant characteristics, the extreme nationalism and all attendant myths, the belief in military aggression, secrecy and propaganda, the confluence of state and corporate power, willingness to jail dissidents, murder scapegoats, pervert elections and seduce a population into submitting to an all-powerful leader who has placed himself above the law, all in the name of God.

Now, it is true to say that doctrinaire communism as practiced by them damned Ruskies also featured some of the above, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone endorsing them at, say, Moveon.org or the Daily Kos or, for that matter Let’s Ask Elroy!™. However, there are many worthy publications bending bookshelves across the civilized world about how the deeply, deeply corrosive policies of the Bush regime are more than reminiscent of those less pleasant characteristics of fascism, and although the Right take the higher moral how-dare-you ground when faced with such accusations, titles such as Goldberg’s level it with the bulldozer of hypocrisy and leave them wide open to whatever slings and arrows outrageous fortune cares to lob their way.

At this point the gentle reader might expect Elroy to launch into a 12,846,826 word rantathon about how the only difference between Bush and Hitler is the length of their respective moustaches (Answer: More than there should be), but he is going to show some uncharacteristic restraint and leave that to Edward Jayne in his wryly amusing 31 Similarities Between Hitler And President Bush, and Naomi Klein’s Fascist America In Ten Easy Steps, two fairly succinct articles to get youse in the mood, 1995’s Eternal Fascism – 14 Ways Of Looking At A Blackshirt by Umberto Eco , a piece echoed in a 2003 article by Dr. Lawrence Britt named The 14 Characteristics Of Fascism and, for a historical perspective, Fascism Part II: The Rise of American Fascism by R.G. Price

(Elroy would also like to highly recommend Klein’s The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and American Fascists – The Christian Right And Its War On America by Chris Hedges.

But enough of theory. ‘It’s all very well blathering on’ I hear you sigh, ‘but is there any solid proof?’ ‘Well’ I retort, ‘what sort of proof would you like? How about legislation passed within the last six months?’

The more observant among you (Yes, I’m looking at you) would have noticed in Elroy’s landmark Webessay Ejected, Neglected And Unelected – Blair, Howard, Bush And What Awaits Us the discussion of George W. Bush signing the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, a piece of legislation which ‘granted him virtual dictatorial powers in the event of a declared Catastrophic National Emergency, such an emergency being defined as ‘any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.’ 

‘In short’ Elroy’s masterwork continues, ‘this Executive Order allows Bush to assume power to direct any and all government and business activities without congressional approval or oversight. He has now put in place power to arbitrarily and unilaterally impose martial law, suspend the Constitution, assume virtual dictatorial power, deploy under his command military forces into U.S. cities to round up citizens declared by his regime to be enemy combatants or security threats, and retain control of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, military personnel, law enforcement agencies and private sector organizations until the CNE is declared over. And who declares the CNE over? That’s right… ’

So why is Elroy hauling over old ground like this? Because the situation has gotten decidedly worse. I draw your attention to the phrase ‘round up citizens declared by his regime to be enemy combatants or security threats’ – who are they? What citizens are to be deemed a security threat?

Enter stage right – H.R. 1955: The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007! This charming spot of legislation is the missing piece in the totalitarian puzzle that helps define just who those unfortunate citizens declared to be enemy combatants or security threats might be and what they will have to do to be one. C’mon, kids – let’s parse a-while!

(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term `violent radicalization' means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.

But what, pray, is an ‘extremist' belief system’? And who decides? Well, funnily enough it is to be a commission appointed by our friends over at the White House and the White House itself that get to say what an extremist belief system happens to be, and Elroy is happy to punt on the chances that it would not include anything concerning James Dobson, Pat Buchanan, Tim LaHaye or R. J. Rushdoony, all of which represent forms of Christianity which make the Taliban look decidedly comfortable and relaxed – No, Elroy is willing to bet the farm that it will be those with a more leftie orientated state of mind who suddenly find themselves to enemies of the state.

But surely this can only refer to any bomb-throwing nutbags caught in the act of fomenting violent revolution? Um…proceed, O gentle reader…

(3) The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.

Uh huh. So merely discussing violence on the internets is enough to secure a free trip to Cuba. But what, according to the act, is ‘violence?’

(4) IDEOLOGICALLY BASED VIOLENCE- The term `ideologically-based violence' means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual's political, religious, or social beliefs.

Suddenly then, the Act becomes The FORCEFUL Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, but force isn’t violence – force could be a strenuous argument, or having to make an unpleasant choice (‘I didn’t want to vote for Kevin Rudd but I was forced to because of Workchoices) but the act is dangerously vague on what both ‘force’ and ‘violence‘ are.

Will it see the jailing of protesters? After all, 100,000 people marching with placards, bullhorns and a worthy cause could be considered pretty forceful, but far be it from Elroy to suggest that the Bush regime distorts and twists language and definitions to suit its agenda.

So, add The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 to The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive and The Military Commissions Act of 2006, another piece of freedom-lovin’™ law that allows ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ to be detained indefinitely, Habeas Corpus be damned, at anyone of over 500 Halliburton detention centers dotted around mainland USA to be subjected to ‘intensive interrogation techniques’, and you create the necessary conditions for a US president to declare martial law just about anytime and imprison just about anybody anywhere and torture them for any amount of time.

Scary, huh? Good job the House Committee on Homeland Security is on the case! Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore), a member of said committee, applied for access to the post-terrorist attack plan for the continuity of government as many of his constituents had complained of a ‘conspiracy’ buried in the fine print, but guess what? Access denied!

‘I just can't believe they're going to deny a member of Congress the right of reviewing how they plan to conduct the government of the United States after a significant terrorist attack’ DeFazio said, ‘I would think that would be relevant to any member of Congress, let alone a member of the Homeland Security Committee…maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right’.

How very reassuring! Thank god, then, that the Democratic Party have the majority in both houses! They should be able to scupper The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 before it makes it to the floor, right? Right?

Um, The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 was passed on Tuesday 404 – 6. Oh dear.

So the fascism watch just moved one more minute to midnight. All the articles of law are now in place, and as there is little point in putting new laws on the books in you don’t intend to use them, Americans should be afraid, very afraid, and heed the words of former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer when he said ‘Americans need to watch what they do, and watch what they say’.

Ah, what a good job the USA is the Home of the Free™!

Blacks Are The New Whites

2007-10-23T16:30:00.000+08:00

On Thursday the 11th of October 'Honest' John Howard, the Australian conservative Prime Minister who is staring down the barrel of electoral obliteration, woke up, copped an overwhelming snoutful of coffee and roses and executed a 180º triple backflip with pike, trout and flounder (degree of difficulty – unknown and unknowable) in declaring his love of the aboriginal people he has just finished finishing off. Once again the constitution was in his sights as he pledged, as he has a wont of doing, to add a preamble to that sacred document this time stating that blackfellas are grouse, that they are our ‘mates’ and that we probably shouldn’t have spent nations the first 150 years hunting them like dogs.

Out of the blue, symbolic reconciliation has become paramount to Dear Leader. It wasn’t so important to him when he officially declared war on black Australia back in 1996 when, as his first act as PM, he attempted to knobble ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) by appointing an administrator, and it was certainly not on his radar when he implanted his vile ’10 point plan’ to gut the High Court’s landmark Wik decision in 1997.

It didn’t put him off the Weaties he eventually wolfed down after sleeping in during 2000’s Bridge Walks for Reconciliation, and neither did he didn’t loose many ZZZs when he hurled the whole concept of reconciliation overboard in 2004 and sent the 'Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Reconciliation’ portfolio the way of button shoes, followed swiftly in 2005 by ATSIC.

There are myriad other examples of his hatred of the aboriginal lobby; Howard has consistently and vehemently denied what he so eloquently termed the ‘Black armband’ view of Australian history and so it is inevitable that those who know that his sobriquet was earned in irony will be fair rolling in the aisles, but the questions they raise are valid. ‘Why now?’ they ask, and ‘What now?’

So, ‘Why now?’ indeed. Elroy is happy enough that Johnny is superficially tottering in the right direction, and Elroy has come up with a quick lucky seven reasons as to why the Honourable may have done so.

1. ‘Look! Over there!’

The first thing that comes to mind is that such a massive dereliction of principle provides a great distraction from the opinion polls that have him languishing somewhere down around the levels of a post-war Hitler or, even worse, a current war George Bush; this magnificent volte-face was perfectly timed to suck up all the available media oxygen and make it all about HIM come his big announcement last Sunday.

2. ‘Shut up! Listen to me! I’m the Prime Minister!...’

Secondly, it put him thoroughly in charge of the agenda. Honest John has been looking more and more like the opposition lately, reacting to whatever bit of socialist madness the Labor Party have proposed or defending themselves against said commie’s scurrilous attacks, but not actually proposing much apart from a promise to dismember federation. However, with this jaw-dropping paean to all things indigenous, Little Johnny is looking decidedly statesmanlike. At last.

3. ‘…but I do have a sensitive side.’

The third reason is that, as his iron vice of a grip starts to weaken and the Liberal Party get a bit bolshy, Honest John recognised the need to lob some meat to the Party’s wet wing and its more swingin’ voters, the infamous doctors’ wives and their ilk who periodically fret about the bootless and unhorsed after lunch with the gals.

This bunch, the teeny ‘l’ faction, have been bulldozed into silence by the marauding economic irrationalists that have held the party hostage since Howard found a copy of Milton Freidman’s Capitalism And Freedom down the back of the couch, but now that the Labor Party have swung so far right that they make Menzies look more like Mao, Howie has had to make a magnificently empty gesture in order to make them think that he ‘cares’ and stop them taking that oh-so-short but significant trip to the dark side and voting for that ‘Nice’ Mr Rudd.

4. ‘See? I do care!’

This pronouncement helps deflect adverse criticism of his indigenous ‘Intervention’ program that has eradicated what small gains aboriginal people have made over the years and subjected them to an unholy panoply of unwarranted sanctions and hoops that the rest of society are not required to jump through. The intervention is apparently all for their own good, if only they would realise it, and it is obvious that Howard only has their best interests at heart because he is going to add them to the constitution, dammit!

5. ‘Nothing in my hands…nothing up my sleeve…presto chango…!’

The beauty of this audacious flip-flop is that it isn’t really one at all; it’s an illusion, a trick, a sleight of hand – the biggest sticking point for the Wee One has been the dreaded ‘sorry’ word and he has no intention of uttering it, but he’s trying to make it look as if he will.

On the Thursday he said ‘I recognise the parlous position of indigenous Australians does have its roots in history and that past injustices have a real legacy in the present’ but he also said ‘I still believe that a collective national apology for past injustice fails to provide the necessary basis to move forward’, which just goes to show how grudging and ultimately vapid his declaration is.

In making this symbolic nod to symbolism he can look like he is doing something while not actually doing much at all which is, ironically, what he has been grizzling about all these years. ‘I said a couple of years ago that part of my problem with the old reconciliation agenda was that it let too many people - particularly in white Australia - off the hook’ he intoned. ‘It let them imagine they could achieve something lasting and profound through symbolic gesture alone, without grappling in a serious, sustained way with the real practical dimensions of indigenous misery.’

Which appears to be exactly what he is doing. If you are in any doubt about the down side of the intervention then you obviously haven’t read It’s A Black Thing, available here, which documents just how devastating it is, but Howard is hoping that the electorate is just going to take his word for it that the intervention is a you-beaut, final solution method of grappling in a serious, sustained way with the real practical dimensions of indigenous misery and that, with his new little cherry on top, the problem will be forever solved.

John Howard is correct when he says that white Australia will be let of the hook, that they can imagine they can achieve something lasting and profound through symbolic gesture alone, without grappling in a serious, sustained way with the real practical dimensions of indigenous misery, because he’s the one doing the gesturing. Aboriginal people have never been in any doubt that reconciliation will require both symbolic and practical approaches, but Honest John is not interested in real reconciliation and never has been – his offer of a referendum to add a preamble recognizing the prior ownership of the land is as useless as his current, er, robust approach to aboriginal affairs.

The one symbolic gesture that aboriginal people actually want, an official ‘sorry’, will ‘only reinforce a culture of victimhood and take us backwards’ according to Howard, which is ironic because that is precisely what the intervention is currently doing. However, what his symbolic gesture is meant to represent is not entirely clear.

The Liberals and their fellow conservative nutbags are constantly reminding us about the importance of the Judeo-Christian moral code, the rule of law and how free lunches will never be a reality for those outside Parliament House, but what they fail to understand is the importance of themselves obeying said moral code, that an important foundation of the aforementioned rule of law is that the fear of retribution does not justify the denial of criminality and that colonialism, whitey’s overlong and really free lunch, did have a price and is still not entirely paid for.

‘Thou shalt not kill’, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’, ‘Love your enemies’, ‘Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me’ – all of these are in Volumes one and two of the Bible’s Greatest Hits, yet when it comes to indigenous affairs they are conspicuous only by their absence. The original inhabitants of Australia have been classed as fauna, shot at, imprisoned, disenfranchised and evicted, robbed, brainwashed and denied their basic human rights for over two hundred years, so it seems like the Judeo-Christian moral code can only applied so far and only when the suits those that trumpet its superiority.

With regards to the rule of law, the powers that be are adamant that it be revered at all times and that its word is final. The High Court is the ultimate arbiter of what is constitutionally correct unless, of course, you are John Howard, in which case you can take any old High Court decision that happens to displease you and legislate it away, particularly if it pertains to aborigines.

That’s what he did with the Wik decision, continuing a long tradition of ignoring the rule of law when it is convenient. From the first fleet onward, various treaties have been broken and legal judgments ignored as the English, their descendants, and whoever else happened to wander over more or less helped themselves.

Murderers and others that flaunt the law are called to account (CEOs and senior politicians excepted); they are not let go because they don’t feel like pleading guilty or don’t think they should, so why should the government be any different? The Liberals claim saying sorry is ‘divisive’, ‘offensive’ and ‘hectoring’ because the current crop of whiteys were not the ones firing the guns, poisoning the flour and stealing the children while at the same time, but just as the representatives of the Swiss Banks that kept the savings of the German Jewry after World War Two were not the hands that signed the passbooks, the banks were still judged to have benefited and ordered to pay restitution. Where is the difference?

Australia has been chowing down on a free lunch that has lasted over 200 years. We are told that the current crop of whiteys enjoying the spoils of oppression may fear that saying sorry will open the floodgates for compensation claims, but the end game of Empire is still being played out where ever the sun never set, from New Zealand to Zimbabwe to Australia to Old Blighty herself, and as long as long as the feeding frenzy continues then the descendents of the oppressed have a legitimate claim against them.

If ‘sorry’ is as uselessly symbolic as the Honest John would have us believe, then why not say it? On the other hand, if ‘sorry’ opens the Commonwealth up to compensation, surely that should be admitted and dealt with in a way which respects the aforementioned Judeo-Christian moral code and rule of law? How can the government duck the long arm of the law and still be regarded as legitimate?

Everybody knows that the indigenous people were treated inhumanly, so to bring the healing of this weeping wound down to a base and vulgar question of mammon is wholly immoral at best and at worst greedy and slothful, not to mention a certain amount of pride, wrath and, to push the boat out somewhat, jealousy, gluttony and lust, but distinctly lacking in the cardinal virtues of faith, hope, charity, prudence, moderation, religion and fortitude. Well done, guys! Not bad going for a Christian nation!

Howard is now taking charge, saying OK, this far but no further, but again he doesn’t get it. He wants to own the issue by defining what he is willing to do, an arrogance which is not lost on aboriginal Australia, but he has so failed to explain why his symbolism is appropriate but another is not, but his offer is merely style over substance, form over content, all froth and no bubble – all tip, to quote Keating, and no iceberg.

To quote Malcolm Fraser, a man who must accept some responsibility for creating the horror show we know as Honest John Howard, the changes to the constitution would be ‘totally meaningless’ until we are told exactly what the changes are to be and, more importantly ‘It means nothing without a 20-year commitment to Aboriginal health, education, housing and also a commitment that will enable Aboriginals to cherish and preserve their own culture’ and that, funnily enough, is strangely missing from Howard’s treaty.

6. ‘Oooh! There’s a bear in there…’

Enough of fifth. Sixth, it is a classic wedge issue. Howard is trying to force Rudd into saying that he WILL say sorry so that Howard can scare the punters with lurid tales of the compensation claims and other racist fear mongering as outlined above (5).

7. ‘Hang on! I’m not quite finished yet! I’ve just got to…’

The last reason is that Howard has an eye to history and his place in it – when the truth of his 11 years of all-out war against Aborigines in general and the Intervention in particular are revealed in their full barbarity Howard will not be regarded too fondly, hence his current sop. He is going against his own advise and trying desperately to stuff a hog with whatever bon-bons and cream he can find prior to its sale, but it’s too late; so many chances to have done the right thing, the right practical thing and the right symbolic thing, have now whistled past his ear and into the garbage compactor of history where he has no hope of dictating what they will be recycled into.

He says this the ‘unfinished business of the nation’, but more importantly for Howard it is the unfinished business of his reign. He knows the jig is up and that history is going to judge him badly on the indigenous issue, particularly after the ‘intervention’ farrago, and so at five to twelve he suddenly slaps his forehead and says ‘Doh! The Abos! Gotta remember – do something about the flaming Abos!’ The word ‘cynical’ does not seem out of place, or even adequate.

But as much as he may admit that this journey to his micro-epiphany has taken in its fair share of ‘sidetracks and dry gullies’, the leader of the party which stresses personal responsibility above all else would like us to know that it is not his fault. No, society is to blame, society and Johnny’s poor old mum and dad. ‘The challenge I have faced around indigenous identity politics’ he lamented to an audience of like-minded stooges, ‘is in part an artefact of who I am and the time in which I grew up.’

The fact that many millions of others that grew up at the same time vehemently disagree with him doesn’t seem to register, so the problem for Johnny is obviously genetic as well as environmental, a subtle blend of nature and nurture against which he is so defenceless.

Far be it from the Little Man to challenge the status quo and orthodox thinking – if it was said to be true then it was true, and much as he might now claim to be challenging the dominant paradigm, all that has happened is that he has found a successor to the conservative values of Faith Bandler and Neville Bonner to legitimise his ureconstructed, old school assimilationism in the shape of Noel Pearson.

Pearson is the kind of Blackfella that Howard loves – a clever gentleman that rose from the stolen generation to become a spokesman for ‘his people’ who rails against welfare dependency and props up other conservative canards. It doesn’t matter that 90% of the other aboriginal leaders are opposed to his views, or that ‘his people’ are not the greater mass of aborigines as imagined by white society but a small group on the York Peninsula in far north Queensland who are quite culturally separate from the people of the Central Desert; what matters that Pearson is an aborigine whose views allow Howard to take the question of indigenous identity politics back to the comfy 1950s where the only blackfella he was likely to see was brandishing a spear on his authentic pokerwork Alice Springs souvenir pipe and slipper rack.

So what happens next? The signs were encouraging, but the day after his bunker-buster Howard held a somewhat qualifying press conference where he denied that it was an election sell out but added ‘I don't believe Labor could unite conservative and progressive Australia on this issue’.

It this kind of veiled threat that makes Howard look so slippery and lacking conviction, as mean and tricky as even his own party have painted him. Does this mean that he would actively fight against the position if he doesn’t get the guernsey? Does it mean that conservatives are such convictionless drips that they would only support reconciliation when their Dear Leader tells them to?

So, Honest John Howard in person and the intervention in general promised aboriginal people both symbolic and practical help but if, God forbid, he somehow manages to crawl back into Kirribilli House, what they will get is the final nail in the creaking coffin of reconciliation with the most meaningless paean the Government could muster in the shape of a couple of lines in an unread preamble to an unread Constitution, a worthless and grudging nod toward their ‘prior stewardship’ or some similar prolix prose, and a short, sharp asset-stripping exercise to finally wipe out what is left of their culture and drive them into the towns and cities in line with Howard’s assimilation agenda.

But if Honest John is sent to CentreLink, will he follow his new-found path and still push for some sort of reconciliation by putting the wedge back in the political tool drawer and bringing conservative Australia with him in bipartisan recognition of That Nice Mr Rudd’s ‘mandate’, finally admit the country is as divided as it was since Captain Cook unpacked his first picnic and attempt to rehabilitate his legacy by eventually, belatedly, at least allowing someone to utter the hardest word?

Or will he take his bat and ball home to XXXX after having used them to smash any attempts by TNMR to say it while perpetuating the conceit that Australia is ‘One tribe’? Time will tell, although there is growing evidence that, after 80,000 odd years, time for indigenous Australia is finally running out.

Australia has been at least two tribes – the colonisers and the aborigines – since 1776, and the only real attempt by the former to make us ‘one tribe’ has been by exterminating the latter. Elroy’s old daddy, Elroy Snr, Elroy the Wiser, Elroy the All-seeing and all-knowing, Elroy the Kind, Wonderful and Generous, always says ‘Trust only movement’, and Howard’s intervention policy is the practical proof, the concrete evidence that Howard knows this ‘One tribe’ malarkey with its ominous overtones of One Nation is so far from the truth to be somewhat laughable but not so far that it cannot be achieved.

The awful truth of John Howard’s relationship with indigenous Australia is that reconciliation is not the unfinished business of the nation – for the conservative elite, the true unfinished business of the nation is the ultimate destruction of black Australia as it disappears into the towering ghettos of inner city disadvantage and cheap houses of the outer suburban sprawl. Howard’s ‘One tribe’ is a project, a work in progress that will see the indigenous people subsumed, assimilated and no longer able to stake their claim; it will mean that blacks are the new whites and the genocide is finally complete.

Dear John...

2007-10-15T17:12:00.000+08:00

Dear John

We are not for sale. Unlike you, we know both the price and the value of everything. Money, it may come as a suprise to know, is not the be all and end all of our existance.

We don’t want tax cuts – we want services. We don’t an extra sandwich – we want schools and hospitals. We don’t want lower top marginal tax rates – we want higher top marginal tax rates. We want you to take your $34 billion of tax cuts and shove ‘em – shove ‘em into health, education, housing and alternative energy sources that don’t include coal or uranium.

We are embarrassed that we have homeless people, working poor, jails full of people whose only crime is to have a mental illness, people who can’t get a bed in a hospital ward, hospital wards full of old people who can’t get a bed in a nursing home and nursing homes full of young people who can’t get a bed anywhere.

We are sick of kids going to schools that can’t afford books next schools with books that the kids can’t afford. We are tired of paying off everyone else’s mortgage. We are sick of not being able to afford our own mortgage. We are over having to pay logging companies to destroy our forests.

We cannot pool our extra $15pw with our neighbours and build a hospital, or a school, or a nursing home –that's your job. Infrastructure. Economies of scale. Look them up.

We are over being lied to, we are over a government that is in the pocket of big business and we are over having to be at war with our fellow man to get ahead.

We are, frankly, over you, Mr Howard. And we’ll probably be over Mr Rudd in a year or two, but he’ll do for now as he is not, thankfully, you.

Bob Brown For President!

Cheers

Elroy

So if not...then what?

2007-10-11T12:05:00.000+08:00

Let’s Ask Elroy!™ has received a message from some old codger in Syd-en-neee concerning Elroy's last post, 'Oils Ain't Oils' that reads...

‘Well done…Nice poetry…making a very good point’

...to which we reply ‘Ta!’ while insolently peering at our fingernails. However, it goes on to ask:

‘On the other hand what do we use if we don’t use Ethanol? Are you going to give up your car?’

...to which we reply ‘Yay! Someone asked Elroy!’.

And a fair enough question; after all, it’s typical of lefty, tree-hugging, vege-munching, Osama-lovin’ freedom loathin’, commie-fuckin’ enviro-nazis to whine endlessly about everything that might not sit 110% with their precious, overblown, sanctimonious sensibilities without ever offering a solution, so here at Let’s Ask Elroy!™ we feel honour bound to break the mould and say that yes, there might be a way around it and that no, I will not have to give up pedaling my car.

It’s not ethanol per se which is the problem, more like what the ethanol is made from. Let Elroy take you somewhere, to an alternative planet where there is a magic plant that can produce four mature crops a year literally anywhere with far more material per acre per crop, which means far more methanol than we can squeeze out the highly subsidized crop of choice for ethanol production – corn.

Unlike corn, this stuff requires little water, less attention and no fertilizers, it produces less Co2 and is far more efficient than methanol made from other substances; it can be grown in rotation with corn and soy and so need not compete outright with it and, furthermore, it can not only be grown on marginal and degraded land that could not support a corn crop but it can also actually rehabilitate that land!

And as a food source it is somewhat miraculous. Its seeds are very high in protein and mineral, are not only low in cholesterol they lower cholesterol, its oil has the most perfect natural balance of essential fatty acids and the second highest level of Omega 3. It also has many medical applications, from pain relief to glaucoma to ameliorating the nauseating side effects of chemotherapy.

And while we’re at it we might as well mention the other things it can do, like make biodegradable plastics, replace timber building materials, make high grade paper, fabrics, and just about anything else you can name in a sustainable manner.

It’s the best proof yet of the existence of God and the best proof yet that mankind is so unbelievably venal, hubristic, proud, vain, judgmental, blind, deaf and stupid that is willing to kill the planet they live on while they kill themselves. Elroy admits that this plant is not going to save the world all on it own, but it would truly help the problems by reducing deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, hunger and poverty and the world’s reliance on chemicals and fossil fuels.

What a shame we don’t have it on this planet. And Elroy knows what you are thinking – if this plant exists on another planet, how does Elroy know about it? And how does he suggest we get it? Well, the planet that this miraculous bush lives on is called Planet Tolerant but unfortunately we live on Planet Prohibition, so we will probably have to wait until we are all half-dead from whatever before we realize that forbidding the cultivation of hemp was such a good idea.

Oils Ain't Oils

2007-10-04T17:32:00.000+08:00

True to his word Elroy has posted twice in a week, and true to his threat he has done it in rhyme. If bad poetry is your love, go no further! However, if this just sets your teeth on edge just a tad too much then Let's Ask Elroy™ to stop immediately.

OK then, here goes. Harruuum. La-deeeez...and...genulmun! I Give youse...

OILS AIN'T OILS.

Planet Earth has been bled dry
The oil is nearly through
Many wells
Are empty shells
So now what do we do?

Let’s all go fuck up the world
Fighting for what’s left
Crushing those
That dare oppose
And leaving them bereft

China wants the Russian slicks
But then, so does Japan
The Yanks attack
Saddam’s I-raq
And ‘liberate’ Iran

Kazakhstan is in the sights
Of Exxon, Shell and Fina
But other voices
Offer choices
That will make us greener

‘Fossil fuels are bad! They say,
They’re melting all the ice!
And people choke
On all the smoke!
It isn’t very nice!

We know there is another way
To make our engines go
Who needs a Sheik
When we can make
Our fuel from what we grow?’

It doesn’t fill the air with smog
It’s so clean when it burns
And unlike crude
It gets renewed –
Each season it returns!’

So what could be the problem?
Let’s plant it right away!
It’s going to charm
Those on the farm
With pay instead of hay!

Making all the fuel we need
Corn and soy and wheat
By the ton
Will mean there’s none
Left for us to eat

But we can grow our foodstuffs
In other peoples’ fields
In lieu of debt
We can jet
All a country yields

Back to where we’re living
And eat it all ourselves
And we won’t share
So people stare
At rows of empty shelves

And when those third world countries
Have all been dispossessed
Of all their land
They’ll all be banned
From moving to the west

Does Ethanol burn cleaner?
It’s dirty stuff to make
It tends to spew
Co2
And chaos in its wake

It takes more energy to make
A gallon of this goo
Than it releases
But it greases
Palms of you-know-who

Coporate vested interests
That stand to rake in stacks
Of subsidies
If you please
Paid for with your tax

To grow the fuel we cut down trees
And burn them then and there
And all the gas
Within their mass
Is sent into the air

And all the Co2 that forests
Normally absorb
Now just flies
Around the skies
Of our blue/green orb

Melting all the glaciers
Filling up the seas
Making more
People poor
To fuel our SUVs

We’re being told we’re helping while
The planet slowly boils
Which goes to show
What we should know
That they know oils ain’t oils

Thanuverimuch!

Dolly Downer's Democratic Dilemma

2007-10-01T07:57:00.000+08:00

ATTENTION...ATTENTION...ATTENTION...ATTENTION...ATTENTION...
There is to be a change in editorial policy at Let’s Ask Elroy!™ In an attempt to remain vaguely relevant and be in the now we shall present more thoughts more often, heaving the ‘Webessay’ format overboard for the time being and becoming snappily tabloidesque although no less opinionated. Expect Elroy to report at least, and he means at least three times a week! Can he do it? The stakes are high...

The longer polemic/rant/screed/diatribe/ may turn up from time to time, but on the whole you’d better stick Let’s Ask Elroy on your bookmark bar and check in daily – who knows what he might hold forth on. So make it part of your breakfast experience, and once again thank you for being part of the exclusive family that is Let’s Ask Elroy!™ That is all.

(Having said that, the following is waaaay too long and a complete abrogation of the new editorial guidelines. Elroy has severely chastised the minion responsible but, as the staff are a bunch of wild and crazy kids who live for the now, don't expect it not to happen again.)

Dolly Downer's Democratic Dilemma

As the footy winds up, the sport of would-be kings is about to lurch out of the home-and-away season and kick into finals mode! Yes, the unelection campaign is nearly over and the quest for the keys to Kirribilli is about to hit high gear, and as it does the Liberal Government’s elite come out fighting in the ultimate festival of the boot, no matter how ridiculous they may sound and look, which leads us to Australian Foreign Minister Alexander ‘Dolly’ Downer and his peculiar notions of democracy.

The government, particularly this one, is very attached to the tri-yearly ballot-box farrago as it means that for the most part they can get on with doing whatever they want to do regardless of whether or not there is any kind of ‘mandate’ for it. The Westminster system of Representative Democracy gives politicians carte blanche to break every pledge they used to get elected in the first place – see Honest John Howard’s infamous 'core' and ‘non-core’ promises – they are unaccountable for around 36 months at a stretch, plenty of time to cause all kinds of damage as they plough the ship of state full steam ahead into iceberg after bloody iceberg.

So it’s no great stretch to see why Westminster-style Representative Democracy is touted by government as the be-all and end-all of societal organization, and although there are often exceptions that let the cat out pf the bag – former Liberal Party candidate and all-round political fruit-loop Pauline Hanson described it as ‘Mob rule’ – it’s not often that Liberal front men, those that are actively prosecuting a war supposedly based on spreading democracy around the Middle East like so much Vegemite, get all muddled about their product.

But Dolly Downer was so keen to deliver a hefty kick at Saint Kevin and his Laboring disciples he wound up sticking the boot into poor old democracy herself and unwittingly promoting an alternative system of government that Elroy thinks sounds far closer to how a society should be constructed. Yes, the truth is that Dolly, the bluest of bloods, knows that representative democracy is a dud for anyone but the ruling classes, and showed his disdain quite clearly On ABC television’s Lateline show last Tuesday.

While defending the fact that, because Australia did not ratify the Koyoto Protocol, we will have no vote at the upcoming Bali climate change conference, Dolly said

‘It's not like some Labor Party branch meeting, you know, all in favour of socialism and 35 put up their hands, all against two put up their hands, OK socialism's adopted. It doesn't work like that.’

Really, Dolly? Y’see, that’s the way it works for the punters back home. In general elections, the House of Representatives and the Senate – the ayes have it! So how does it work when nation states are the electorates?

‘What you do is you sit around in groups, have bilateral meetings, have plenary meetings and you negotiate the type of arrangement that we put in place and hopefully in the end there will be something of a consensus on what kind of an arrangement is put in place.’

Wow! Did you hear that? Let’s parse a-while!

‘What you do is you sit around in groups…’

Mmm. That sounds encouraging. Smaller arrangements of interested parties getting down to the nitty-gritty instead of everyone yelling at each other all together, kind of like having smaller class sizes in schools as opposed to trying to teach the entire school body in the one dining hall. And we all like smaller class sizes, right? So far so good, Dolly – what’s next?

‘…have bilateral meetings, have plenary meetings…’

OK, for us mortals, well, we know what ‘bilateral’ means (my trusty ol’ Oxford defines it as ‘Adjective: 1. Having two sides. 2. Involving two parties), but ‘plenary’? ‘1. Unqualified; absolute. 2. (Of a meeting at a conference or assembly) to be attended by all participants. Thanks for that Word Of The Day, Dolly – and now we know what it actually means!

Ok, so we have all interested parties involved, both or even every side of the argument sits down and no bunking off! No playing hookey! Not like the current situation in the House of Representatives, where most of the members are somewhere else polishing off another crate of Grange, no! Plenary! Everybody must attend! Absolute! No exceptions! And…

‘…and you negotiate the type of arrangement that we put in place and hopefully in the end there will be something of a consensus on what kind of an arrangement is put in place.’

So, a plan is developed through a process of consultation and conciliation by all stakeholders in the hope of finding consensus with the wider body. Terrific! Maybe Dolly is OK after all!

But I know what you’re asking: What else did he say? This visionary, this champion of the people, this democratic revolutionary, did he have more pearls of wisdom to impart? I mean, what is wrong with the obviously crude and distinctly primitive ‘democracy’ that he and is kind insists be adopted around the world? Hmm, Dolly?

‘After all, if you just have a vote and some countries vote against a particular proposition, you can't force those countries that have voted against a proposition to embrace it. It doesn't work like that.’

But again, that's the way it works for us. It works like that here. The constituencies that vote against a motion or a piece of legislation don’t get to reject it; we still have WorkChoices here in Melbourne Ports, no matter how our local member may have voted. So how does it work there?

‘What happens is that, and what should happen, is that there is an effort to put together an international agreement and that is what's in the best interests of the world.’

That is what should happen! Damn straight!

‘When you were talking at the beginning about the importance of this meeting, it's not going to be much of a meeting if it's conducted like some sort of Labor Party branch meeting.’

Maybe we should once again remind the Honourable Member for Mayo that meetings ‘conducted like some sort of Labor Party branch meeting’ are eerily similar to those held by that other rabble, the Australian Federal Government’s House of Representatives, and has even been known to have tried by the Liberal Party themselves! Fancy! Does Dolly know?

Is there any reason that Australia doesn’t organize it’s affairs this way? That we don’t have, say, an arrangement whereby all the political representatives of an electorate could have bilateral and plenary meetings to negotiate agreements so that delegates could reach a consensus? And that those that do agree with those agreements are not bound by them?

This would eradicate the kind of politics we have now where approximately 50% of the electorate are saddled with policies that they are vehemently opposed to, where one party is free to indulge in ideological excess and free to govern for the benefit of the vested interests that put them there.

The sky’s the limit! Using Dolly’s preferred formula, that vintage, nay, veteran democratic vehicle we all lumber along could be restored and renovated, hot-rodded for the new millennium! That old bus is hundreds of years old! It’s a steam-powered, string-driven, two-wheeled, us-or-them, black-or-white thingamajig that could really do with some radical revamping! It’s the 21st Century, man – let’s build a democratic process that provides a voice for everyone!

There is no shortage of ideas on what to do instead – ‘voting theory' is a branch of political science that has been actively discussed since the 18th Century and democracy comes in many forms – but if the international community has found a better way, why not us? Why, Dolly, can’t we mere mortals organize our affairs like you and your diplomatic chums?

‘It's got to be conducted in a sophisticated way by sophisticated people addressing a truly important issue.’

And we are what, Dolly?

So can we look forward to some radical interpretations of democratic theory from Alexander ‘Dolly’ Dower during the election campaign? Can we expect him to agitate for change so that the interests of the great unwashed of Goddamorgidge ride in a style suitable for the upper echelons of the ruling classes? Or will they yet again get to lollop along in the venerable old ‘bus that’s wheeled out every three years to such fanfare and mock delight?

Elroy's going with the bus, because Dolly Downer's democratic dilemma is that although he knows full well that bus is broken, he also knows that because his grip on the reins of power depend on it he must keep telling us that it is fully operational and all of its circuits are functioning perfectly. He tells us one thing while believing another, and if that isn't lying then it is at the least a dereliction of principles, and is that what we want from our elected leaders? Elroy's thinking 'No'.

It's A Black Thing.

2007-08-07T15:02:00.001+08:00

The Australian Federal Government's response to the child abuse scandals in indigenous communities is heavy handed and lacks the very element crucial to it's success - consulation. Unfortunately, this is a message Prime Minister John Howard does not, or will not, understand.

The indigenous people of Australia are a long-suffering mob. Since 1788 thy have been systematically murdered and robbed, dispossessed and treated as second if not third rate citizens. Years of neglect by successive Federal Governments, particularly the current one who refused point blank to seize the day and apologize in the spirit of reconciliation, has resulted in a breakdown of aboriginal health, education and housing, and the horror of rampant child abuse, alcoholism, and domestic violence.

The Little Children Are Sacred, a report prepared by indigenous health expert Pat Anderson and QC Rex Wild, highlighted the wretchedness of the situation and offered ninety-seven recommendations for how it could and should be rectified. To the authors’ great surprise, the Howard Federal Government leapt into action and John Howard, ignoring his great hero Ronald Reagan’s famous edict ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”’ and announced that he is from the government and he is here to help.

The last time indigenous children were ostensibly ‘saved’ by Federal Government intervention it turned out to be all part of a concerted effort to ‘breed out the black’ so no wonder the indigenous population is a tad nervous, but suddenly the condition of aborigines became first priority for Honest John Howard.

However, in classic conservative style, Howard ignored all ninety-seven of the bleeding hearts’ ‘expert’ proposals, much to the disappointment of Anderson and Wild. ‘Let me say’ said Anderson, ‘there is not a single action that the commonwealth has taken so far that corresponds with a single recommendation…there is no relationship between this emergency protection and what's in our report.’

Anyway, Howard has declared the whole thing a ‘national emergency’ and come up with his own somewhat more ‘practical’ remedies, like ‘restoring law and order’; He obviously thought that Pat and Rex were missing out on a perfectly good opportunity to do a little shock and awe, and literally sent in the cavalry. ‘We argue’ sniffed the PM, “that our intervention plan is the way to respond’.

Anderson, however, is less than impressed; ‘When we turned the TV on and saw the troops roll into the Northern Territory’ said Ms Anderson, ‘we were just sort of devastated to think that that could happen, so we feel sort of betrayed and disappointed, hurt and angry and pretty pissed off all at the same time.’

And neither is Rex wild about Howard’s way. ‘We arranged meetings, we told people about them’ explained Rex, ‘that we were coming and why we were coming. ‘We arrived quietly with courtesy and politeness’ said Wild, ‘We didn't arrive unannounced in helicopters, we didn't arrive in gunships, we didn't arrive in tanks or trucks’

Contrary to the Liberal’s core belief of an individual’s right to choose Howard’s fix is a one size fits all, take it or, er, take it proposition. Communities with absolutely no record of child abuse, or that have controlled their alcoholism, are being targeted as if they are as dysfunctional as the worst of them and they are rightfully horrified at being stigmatized as child molesters. They are being treated with the sort of one-you-has-ruined-it-for-everybody routine that would be more at home in a kindergarten; it is patronizing, paternalist, racist and should be stopped. However, this is John Howard we’re talking about…

Anyhoo, there are seven main planks that the blackfellas will have to walk, seven main aims which are:

1) To perform compulsory health checks.

2) To ‘quarantine’ dole payments so that parents feed their children properly and get them to school.

3) To boost employment opportunities for aborigines.

4) To outlaw X-rated porn

5) To outlaw alcohol.

6) To lease aboriginal lands.

7) To abolish the entry permit system.

Many argue that Howard’s plan is racist in that is inflicting draconian measures on only one section of the community based on the colour of their skin and/or cultural practices; Howard’s scheme is discriminatory and therefore, QED, racist. It is pointed out that child abuse is pretty rife in the wider white community too, as is drinking and wanking to X-rated video nasties, but no one has mentioned that the rest of us must also be subjected to these same sanctions.

And this perception hasn’t been helped by the president of the Northern Territory AMA, who wrote a letter to Health Minister Tony Abbott stating that as Aborigines do not have ‘processes, accountability or any form of formal management structure in their culture’ then ‘Caucasians…need to exert some mild dictatorship into the management of aboriginal healthcare’. The ‘major error’, he opines, ‘started from the time self-determination was returned to the Aboriginal people some 40 years ago’.

Golly! Imagine! Returning self-determination! Why did we ever get rid of those nice missionaries! That’s the thing about dealing with fuzzy-wuzzies – you’ve got to show them who’s boss! Oh, why can’t they just be more like us!
The good doctor then compounded his stupidity by entering into a certain amount subterfuge about the use of the dreaded ‘D’ word; ‘neither you nor I’, he whispered, ‘must ever use this word publicly’ but worryingly, now that it is out in the open, it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Local good ol’ boy Dave Tollner, Country Liberal Party member of the house of representatives, didn’t have much a problem with it – he was actually CC’ed a copy – and worst of all, neither does Mal Brough, the hapless bastard of a Minister who has to implement Howard’s little land grab; he says that Beaumont was ‘frustrated’, and the AMA are quite happy too. ‘Peter’, sniffed AMA national president Rosanna Capolingua draws us to the attention of many issues’ – like he’s a complete and utter fucking racist – ‘and I am very proud that he continues to want to represent the AMA.’ Oh. So that’s all right then.

The trouble is with Howard solution, or solutions, is they’re all madness, and every one of Howard’s answers will result in the exact opposite of what is purportedly trying to achieve. Let’s take a peek.

1) Performing compulsory health checks.

It turns out the compulsory health checks would constitute assault, so it’s back to the drawing board with that one.

2) Quarantining dole payments.

This one has hit some rocks along the road. The government swears that the greater community will be also exposed to this privation, although there are no details available no how this will be accomplished nor how taking money away from people will improve their diets.

However, for aborigines to eat properly they might need something proper to eat. Decent fresh food is not simply not available in the remote communities Howard is trying to target, and when it is it’s wildly expensive, so how anyone is supposed to buy it when their income has been halved is beyond me.

Furthermore, although the getting the kiddies into school is a laudable enough concept, the schools on many, if not most, of these communities are incapable of physically fitting them all in, let alone seating them, let alone finding someone to teach them. Or maybe we should take up Noel Pearson’s idea and send them all of those black kids to the leafy city suburbs’ elite boarding schools.

3) Boosting employment opportunities.

It is a constant grumble of the migrant community (the rest of Australia) that indigenous Australians should get with the program and BE LIKE US! Why they should be like us no one can really say – it’s not as if they asked for our culture to be imposed upon them, or begged to be poisoned and shot, or pleaded to be rounded up and imprisoned on missions and settlements, or demanded that they not be counted on the census, or requested that their tribes, clans and culture be deliberately mixed up and obliterated – but no matter! Mal to the rescue!

The current concern is that if aborigines don’t work they become ‘welfare dependent’ but it may come to a surprise to white Australia but the indigenous folk agree. ‘Aboriginal people are worried about their kids’ said Anderson, ‘but they want to be part of the solution not merely to be passive recipients. The days of being passive recipients are over, absolutely over. That isn't going to work, that hasn't worked.’

That indigenous Australians should get a job has been an article of faith for the invaders since 1789, and in 1977 the highly successful Community Development Program (CDEP) was introduced to help communities by employing their inhabitants for twenty hours a week and paying them for it. Not much, a little more than the dole, but with the various extra payments available to those involved in viable operations, the 35,000 people on the CDEP were able to carve a living and not be part of the unemployment statistics.

The CDEP is working; communities have locally run stores, garages, all manner of things going on that employ something like 35,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders across the country, empowering those who volunteer to be involved and providing a gateway to employment outside of the scheme.

As a result, people are making financial commitments and breaking out of the ‘welfare dependency’ trap that conservatives wail about from dawn ‘til dusk. Who knows? If the blackfellas keep this up they might even make Howard’s wettest dream come true and start getting mortgages! They’re becoming…more like us!

So Mal is ramping up this proven success in order to achieve the government’s objective forging an independent and self-motivated indigenous population that will flourish in the face of the 21st Century’s harsh realities, yes?

Er, no. In fact, the government is so hell-bent on punishment as a way looking tough for the edification of the white electorate that, when they were told that ‘quarantining’ the money earned CDEP participants was actually illegal because it is not ‘welfare’ as such, well, Brough just took the 8,000 CDEP employees in the Northern Territory sacked ‘em and stuck ‘em on the dole!

Now that is one progressive policy! Now they are all on Newstart, instead of being allowed to earn money they are being penalized for it as deductions from the Newstart allowance begin after twenty bucks a week has been earned. This means that loans will be defaulted on, money will be a whole lot tighter, people will be angry, let down, depressed, and who will bear the brunt of this? The kids and their mothers, the very people the ‘strategy’ is supposed to help. Welcome to compassionate conservatism, Aussie style! Way to end welfare dependency!

4) Outlawing X-rated porn

The X-rated material is either illegal anyway, having been distributed by illicit traders in the Northern Territory, and as a result is far more graphic and violent than the legal, classified variety, but such is the price of prohibition, or is beamed in via the Austar satellite Pay TV service.
With regards to the first component of the porn problem, all good capitalists know that a demand will result in a supply, that is, if people want porn they will get it, so if classified porn is easily available it will reduce the supply of unclassified porn. Contain and control (More on this coming up on Let’s Ask Elroy!™ real soon!).

The second bit may be trickier. The Austar satellite has two adult channels and Elroy is looking forward to seeing John Howard go in to bat for the future of indigenous kiddies with Austar’s majority shareholder, the quietly achieving media magnate billionaire John C. Malone, a man known in the cable industry, due to his understanding nature, as Darth Vader, as Elroy knows that Howard loves nothing better than showing media magnate billionaires who’s boss.

5) Outlawing alcohol.

The alcohol ban is way stickier. The vast majority of NT communities are dry already, due in the main to agitation from indigenous women, except for the drinking permits granted to white teachers, policemen etc that may work there. This system does rankle deeply with many indigenous denizens of said communities as it is, quite obviously, racist, so the question is whether the Feds are going to stop that practice as well?

But if the communities are for the most part dry, how does the grog get there? From the big towns, roadhouses, corner shops and petrol stations, but the chances of them being subject to the kind of draconian regulation that would be required is negligible – indeed, the liquor outlets have fought tooth and nail against any restriction to their trade, no matter what effect on the local population, and not without some success.

So here’s Mal’s latest genius idea: allow, nay, FORCE the hitherto dry communities to open ‘wet’ canteens! That’s right! The Liberal/National coalition’s brilliant scheme to eradicate drinking in the communities is to, er, introduce drinking to the communities.

Now, Elroy is no fan of prohibition (more on that in an upcoming Let’s Ask Elroy!™ special investigation), but if a population of a community is overwhelmingly in favour of it, then who is anyone to argue? The point is, many communities have discovered that the ready availability of alcohol has been a disaster, and so have tried hard to stop it, and it is those initiatives that the Government is intent on overturning.

This is a complicated issue, and Elroy is treading a very thin wire to avoid quite valid accusations of hypocrisy. In most cases, but by no means all, Elroy holds that prohibition does not work, and in indigenous communities this is still true – those that really want alcohol will get it – but the difference is that communities choose an alcohol ban for themselves instead of having it imposed upon them.

There is, of course, another angle as to why communities desperate to stay dry must become wet. The trouble is that aborigines that want to drink have the nerve to come into town to do it! In a pub! Well, as that’s just plain not nice for the tourists, white chambers of commerce across the NT have been trying for years to keep them darkies on the missions and settlements and out of the towns, and they think the ‘wet canteen’ would be a perfect solution. The white pub owners would be perfectly happy to ferry the grog out there, at a price, cleaning up the streets and the dole cheques while they’re at it, so when you read that Howard wants to institute ‘new alcohol restrictions’, remember that means new alcohol restrictions in white communities.

6) Leasing aboriginal lands.

The Howard Government intends to ‘lease’ Aboriginal communities from the relevant Land Councils for five years, after which time Howard says that the lands will be returned unless they’re not. ‘We are not going to take anybody’s land’ he sniffed the other day, ‘without just compensation’, and any suggestions of a land grab were sneered off as ‘Ludicrous!’

And just to show he meant it, he repeated himself. ‘The purpose of this is not to violate people’s land rights’ we weaseled, ‘the purpose of this is get control of these townships and if there is any disturbance of title’ – Uh oh! Title disturbance alert! – ‘just compensation will be paid’.

Disturbance of title? A curious turn of phrase, no? Well, he sure meant it, meant it so much he said it again. ‘We are leasing the land for five years and then it goes back’ he condescended, ‘and if there is any disturbance of title involved in that there’ll be, er, compensation paid.’ Never mind if the communities don’t want to lease it it’s going to be leased anyhow –What’s all that mewling that conservatives do about the sanctity of property rights?

Howard knows exactly what he is saying – he is a wizard with the weasel word, a Sultan of semantics – because he hardly ever says anything he does not mean. He is the lord of linguistic smoke and mirrors, of plausible deniability, of sounding like he said one thing when he really meant the opposite, a paragon of parsing. He is a creature of the law, and knows as well as any other suburban solicitor just how malleable the letter of law can be.

Anyhoo, if there is one mob that really deserves that land, one mob that Howard owes above all others it’s not the voters of Bennelong, it’s the miners, and on crown land, well – they’re more than welcome! Shame about those sacred sites and that, but hey! We’re progressing here!

7) Abolishing the entry permit system.

The last part of the equation is the entry permit system, which the government seeks to abolish. This is pure ideology; John Howard just seems narked that Aboriginal communities get to say ‘We choose who comes to our country and the circumstances in which they come’ about their patches of dirt when Howard cannot do the same in Bennelong.

He said the same about Australia when it came to bombed out Afghans clinging to the side of a sinking bathtub, and circumnavigates the irony that had the indigenous population said ‘We choose who comes to our country and the circumstances in which they come’ to Captain Cook they might be in better shape today; instead, Howard insists on maintaining the conceit that Australia is one country and will demands that black Australia become white.

It all gets particularly loopy when the Liberal Party starts accusing the left, and Aborigines, of being ‘racist’ for arguing for a system that, on the surface, promotes inequality. Apparently it is un-Australian to lock our indigenous brothers and sisters up in outback ghettos and really, if the left had any heart at all, they would understand that what the blackfellas really need is some input from the rest of modern day Australia; not only that, throwing the permit system on the municipal tip of paternalism would mean greater scrutiny for evil doers who might be tempted to roam around the outer bush doing evil.

But that’s the point. After the Aborigines’ previous experiences of white mans’ input, Elroy cannot blame them for wanting to keep whitey as far away as possible but, as usual, logic has taken a holiday. The indigenous folk say that, contrary to John Howard’s educated and knowledgeable opinion, the best way to keep evil doers at bay is with – get this – a permit system!

Yup, the locals have the bizarre notion that being able to screen who can visit their isolated communities actually reduces the evil done to them by evil doers and even the police, not known for taking a blackfella’s side when a little oppression is in the air, agree! However, it seems that a community on Bathurst Island, rife with youth suicide and alcohol abuse, has been offered to keep their permit system in place if they sign a 99-year lease, so suddenly permits and all the little children are not as important as land. Why is Elroy not surprised?

Unfortunately for the communities however, the wagon trains are a-circling on the prairies as people doomed to forever wander a sunburnt country, the lost tribe of Australis known as Nomadus Greyus, look for a promised land to put their barbeque sets and park the Winnebago, ask for directions to the toilet block and where they can buy some fresh Tupperware, purchase doilies and air freshener.

Some forward reconnaissance backpackers have already been spotted asking the whereabouts of the local Centrelink office in the more remote locations, and nomads have started campervanning where no white man has campervanned before, despite the relevant legislation not having been passed yet. ‘Oh’ dithered the oldies, ‘we’d heard that we the permits had been scrapped’ as they putted around the perplexed peoples of the pittianhajara, ignoring the fact that they were in breach of the law and liable to be fined $1000 a day. Elroy always thought that oldies respected the rule of law, but it seems they follow the example of their man Howard and disobey if he says to do so.

Not that the grey nomads and backpackers are necessarily evil doers, but where goeth the Jayco Heritage so goeth the bootleggers, pornographers and miners both off duty and on. The Government says it is all for the aborigines own good, but has so far failed to reveal how exactly that will be achieved; meanwhile, forty years of land rights struggle is about to be undone as a favour to the mining chums, and forty thousand years of culture is about to breath its last.

So, in short, in order to save kiddies form child abuse the Howard Government is going to perform common assault on all aboriginal kiddies in the Northern Territory, to get them to schools that don’t exist and eat food they can’t afford the government is going to take their money, to boost employment and reduce welfare dependency the people will all be sacked and put on welfare, to outlaw porn the government will allow 24 hour sex channels on satellite TV, to outlaw alcohol the government will open ‘wet canteens’ on dry communities, to encourage self-determination the government will steal, er, ‘lease’ aboriginal lands, and to keep the bootleg alcohol and pornography out of the communities the government will abolish the entry permit system that keeps bootleg alcohol and pornography out of the communities. Excellent! What are waiting for!

Elroy is not suggesting for one second that the indigenous population don’t need help – they do – and Pat Anderson recognizes that it will take the logistical and financial heft of the Feds, saying ‘We needed the assistance of the federal government that had the bigger cheque book’; she knows that the problem of land rights, substance abuse, housing, education and health care will take years, generations, to improve, and millions of billions of dollars to enable that improvement, but Mal Brough says that the report’s ninety-seven recommendations along these lines are ‘band-aid solutions’; far better, obviously, to go with John Howard’s timeline of ‘six months’ and dollar expenditure in the ‘tens of millions’.

To be fair, the government has revised his guesstimate to $500 million per year and Howard now says ‘This will take a number of years, it will be expensive, it will be very costly’ but it is still not enough, and the haste with which this is all being cobbled together belie the possibility that the Howard Government, with an election merely months away, are actually serious about this mission.

The legislation is in the post, but a last-ditch effort by people who have no place at the table in this debate, those who actually know what they are talking about, is being made to head the postman off at the pass. A high-powered delegation spearheaded by Pat Turner, former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment Coordinator and John Ah Kit, former NT government minister, is barreling off to Parliament House in an attempt to talk the government into taking a few deep breaths and, uh, thinking about it all a little bit more.

The government has pulled out all the hairdryers to try dry the ink on the 500 page legislation before the vote today, Tuesday, before the rest of the House of Representatives have even had a chance to spill their coffee on it. This is a huge constitutional shift, a major alteration in the Federal/State relationship but it is not even being allowed to go to a one-day inquiry by a Senate committee because, according to Mal ‘It'll only have the accusation that this is insufficient time.’ So apart from thinking that it is perfectly acceptable for him to second guess the Upper House and nominate himself as a one-man senate, what Mal is saying is that isn’t time for the senate to consider this legislation and to tell him that there isn’t time pass it. Viva democracia!

The delegation is also going after the opposition, whose me-tooism is not helping. ‘Federal Labor's job is to distinguish itself from the conservatism of Howard's government’, said Pat Turner,‘It has to show the people of Australia that it has backbone, that it is prepared to lead a proper united Australia that all stands for a fair go. The Labor party has to differentiate itself. It cannot hide behind the excuse of avoiding wedge politics.’

Politics, of course, is what the whole thing is about, and it all feeds into Howard’s brand new War on States. He says that his intervention is ‘an example of where a function that was meant to be carried out by states and territories has not been carried out, and it has been necessary for the federal government to intervene’, which means that he is being deliberately antagonistic, which means that aborigines are but a political football. Again.

In the end, no one in the government has been able to convince anybody except themselves of how any of these measures will prevent child abuse. There are methods but they will require extensive consultation, education, and lots and lots of time. One point The Little Children Are Sacred report stresses over and over again is that a top-down, fly-in/fly-out, Canberra driven response is the one sure way of guaranteeing failure, but Elroy is thinking that Howard is just planning ahead.

If, through some gaping vent in the space-time continuum, Howard makes it back to Kirribilli then this little initiative will quietly fade away. However, if sanity prevails and the PM is sent checking out the Twighlight Home for the Terminally Vanquished, whoever comprises the opposition can deride the ALP for not doing enough, or doing too much, or not doing it right, all the while knowing that, given the legislation they had bequeathed Labor, Rudd had no chance of success and that the sacred little children would not be saved.

The thing is, it does not have to be this painful. Among The Little Children Are Sacred report’s ninety-seen ignored recommendations are exhortations to improve school attendance; provide education campaigns on child sexual abuse and how to stop it; reduce alcohol consumption in Aboriginal communities; build greater trust between Government departments, the police and Aboriginal communities; strengthen family support services; empower Aboriginal communities to take more control and make decisions about the future; and appoint a senior, independent person who can focus on the interests and wellbeing of children and young people, review issues and report to Parliament.

Finally, after making such a fuss about actually asking the indigenous people what they think would be effective and working with them as opposed to at them, the last word goes to The Combined Aboriginal Organizations of the Northern Territory, who have released an alternative Emergency Response and Development Plan to protect Aboriginal children.

The plan is a comprehensive approach that gives priority to protection from immediate physical or emotional harm but also addresses underlying issues including housing, health care and education.

Unlike the current Government approach the Combined Aboriginal Organisations' plan builds on the recommendations of the Little Children are Sacred report and programs that are already working in Aboriginal communities. It adopts a partnership approach between Government and Aboriginal people and would strengthen the governance and capacity of Aboriginal communities.

It envisages the creation of a national lead agency to implement the plan and an independent monitoring and evaluation body to report on progress.

There are 68 actions in the plan ranging from developing an emergency response in conjunction with Aboriginal community representatives, boosting child protection services, proper training of a permanent police presence in communities, tackling alcohol take away sales and buyback of existing hotel licenses and improved schooling strategies to trauma counseling for victims of abuse.

Australians for Native Title and Reconcilliation (ANTaR )considers that this plan has a far greater chance of success than the current Government approach. We urge the Federal Government and Opposition to adopt the plan in a bipartisan manner.

There. Simple really, but John Howard would never understand – it’s a black thing.

The Oils Of War.

2007-07-11T14:15:00.000+08:00

Truth maybe war’s first casualty but every now and then the fog lifts and truth is allowed to come blinking into the sunlight. The left have been positively ladling out ‘latte and showering in Chardonnay since Australian Federal Minister of Defence Brendan John Nelson intimated on Thursday that the Iraq war was, at least in part, over oil, and proving what the anti-war brigade have been yelling for years.

Then the Prime Minister, of all people, later on the same day said much the same thing, but of course the government have been in damage control ever since and denied that they meant what is was they so definitely said. So what did they say, exactly? Let’s take a peek.

Nelson kicked off this uncharacteristic chaos on ABC radio on Thursday morning when, according to The Age newspaper, he said

‘The defence update we're releasing today sets out many priorities for Australia's defence and security, and resource security is one of them...the entire (Middle East) region is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world. Australians and all of us need to think well what would happen if there were a premature withdrawal from Iraq?’

Seems fairly straightforward. Later on, Prime Minister ‘Honest’ John Howard said much the same thing to an Australian Strategic Policy Institute conference:

‘Many of the key strategic trends I have mentioned, including terrorism and extremism, challenging demographics, WMD aspirations, energy demand and great power competition, converge in the Middle East…our major ally and our most
important economic partners have crucial interests there.’

So with the pussycat merrily playing tag among the stool pigeons, Peter ‘Tip’* Costello, Federal Treasurer and all-round gutless wonder, was quickly on the case.

‘We're fighting for something much more important here than oil – this is about democracy and freedom in the Middle East.’

Ah, that’s better! Back on message! And by Thursday Honest John had evidently executed a swift 180 with pike by Thursday arvo and let fly with a little salvo on himself:

‘We are not there because of oil and we didn't go there because of oil, and we don't remain there because of oil…the reason we remain there is that we want to give the people of Iraq a possibility of embracing democracy.’

What became of ‘terrorism and extremism, challenging demographics, WMD aspirations, energy demand and great power competition’ we can only wonder, but that’s Johnny for you.

Tip continued to, as King George II would put it, ‘catapult the propaganda’ on the ABC’s Sunday morning political gossip show thusly:

‘What Brendan was talking about was a different point, the point that was made in the security update that the globe has an interest in energy security.'

Sounds like the point to Elroy. However, the message seems to be that Nelson didn’t say what he said, he said something else that was exactly the same thing as what he said only different and Nelson agrees – on the Friday he was at it too.

‘People should hose themselves down in Australia; I think elements of the media and those in some political parties who are always engaged in political opportunism (should) look very carefully at every word that I said yesterday. Iraq is not, nor has ever been about oil.’

That’s all very well, but of course Nelson cannot be trusted in any matter at all – he was contradicted by his Prime Minister and so then immediately contradicted himself. He has no shame, no principles and absolutely no common sense, but we should not be surprised; after all, this is the guy who, back in the days when he thought being a member of the Labor Party would better suit his ambitions, was once famously filmed at a student rally shouting, at the top of his, voice, ‘I HAVE NEVER VOTED LIBERAL IN MY LIFE!’

It seems Brendan has always lacked the power of his convictions; he only became a medical practitioner after he found he was too old to be a policeman and too randy to be a priest, and it was this choice of profession which led to him becoming Tasmanian State President of the Australian Medical Association by 1990 and falling under the powerful influence of conservative warrior and AMA Federal President Bruce Shepard.

He became Federal President of the AMA in 1993, and this proved to be a turning point for Nelson; his former medical partner and future Labor politician David Crean sighed ‘I think had he not been in the AMA, his political choice might have been different’, and the professor of public health at Sydney University, Simon Chapman reminisced: ‘In his AMA days he came across as a social wet, a guy who would speak up for oppressed groups and was extremely good at it … there was no sense that it was an act. I would find it astonishing if the private man didn't still subscribe to a lot of the values he championed those years ago.’

He claims that he was voting Liberal as far back as 1987, even though he was a paid-up member of Labor until 1991, but after his 1994 pre-selection bid for the safe Labor seat of Denison in Tasmania was rejected, Nelson did the honourable thing and got Shepard to intimidate the sitting member for Bradfield before a pre-selection battle for that blue-ribbon Liberal seat which saw Nelson only just fall over the line. He then transformed himself into a vanguard of the neo-liberals, a hard-core economic rationalist of no fixed opinion – ‘an example’ said Sydney University's vice-chancellor Professor Gavin Brown, ‘of ambition overriding principle’.

Brendan Nelson used to be two thumbs aloft for abortion rights, land rights, injecting rooms and foreign aid, and two thumbs down for mandatory detention, but all of a sudden he was mad keen on state schools having mandatory flag-flying and Intelligent Design while handing their funding to the elite private ones, so what happened? ‘He's done a Faustian deal with the driest dries in the Liberal Party’ said one ex-ally. ‘You do all this stuff … and we'll give you power.’

So is Nelson merely a conviction-free turncoat or a lying scumbag quite happy to swap principles for privilege? ‘The Nelson of today is totally manufactured’ offered fellow Liberal Greg Barns ‘I think if he's honest with himself, you would see a sort of centrist with a social liberal side’, and Dick Shearman of the Independent Education Union declared that Nelson had been ‘compromised by the general attitudes of the Government and doesn't want to be seen as soft’

Confused? So is Brendan. His attempts to remodel himself as a hard-man of the Right has seen REAL hard men of the Right label him a ‘political hermaphrodite’, but what of the great man himself? ‘I would feel equally comfortable as a moderate Liberal” he stated unequivocally in 1994, ‘as I would in the Labor Right…I still have the same views, but I promote them where it's appropriate.’ Where that is exactly is unclear, but Elroy is waiting patiently for the day that they are promoted. Appropriately, of course.

But whatever his lack of principles and core beliefs, Brendan Nelson is known to be a stickler for whatever detail any given portfolio he is pointed at contains. He is nothing if not thorough so these admissions of his do not reflect a lack of understanding; rather they reflect the lack of a political compass, and his subsequent 180 reflects the fact that he will twist in whatever way the winds of his ambition may blow him.

His efforts to completely rewrite history within a twenty-four hour period merely reflects just how arrogant Nelson has become but, as Elroy is so very fair, let’s do as the good doctor suggests and look very carefully at every word that he said yesterday.

‘The defence update we're releasing today sets out many priorities for Australia's defence and security’

OK, that’s pretty clear then. Australia’s defence and security priorities are being set out in the release of a defence update. Everyone on board with that? No arguments?

‘…and resource security is one of them’

What did he say? Resource security is one of them? One of what? Well, if we look very carefully at every word, as Doc Nelson suggested we do, we can only surmise that resource security is a priority for Australia or, to put it anther way, a priority for Australia is to secure, and to have security in, the supply of resources.

OK, so far so good. Ensuring resource security is a priority. But what resources? Jelly beans? Cough medicine? ’45 Chateau Latffite? Maybe the Brendan will be so kind as to…

‘The entire (Middle East) region is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world.’

Ah! Thank you doctor! Let’s look, indeed, very carefully. ‘The entire (Middle East) region…’ That’s a region not in what was known as the ‘Far East’, China etc, or East, Hungary, Romania etc, but somewhere in between the two, in the middle if you will. Iraq is a country in the Middle East, and that’s where we’re having the war, kids – Iraq. No problem there.

‘...Is an important supplier…’

That is to say, energy is supplied by them, the countries in the Middle East region, of which Iraq is one. All clear?

‘…of energy.’

Energy? What sort of energy? Wheaties? Nine-volt batteries? Solar panels?

‘oil in particular’,

Uh huh…

‘...to the rest of the world.’

Which would be us. As we are not in the Middle East we must be in the rest of the world, that is, somewhere not, like Iraq, in the Middle East. But let’s just go back one.

‘...oil in particular...’,

What? So the energy that Iraq supplies to the rest of the world is…

‘…oil…’
.
Oil among other things? No, oil ‘…in particular.’ Gee, I see what Nelson means now – that is pretty ambiguous.

‘Australians and all of us…’

...who are not in the Middle East…

‘…need to think well what would happen if there were a premature withdrawal from Iraq?’

OK, what would happen? Is this Nelson’s get-out-of-jail-free card? To Elroy, premature withdrawal would mean less death and maybe even better access to the oil but this is not what Nelson is implying; if it were, then he would not be advocating continuing the occupation of Iraq.

Given the context in which Nelson has couched his implication it is impossible to ignore the conclusion that he is inviting us to reach, that is that leaving Iraq will reduce our access to Middle East oil.

Or will it? Tip, as is befitting his status as the world’s third best treasurer, was as equally unequivocal as he brought to bear the full and onerous weight of his office to bear on whether a suggested withdrawal of US-led troops from Iraq would affect oil prices. ‘It might' he intoned, 'it might not. Well! Glad he was able to clear that up for us.

So, to recap. The Middle East, of which Iraq is a part, supplies energy resources, oil in particular, to the rest of the world, which is us, and as it is a priority for Australia, that’s us, to secure a share of that particular resource, the oil, so we must continue with our current foreign policy, war, with the implication that discontinuing the war, premature withdrawal, would reduce the security on that resource that we have achieved.

Witness that Tip quip again:

‘What Brendan was talking about was a different point, the point that was made in the security update that the globe has an interest in energy security.’

There it is! Has as opposed to had, which means that Honest, Tip & Co. are basically saying ‘Yeah, we didn’t think of that before but now you come to mention it…’

Elroy doesn’t know which is more scary; that our elected leaders are such egregious liars that they can send us to war without ever actually telling us the real reason why, or that they are so monumentally witless that they did not consider the impact on our ‘resource security’ of that war.

Everything the Liberal Party elite has said since Thursday has basically intimated that while the invasion of Iraq was not about oil it could be, any day now. Here’s Tip again:

‘It is possible to see down the track that you could have wars over energy if growing industrial powers felt that their interests were being contained, but that is not Iraq.’

So war MIGHT happen over oil, but it hasn’t yet. Really. Honest. Would we lie to you?

But is their new premise even accurate? WOULD our withdrawal from Iraq reduce our resource security? Are they saying that the USA™, our Great And Powerful Friend® who is busy just stealing the oil anyway, and who has every intention of continuing to do so for at least the next thirty years or so, are going to cut off our pipeline if we take and bat and ball and go home? Or are they suggesting that the great experiment is a washout and that IRAN, having annexed Iraq, will deny us the black stuff?

Both scenarios are fairly far-fetched. Exxon et al don’t care who buys their products and Iran/Iraq, if and when the US hightails it out of Dodge, will be selling to all comers to finance reconstruction and because they can. Anyhoo, if all else fails there’s always the Saudis! Or Kuwait! Or Hugo Chavez! Or them democracy-forsaking Ruskies! Or learn to live with less.

But there was something even scarier in Nelson’s message – that it was important to support the ‘prestige’ of the US and US, a comment which is nothing less than an admission of defeat; he is saying that this thing cannot be won –if he thought it could be he would not be talking in these terms – yet he and the rest of the COW™ continue their madness.

So there’s another cat out of the bag – thousands of people are dying, innocent civilians and coalition troops, for pride, a society is being blown apart and world peace is being destabilised for generations to come for the sake of prestige, religious fundamentalists are being recruited and encouraged, on all three sides of the great Abrahamic divide, to kill each other and those of us who reckon all three can keep it to themselves, to maintain for the coalition’s honour.

The world is being slaughtered on the altar of profit and superstition to preserve George Bush’s dignity, and so the only solution is for Bush, Cheney, Howard and Blai – too late, he jumped, what a clever fellow – to be removed immediately. Continuing to protect the US and UK’s ‘prestige’ will not, by its very nature, ever end and ever succeed; it can only doom us all to an everlasting war fought purely out of hubris, and nations that wage war in order to keep up appearances will never win – the very best they can expect is to not lose. On the other hand, as the USA™ gets to define ‘losing’ then what would ordinarily look like a loss could turn out, in these Orwellian times, to be a win. Who knows?

But it certainly doesn’t look like Tip or Johnny are in any hurry to ship out of Iraq; the Australian Federal Government have ordered up more military toys in the past ten years than ever before, and although most of them will be next to useless they do make us look pretty damn tough and our fearless leaders are sure talking the talk.

However, it has been mooted on other darker and dingier corners of the internets that given the recent movements in the USA™, with more and more Republicans jumping ship every day, that Bush might well be about to leave Howard in the lurch by announcing a troop withdrawal in an attempt to bolster his party’s chances in the 2008 election, and in the process dooming Howard in 2007. As Nixon crucified McMahon in 1974 by visiting China a month after McMahon roasted Whitlam for doing exactly that, so Bush may well catch Howard somewhat on the hop.

Johnny, unfortunately, has not yet cottoned on to this scenario and so is still singing from the current sheet music thus:

‘The region will see further turbulence and Iran's nuclear and wider regional ambitions remain a point of particular concern. In these circumstances, it is all the more critical that the coalition succeed in establishing a stable, democratic Iraq.’

‘…WILL see further turbulence…’ tells us quite plainly that Johnny has no intention of going anywhere and is actually rather relishing the prospect of dealing with that naughty Iran, a state which indeed has ‘wider regional ambitions’ due to the COW™’s shenanigans.

Furthermore, Howard says he wishes to establish a ‘stable, democratic Iraq’ but that will take, literally, half a century or more. Stable AND democratic is a tough ask; Palestine is a democracy but not exactly stable while Singapore is stable but not really democratic, and the fact that both of those nation states have been working on their stability and democracy since the end of the British Empire and WW2 demonstrates just how hard stability and democracy are to achieve.

Tip tipped in to this one too:

‘The Middle East will never resolve the endemic problems that it has ... until you can see a system of government which takes into account the views of people which is responsible to the ballot box rather than the bullet.’

Never mind that that the ‘endemic problems’ that the Middle East has ‘will never resolve’ are due squarely to the constant meddling by the way-out West over the centuries. The west are periodically prone to poking the beehive of Islam with a sharp stick and complaining when they get stung while ignoring the fact that, left alone, the occupants of said hive are relatively harmless and really quite productive.

And as for the ‘system of government which takes into account the views of people which is responsible to the ballot box rather than the bullet’, the aforementioned Palestine has had all sorts of troubles making the transition from one to the other, and no thanks to the west either. Palestine was encouraged to hold elections, where the west hoped that nationalist lefties Fatah would be toppled by a more moderate force; alas for the west, the people of Palestine elected feared ‘terrorist’ organization Hamas, whereupon the west started supporting their former foe Fatah.

The message this sends to budding Middle East democracies is not good – basically, it says that we will respect your elections s long as we like who you elect, which of course is highly undemocratic. No wonder they don’t trust us!

Tip once said, without a trace of irony, that an Islamic theocracy in Iraq would be a terrible outcome and it would be far better to install some sort of ‘secular strongman’ to hold the place together. In that case, maybe it may have been wiser to pry lose their former friendly strongman and organise another one a little more benign. It would have been cheaper and tidier for all concerned.

So either the USA™ administration really did believe in its impossible dream of Geneva on the Tigris, or knew that it would all end in tears but went in anyway, never intending to leave, as it is entirely possible that the White House/Pentagon knew perfectly well that once Saddam had been successfully contained (in a coffin), the Sunni and Shia would set to with whatever implements of destruction came to hand, thus creating a convenient smokescreen behind which the COW™ can swipe all the oil it needs.

Now, however, despite whatever encouraging noises Howard and Tip might make, the jig may well be up for the COW™.
The costs of the Iraq War are spiralling out of all control, with no end in sight, while Army numbers are down and the American public are becoming increasingly over it, and it has been pointed out by heads far wiser than Elroy’s that the time is coming when the USA™ will need to make a fundamental choice between being a democracy or an empire.

It took WW2 for the British to realize that that they could not do both, and so chose the former, but what will the USA™ do? Holding together its extensive network of 725 bases across the world, along with waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq, will stretch American resources to breaking point, so either the administration gets a little more authoritarian and REALLY starts telling everyone what to do or pulls back and accepts that it is not as exceptional as it wants to believe and that its manifest destiny is not to rule the whole world after all.

But the chances of this are so remote as to not really be worth serious consideration. The USA™ will not relinquish its mantle of omnipotent world policeman and give up its empire without a titanic struggle, and so the rest of the world is doomed to make whatever we can of the USA™’s failure in Iraq. The ramifications of the debacle are starting to flow through as we speak; now that the world knows that the emperor has no clothes, the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Russia and Europe are just now beginning to comprehend just what the USA’s defeat in Iraq means to the old New World Order™ order and what their place might be in the post-New World Order™ order.

So yes, the war is about oil but it is abut so much more – it is actually about the future of the world. Nothing too much to worry about then.

*Peter Costello earned the epithet 'Tip' from former Prime Minister Paul Keating a couple a weeks ago when he said Pete was 'All tip and no iceberg.'Ah, Paul, you had yer faults, but we do miss you. Sic 'em agin soon.

Ejected, Neglected And Unelected – Blair, Howard, Bush And What Awaits Us – REDUX! NOW WITH ADDED BLACKWATER! (See paragraphs 43 -50! It's worth it!)

2007-05-30T18:14:00.000+08:00

Hi kids! Sorry about the wait! Anyhoo, here’s what’s going down here in the GSS (Great Southern Sunburnt Country©) and beyond. Things are hotting up some in the Anglophone members of the COW’s (Coalition Of the Willing™) pre-election campaigns as the MOW (Masters Of War®) try anything to cling to what is left of their ever diminishing power.

Australia, Britain and the USA are all up for RC (Regime Change™) over the next eighteen months and, as the MOW® begin to realise that for them the road ahead is hard, yea, and the mountain high, so they start to strategise on how to at least keep their relative parties in control if not themselves.

For Noo Labour’s Tony Blair, the answer was pretty obvious – cut and run. He knew that running in the next election would result in the biggest Labour thrashing since the evil Baroness Thatcher took down a befuddled Jim Callaghan and commenced her ROT (Reign of Terror©) over the hapless Britons back in 1979, and so laid the ground work for his disappearance a couple of years ago by declaring a timetable for surrender.

He now manages to be Labour’s longest serving PM and to leave office with his rep. violently savaged but not entirely negated, while poor Gordon Brown, long-time Blair hostage, tries to convince the wary, jaded, disappointed and downright furious Poms that he isn’t Tony, really, not Tony, Tony who? So Brown gets to either lose the next general election and thus be blamed for throwing away the largest majority in British parliamentary history, or be the guy that ‘lost’ the Iraq war. Actually, in old Blighty, this is probably the best move he could make.

And Tony gets to go and be the new head of the World Bank, or whatever other saving-the-poor role he can rustle up, in an attempt be the friend-of-the-people, finder-of-peace-in-the-Emerald-Isle, dictator-vanquishing saviour-of-the-third-world he wants history to demand that he is.

This quitting-before-the-bucket-of-shite-falls-on-yer-head approach to leadership is a luxury of the Westminster system that Honest John is starting to wish he’d indulged in too. And he may well; Crickey! has reported a few juicy rumours about Little Johnny, one of which is that he will just quit when Parliament heads for their respective ski-lodges come June.

Any excuse would do, dog died, whatever, because folks, don’t forget that he didn’t earn his ‘Honest’ for nothing – it was, and always will be, ironic. And this way he gets to go out on top and avoid the likelier-by-the-day scenario of being the only the second Prime Minister to lose his seat, but as this would also reveal himself to be nought but a craven, trembling coward, Elroy thinks he go to his Waterloo loins girded for a shellacking of the worst possible order.

And the theories continue to swirl around Howard’s ‘We’ll all be ‘rooned!’ speech to the party room last Monday where he said that the Liberals ‘…would not just lose but be annihilated’. What was he up to? Was he just putting a ferret up the trousers of his party and its fan base? After all, Howard never says anything he doesn’t exactly mean; it is very rare for him to just blather off the top of his head and don’t forget that the fear factor is weapon he knows how wield all to well. Or was he, just for a change, actually being honest?

Another thesis correlates with Elroy’s predictions in March, that Howard, win or lose, will bail soon after the election. Elroy still has the house on the Costello, Abbott and Turnbull trifecta for the Liberal leadership, taking turns like good little sausages until someone wins the glittering prize.

However, it has also been ruminated that Howard’s comment about Treasurer Peter Costello and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s eleven-year gigs being a ‘weakness’ in reality meant ‘Time’s up!’ for Pete and that, if Johnny was to lose the election then, then the Liberal Party must start its own ABC (Anyone But Costello®) and plonk Abbott in the job. Manipulating the party to gip Cossie out of his dearest desire be Howard’s final act of revenge against a man who has hated him for years but was ever too gutless to take the challenge implied by Howard’s famous mantra ‘I’ll remain leader as long as the party wants me’.

That is if there is a Liberal Party left which whose new party room is not a phone box. Recent media reports say an in-depth examination of the polls reveal a 10% swing to Labor that could mean sayonara to not only Howard but also Costello and Turnbull; the Liberal/National Coalition have been estimated to lose forty-nine of their eighty-nine seats, giving Labor a thumping seventy-two seat majority and sending thirteen of the Coalition’s twenty-three ministers off to an interview with CentreLink.

And as Elroy has previously mentioned, with Federal Liberal sitting in the same gutter as State Liberal, powerless, irrelevant and ripping each other’s eyes out, the Liberal Party will simply implode. Who will take its place? Well, Elroy hears that Pauline Hanson’s back in business and she ain’t frying chips – we welcome to the stage the anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-globalisation Pauline's United Australia Party! Hmm. The words 'Populist' and 'Demagouge' come strangely to mind...

Bush, however, faces a different state of affairs. George Bush can quit if he wants to, but that as would put him an ignominious club which at the moment consists soley of Richard Milhous Nixon, Elroy can’t see it happening. Bush can’t run again anyway, so his most pressing task is ensuring the success of his successor.

There is plenty of debate over whether Bush should have ever been elected president in the first place or the second place, the 2000 and 2004 elections being full of suspect behaviour, and the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and a list of other high crimes and misdemeanors that should, by rights, see BushCorp take that long bus ride to the Big House, have irredeemably poisoned the US voting public against the Republican Party for possibly generations to come.

With a popularity rating at twenty-eight per cent and no end in sight to a deeply unpopular war, elections just aren’t going to cut it for the GOP (Grand Old Party™) but they cannot lose; there are not, Elroy believes, enough shredders with the requisite grunt or just enough shredders anyway, in all of Washington and surrounding states, to munch through the evidence so something else will happen.

But what? Aha! Let’s ask Elroy for some wild supposition! Here are a few scenarios: Stealing the next election is going to be most troublesome as they’ve used up all of their tricks; ‘caging’ lists, dodgy electronic voting machines, disenfranchisement of every persuasion, all of their little stunts have been rumbled by a growing army of voters who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Furthermore, even if the Republicans did pull out every stop in their possession, they can’t take the chance that it wouldn’t be enough – the 2006 midterms weren’t lost for want of trying – and so we move on the next proposition.

Kill George. It’s simple enough. Assassinating George would generate a huge wave of sympathy for the Republican Party and maybe they could surf that wave back into power, especially if the patsy was a Muslim patsy. As if he’d be anything else! On the other hand, that would make Dick Cheney president, not a good look for the Republicans going into an election; one the other hand, he’s the president anyway so what’s the diff?

However, assassinating George would mean they couldn’t assassinate Obama, as the electorate couldn’t stand two assassinations in one year – it’s ain’t 1968, y’know – and knocking off Barak would steal George’s thunder, but as they have to kill Barak, well, they’re going to have to think of something else.

What? Of course they have to whack Barak! And will! Don’t look so shocked! Waddaya think, they’re gonna let him become president? Puh-leese!

Or, and this one’s really out there, they could just have an election with Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate and lose it, which the market will hate, and the fall-out from the subsequent scandals, impeachments, imprisonments and looming real estate meltdown will be catastrophic for the world economy as China and the Royal House of Saud pull their dollars out of the US and convert them into Euros, a move which will, in turn, panic President Clinton into fast-tracking George W. Bush’s of establishing the NAU (North American Union™) out of the USA, Canada and Mexico in order to institute the Amero as a counter to the Euro’s dominance and thus sparking the second American Civil War as various redneck militias, Canucks and wetbacks up pitchforks and head for the final hoedown.

This next cunning scheme is the nuttiest, the craziest, the most whacked-out piece of pre-emptive conspiracy theorizing Elroy has ever deliriumed and one, by the way, that is already happening. On May 9, George W. Bush signed the NSAHSPD (National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive™) which granted him virtual dictatorial powers in the event of a declared CNE (Catastrophic National Emergency™) such an emergency being defined as ‘any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.’

This directive is in direct defiance of the provisions of the NMA (National Emergency Act™) and the directive’s language negates any requirement that Bush submit to Congress a determination that a national emergency exists and implements the president’s powers without congressional approval or oversight.

Congress can supposedly ‘modify, rescind, or render dormant’ the authority if it reckons the pres has acted inappropriately but the new directive, drafted and signed to supersede the National Emergency Act, makes no reference to Congress; instead it creates the new position of NCC (National Continuity Co-ordinator™), who plans for NEF (National Essential Functions™) by arranging for private sector organizations and all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments are function under Bush’s directives in the event of a CNE, without any specific act of Congress authorizing it.

In short, this Executive Order allows Bush to assume power to direct any and all government and business activities without congressional approval or oversight. He has now put in place power to arbitrarily and unilaterally impose martial law, suspend the Constitution, assume virtual dictatorial power, deploy under his command military forces into U.S. cities to round up citizens declared by his regime to be enemy combatants or security threats, and to retain control of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, military personnel, law enforcement agencies, and private sector organizations until the CNE is declared over, and who declares the CNE over? That’s right…

Meanwhile, the rhetoric ramps up. The fear factor is back as Bush suddenly remembers about that Osama guy. Never forget what George said in ’02, not long after he vowed to get OBL ‘Dead or alive’:

‘Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.’

‘But once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became -- we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his al-Qaida killers anymore. And if we -- excuse me for a minute -- and if we find a training camp, we'll take care of it. Either we will or our friends will.’

Now, far be it from me to call George II a flip-flopper – a murderous, narcissistic, deluded, functionally illiterate alcoholic sociopath would be far more accurate – but the other day he said this:

‘In the minds of al-Qaida leaders, 9/11 was just a down payment on violence yet to come. It is tempting to believe that the calm here at home after 9/11 means that the danger to our country has passed. Here in America, we are living in the eye of a storm, all around us, dangerous winds are swirling and these winds could reach our shores at any moment.’

‘Hear the words of Osama bin Laden: He calls the struggle in Iraq a 'war of destiny. The war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever.'

Who? Osama wha? Ain’t he that there dee-moh-krat? For a guy Bush isn’t too concerned about, he seems pretty damn concerned. But there’s one more ingredient needed for such a situation, and of course the White House has not let us down.

In America, right now, internment camps are being constructed by, of course, Halliburton, on a contract from the DoHS (Department of Homeland Security™) awarded in 2005 worth $385m to be used for immigration, disaster relief or the troublingly vague’ ... to support the rapid development of new programs’. Eek! John Ashcroft said they could be used for American citizens who were deemed ‘enemy combatants’ and guess who says does the deeming? Gimmie a ‘G’! Gimmie an ‘E’! Gimmie an ‘O’! Gimmie an ‘R’! Gimmie another ‘G’! Gimmie an ‘E’! What’s that spell? Fucking lunatic! What’s that spell…

Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said that he “could foresee a scenario in which the public would demand internment camps for Arab Americans if Arab terrorists strike again in this country. If they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights.’

So it’s not just Elroy! The chances that anti-war dissenters and other neer’do-wells would avoid a holiday in such a facility are about the same as the Republicans winning 2008, so should we be afraid? Not down here, yet, but the denizens of our GAPF© (Great and Powerful Friend©)? Oh boy.

So what is Elroy getting at? Have you all done your sums? Take one election that cannot be lost at any cost, add surreptitious executive orders allowing George to govern by presidential fiat, mix with 600-odd domestic concentration camps, stir in a generous amount of boogey man paranoia and what do you have a recipe for? 9/11 Redux!

No wonder they didn’t want to catch Osama! He’s one pre-selected patsy! Who else would fit the bill? Who else would fit the bill? Ahmadinajad? Hugo Chavez? (Um, memo to self – re: Next 9/11: Possible perpertrators…)

The only reason AHBASNE (America Hasn’t Been Attacked Since 9/11!™) is that the terrorists haven’t needed to, but now they are being threatened with RC maybe they will act. A mini-nuke in the White House? 9/11 is a hard act to follow, but they’ll think of something; another 9/11 would certainly do the job, in fact it’s probably the only way to do the job. Everlasting Bushiness!

There is, however, one more option left open to the Republicans, and for that we cross over to a certain Dr Thomas Sowell – free-market economist, major influence on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and a syndicated columnist in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and sundry other mainstream establishment organs. He’s a lovely chap, and he wrote this not long ago in the National Review:

‘When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.’

Whoa, Jimmy! Say what? Hey, don’t sugar coat it doc; tell us what you really think!
And he’s not kidding, either. On that bastion of Fair And Balanced™- ness, Hannity & Colmes, he expounded further ‘I’m very serious about whether or not the country can be saved at all’ he intoned. When asked what crisis would precipitate such an action, Sowell said ’If the political system becomes ever more irresponsible, if the education system becomes ever more degenerate, if the race hustlers polarize this country and the schools and intelligentsia dismantle the values on which it’s built’

Indeed, if BushCorp finally get rumbled for their 9/11 chicanery this might well the only option left open to them, and there’s no shortage of military types to put their hand up for such an insurrection, good Bushies more than willing to take up the cudgels for Christ and cast that ‘goddamn piece of paper’ known as the ‘Constitution’ in the fires of hell from whence it was spawned.

Take General William G. ‘Jerry’ Boykin; he is obviously no great fan of democracy or even America’s vague semblance of it. He has no time for elections per se – as far as Boykin is concerned, the only vote that needs to be counted is the one cast by the Big Cheese Himself. ‘Why is this man in the White House?’, Boykin asks audiences about the unikely ascendency of KIng George II, ‘The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there?’ Hmm. Good questions all, Jezza! So, what’s the scoop? ‘And I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.’ Eek!.

Now, be aware, be very aware, that again this guy is no fringe-dweller, no retired old curmudgeon who can’t shut up; from April 1998 to February 2000 he served as the Commanding General, U.S. Army Special Operations Command (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from March 2000-2003 he was the Commanding General at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, and in June 2003 he was appointed Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and he’s still is. Gulp!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Elroy, you’re a fucking idiot. How’s he going to do that? Arm Sunday school teachers?’ No, Elroy’s afraid, very afraid, that the last piece of the infrastructure is also already in place. Obviously someone will have to round up the traitors, the dissenters, the A-rabs, the ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ and other ‘enemies of the state’ and it won’t be the military – Bush has busted all his soldiers – it will be Blackwater.

Ever heard of Iraq’s ‘private security contractors’? The USA has paid $4 Billion out to ‘private security contractors’ so far, and the biggest of them are to mercenary armies what Halliburton is to meals-on-wheels. There are at least 30,000 Blackwater soldiers of fortune in Iraq, some say more, along with another 100,000 other private suppliers of logistical support working for various other operators.

Incredibly, ‘private security contractors’ in Iraq are not subject to any laws, American or Iraqi, civil or military, which means that there are an unknown or at least undisclosed number of heavily armed, highly trained, utterly lawless mercenaries roaming Iraq with no confines whatsoever at rates of pay many times that of government regulars. 40c of every $1.00 spent by the US in Iraq goes inauditably to the private sector – the world is at outsourced war.

And Blackwater does not just supply soldiers. They run their own training camps in Iraq, have a 7,000 acre facility in North Carolina, another in Illinois and yet another under construction in san Diego, twenty-odd aircraft and helicopter gunships, contracts from the US Federal Government upwards of $750m and are currently setting up an intelligence arm, Total Intelligence complete with their own drone spy planes. Private military intelligence? Uh oh.

But surely this bunch are for helping out in foreign affairs? Not to be taken internally? Export only? Domestic consumption prohibited? The Louisiana National Guard were in Iraq during the Hurricane Katrina debacle, but hundreds of black-clad Blackwater goons in wraparound sunnies toting AK47s were on the streets of New Orleans way before any federal or state military with orders to guard uptown mansions and generally ‘kill looters’, a service which cost the Federal Government $240,000 per day.

But would this operation put itself on the line for Bush? Well, apart from the fact that he is their best customer (although they are setting up an international branch in the conveniently tax-lite Barbados), its founder is one of the faithful. Ex-US Navy SEAL Erik Prince inherited $1.3 billion in cash after the sale of his family’s car-parts manufacturing operation and put it to good use, as befitting a good Dominionist Christian.

Dominionists are to Christians what Islamists are to Muslims; they believe that there is no law but God’s law and seek political means to introduce it – they are, for all intents and purposes, a Christian Taliban and there are millions of them, including the owner of the biggest private army on the planet and, sadly, most of the White House staff and the President of the United States. Worried yet?

So there you go, folks; in a climate where presidents can declare themselves to be above the law, where civilian prison camps can be openly constructed, where even respected men of letters like Thomas Sowell can advocate the establishment of a military junta and not be ridiculed and sidelined but lionized and feted,where top brass generals can openly regard the democratic process as some sort of affront to the will of God and not be cashiered and sent to a home form the terminally bewildered, where an alternative private partisan army can be raised and maintained on taxpayers' millions, well, nothing is beyond speculation. At least the military coup option does away with the need for subterfuge and patsies, and it would sure shut the conspiracy theorists up.

This has been a special souvenir edition of Let’s Ask Elroy!™. Cut it out and keep it, read it again from the bunk of an internment facility near you and remember where you read it first. Before, that is, they take you out the back and…

Back To The Future? We'll All Be 'Rooned!'

2007-05-15T12:20:00.000+08:00

Once again, Australian trade unions are under siege from the forces of an ever-desperate conservatism seeking to scare the population into believing that any number of reds are hiding under any amount beds in order to steal the peoples’ money for their own nefarious ends.

Conservative Prime Minister ‘Honest’ John Howard, of the Liberal Party of Australia, claims to represent a new age of industrial relations when he is really plunging us back to standards comparable with those of pre-World War One; The Australian Labor Party’s Kevin ‘That Nice Mr’ Rudd, on the other hand, says that workers must be represented fairly by their respective union bodies in order for a mature, progressive society to move forward in a serious and meaningful fashion, and if this means tearing up Australian Workplace Agreements, so be it. Howard says we must go forward into the past – Rudd says we must go back to the future.

The unelection campaign is hotting up down here in a sunburnt country as Honest John ramps up the rhetoric against That Nice Mr. Rudd. Industrial Relations (IR) has become the latest blood-soaked battlefield as Labor promise to wind back some of the more onerous provisions of a satirically titled ‘WorkPlace Relations Legislation Amendment (More Jobs! Better Pay)’ that no one voted for. The notion that his cunning plan to roll the rights of Australian workers back to those in place at Federation might be usurped has the honest one fair sputtering on his ’45 Lafitte in indignation, but luckily the plucky PM has the business lobby to hold his hand and make the appropriate noises.

Leading the charge is such altruistic and civic-minded concerns as Rio Tinto, BHP/Biliton and that tireless advocate of workers’ rights, The Australian Mines and Metals Association (AMMA). They are shrieking to the highest heavens that the ‘WorkChoices’ legislation and Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) are the only things propping up Australia’s mining boom and without them the entire world mineral market will collapse, bringing a pestilence and blight upon the land and nothing to do with India and China becoming the planet’s one-stop services and manufacturing shops.

AWAs are individual contracts that employees must voluntarily sign with their employers. The theory – and Elroy just loves conservative political theory – is that employees and employers will come together mano-a-mano, on that good ol’ level playing field so beloved of free marketeers without those big, bad boogey-man union nasty-pasties getting their two cents worth, strike a deal that makes both parties want to plant a sloppy WorkChoice smooch on one another and pledge everlasting individual agreement adoration.

Both parties are then supposed to trip merrily back though the sweet-smelling meadows of industrial contract law to their workstations various and harvest the blossoms and blooms of a deregulated labour market, bosses rueful about the concessions that wily Afghan refugee screwed out of him and said refugee safe in the knowledge that she has fully protected her rights despite the fact that she speaks only Farsi.

As Honest John will waste absolutely no time in telling you, the greatest impediment to peace, goodwill and an IR environment so harmonious as to render doves redundant are those utter, utter beasts the unions. Unions are, as we all know, the scourge of all mankind, venal and corrupt axis’s of evil that prey on the pay of those dispensing honest sweat and fair dinkum toil to feather their own nests and drink their members’ blood in orgies of satanic delirium. Obviously, workers’ interests are best protected by those bodies that have a vested interest in them, like the Australian Chamber of Commerce.

The problem for unions is that they have doomed themselves to irrelevance by dint of their success. 100-odd years ago, unions were an absolute necessity for workers as they fought tooth and nail for rights that are now taken for granted, and therein lies the rub. People now do not realise that the rights they enjoy are because of the unions, and so resent paying their dues, but the price of liberty is eternal vigilance I tells ya!

Honest John Howard’s idea of progress is to take us back to time which is now before living memory which is being painted as being nice, different, unusual. Some workers’ have been duped into thinking that the capitalist classes just live to make their employees’ life worthwhile, ignoring that without union intervention they too could be working for one to five dollars a day like their third-world comrades.

Some people have made an analogy between unions and business, that unions are ‘labour corporations’ selling man-hours on a level playing field with employers, but the owners of t’ means o’ production, lad, have always had and will always have the upper hand, unless workers stay strong. The Liberal Party whine that it should all be ‘Fair And Balanced™’ but it can’t be. Capital has the power. The only bulwark the worker has against this is the union. Is that fair? Probably not. But capitalism isn’t fair, the system isn’t fair, and as capital has no morality per se, business will only fight fair when they are forced to.

Business has been hollering ‘We’ll all be ‘rooned’ since slavery was abolished (another feat not due to the largesse of corporate interests), and it just wants to be happy and safe in the knowledge that they can hire and fire at will, and drive down wages to wherever makes the most profits for their poor widdle put-upon shareholders, the people who are, after all, the backbone of society and the only ones to which the corporation must be responsible. Investors must have certainty! The workforce can just blunder on from day to week wondering where the next mortgage payment is coming from, but INVESTORS MUST HAVE CERTAINTY!!!

However, free market ideologues that quote Friedman are as much Utopian nutters as any commie they may care to mention. If workers are not represented by a single entity then they will be picked off and exploited. Divide and rule. Elroy has a friend (Yes! Apparently it’s true!) whose employer was bought out recently, and as result the workers there were ‘moved’ into the new corporate structure, which meant that their contracts were torn up and AWAs were put in place. They were all called in to ‘negotiate’ individually, in a process known in the real world as ‘sign or resign’. Not ‘re-sign; resign.’

They were told not to discuss the content of their contracts with anyone. Elroy’s pal stated that she could not sign the AWA due to an unconscionable clause and, in spite of corporate directives, discussed it far and wide. All the workers in her department refused to sign and the company backed down. Fortunately they were skilled workers and so had something to bargain with. God help them if they had been Sudanese cleaners.

Unions are a necessary evil; without them we’d all be buggered because business cannot be trusted to be reasonable and they have proved this time and time again. If they did behave properly the unions would not be, or would ever have been, required. But the nature of capitalism requires that enterprises do all to they can to maximise profits. That means increasing productivity and reducing input costs by any method available, and labour costs are part of that equation. Why do companies relocate overseas? To reduce labour costs.

Monetarist policy demands that a certain percentage of the labour force, between 5%-15%, is unemployed at any one time. Of course, the victims of this system are blamed for their predicament, but it must be that way to keep labour at each other’s throats and a free kick for capital. Some bright spark from the ANZ admitted this the other day when he said that jobs had been scarce over the past thirty years, blowing apart the lie that the work was out there but the unemployed just couldn’t be bothered looking for it.

So having conned us then as now, how’s it looking now that a labour shortage maybe on the horizon and labour might have some bargaining power? The goalposts are moved in order to help business some more. Conservatives love to scream from the rooftops that the country is being held hostage to the unions’ demands, but is it?

Yes. It is being held to ransom by unions, by staunch, militant unions whose tentacles reach far up into the echelons of power. The government are in the pockets of these unions; politicians argue their case for them and the government uncritically do all in their power to mollify these institutions. Their wishes are the government’s commands. There can be no doubt that they legislate on the unions’ behalf; the Australian Chamber of Commerce and similar organizations are in the box seat of power and they don’t feel much like moving.

They are the correct analogy for workers’ unions. As business colludes, so does labour, and business does collude; anyone that thinks that they are constantly fretting about ‘competition’ is also waiting for the Tooth Fairy to show up.

If Labor is in the pocket of the ACTU, then Elroy would rather that than a government that was in the pocket of the ACC. In the end, trade unions represent the people. Business associations represent vested interests. One is fundamentally orientated toward enriching the great unwashed, and one is orientated toward enriching the corporate elite. Elroy knows which he would prefer. What about youse?

If the Liberal Party is somehow mysteriously returned to power at the end of the year then it will be big business usual, but once those AWAs really start to bite the punters will flock back the unions and the 20th Century IR battles will have to be rerun. Ho hum. Go foward to the past to get back to the future? We'd rather not, but if we have to – we will.

In Iraq They Call It Monday.

2007-04-24T07:20:00.000+08:00

Well well, it happened again, and although everyone is shocked, at the same time no one is particularly surprised. Another ‘loser’ snaps and bingo! Dead people.

There are so many questions raised by this catastrophe that its hard to know where to start, and although Elroy is pretty sure that everyone in the bloggerhood has had a crack at it he also feels the need to opine.

The problems are many fold. Society, education, the health system, that bloody second amendment, popular culture, history, all of these have a bearing on what brought Cho Seung-Hui his point of no return, and as Elroy doesn’t mind a bit of depth, deep into these issues he will go. Crack an ale and order pizza – this might take a while.

Of course, the more authoritarian among us have got it all pegged. Cho was evil. Simple as that. No more to see here, move along please, evil is as evil does. However, Elroy finds it intriguing that, no matter what improvements are made in audio/visual technologies, some people will always see the world in black and white and the answers to life’s questions on the rear bumper of an SUV.

It is true that Cho Seung-Hui was pretty severely messed up, and maybe he shouldn’t have been wandering around unsupervised, but could it not be argued that this tragedy is a consequence of the conservative philosophy that denies any positive influence that the ‘nanny state’ may bring and demands that individuals be ultimately responsible for their actions?

Cho certainly took responsibility for his actions in one respect; his blew his own head off. He didn’t say ‘I didn’t do it! It wasn’t me! I mis-shot! I ’m going into rehab!' I don’t quite recall the exact massacre to which you refer!’ No, instead he understood that there would have to be a price paid for his rampage, and although Cho probably considered blowing his own head off quite a bargain in comparison to the alternative, it cannot be denied that he suffered for his crimes.

But where conservative, or rather neo-conservative, ideology has contributed to this fiasco is in the cult of the personal, the perversion of autonomy. The right like to blame this concept on the hippies of the 1960s, but seeing as said counter-culturalists were also busy advocating communal living, a general end-to-capitalism-as-we-know-it and adventures in the land of the psychoactive pharmaceutical, it’s hard to see how conservatives apportion the blame quite so easily. Unless they are covering for someone.

Which of course they are. The individualism of the ‘60s, the simple wish to able to follow one’s dreams and wishes without too much undue interference from the man, is a very different kettle of lentils to the marauding isolate that straddles the globe today; as the lady once said, ‘the central message of Buddhism is not “every man for himself”’.

No, for the 21st Century’s manifestation of greed and selfishness we need look no further than Levi Strauss and his fawning acolytes, two of which did more damage to the fabric of society than I care to imagine, ladies and gentlemen I give you…Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan!

It is their ‘individualism’ that has poisoned the community well, not that of The Furry Freak Brother, it is their vision splendid which spawned the grotesque gargoyle of consume-or-dieism that gives not a flying fuck for his fellow man, not the amiable bumblings of Mr. Natural, but this is typical of conservatives' idea of personal responsibility – that everyone else should take personal responsibility for the havoc their ideas and subsequent actions have wreaked.

Conservatives are always yearning for some golden past, particularly that post-war utopia where everyone was nice to everyone else, always, forgetting that this brief epoch of alleged harmonial bliss was brought to them courtesy of none other than huge tariffs, strong unions and John Maynard Keynes, not free markets, a ‘flexible’ labour force and Milton Freidman.

Thirty years ago the promise of computers was that we would all have more leisure time. Well, that happened alright, it’s just that it was stolen and called unemployment, which enabled the powers-that-be to blame the people whose jobs were exported like so many woodchips for the consequences of those exports.

Making citizens fight for scraps instead inviting them for dinner was always going to end in tears; instituting self-preservation as the driving force of the people has led to a culture whereby the priority of the self is the self, an I’m-alright-Jack society which does not think it owes anything to anybody, let alone the community at large. And as the thought that that they should do something for nothing, however small, is anathema to the prevailing ethos, the great unwashed has withdrawn from society to tend only to its very nearest and dearest, and sometimes not even them.

There is another neo-con tactic in the arsenal of devide and rule, that of ‘starve the beast’– defunding the state-run services they can’t sell outright, like schools, hospitals, housing and transport – and it is active across the word, leading to a flight from all things public for a citizenry who are now too scared to risk them. This has left these institutions to either the most dogged ideologues or those with no other choices, and the resulting breakdown in education standards are nothing short of criminal.

Many public schools in the USA are only just holding on; in the poorer districts, students come from homes and backgrounds which are, shall we say, challenged in many ways, and the workload on teachers just keeps on growing. No Child Left Behind has increased schools’ paperwork and makes them to concentrate on attempting to pass the various tests that new legislation requires as schools that fail them are forced hire private education ‘consultants’ to supplement the teaching staff.

This puts an extra strain on already busted budgets, as the White House failed to actually fund NCLB. So now that educators are snowed under by having to get students through tests that are designed to see if the kids can pass tests, unimportant things like ‘critical thought’ go to the wall, nothing gets learnt and bored students start to entertain themselves in other ways, like bullying and ostracizing whatever misfit just happens to wander past.

This funding drain has been trickling the lifeblood from public schools for decades. Governments, particularly those of the Anglophone countries, say that ‘It’s no good just chucking money at it’ but Elroy says that sounds like a pretty good idea. Chuck money at education. Lots. All the time. And if that doesn’t work, chuck some more – it works for defense departments! We spend less on educating children than we do on killing them.

Another of the problems with the conservatives’ miserable mantra of ‘individual responsibility’ is that it was extended to citizens who could not, by no fault of their own, be entirely responsible. Now, on no account think that Elroy is advocating a return to the nuthouses of old, but the he does think that the state has a far greater obligation to those with a mental illness, and by the extension the rest of society, than it is currently fulfilling. Not that asylums don’t exist anymore; on the contrary, more and more and built each year, it’s just the name has changed – now they are called ‘penitentiaries’, ‘prisons’ and ‘gaols’.

In Australia they called it ‘care in the community’, which is all very well, but the problem was there was no money to pay for it. The savings made by closing institutions went straight into higher profile and more glamorous projects, but someone forgot to tell the suffering that the ‘community’ would be looking after them now, so those not lucky enough to find refuge with what services remain are either left cowering in motels, hotels, hostels and whatever other flophouses find themselves ill-equipped enough to take them in, are in jail, are taking their long-suffering families down with them or are camped out in a cardboard box near you.

If people were lying on the streets with blood pouring from open wounds, a civilized society would put them in a hospital (for free!), but the doctrine created by the current world order dictates that we must leave anyone with a mental illness to die in the gutter. If anyone else gets harmed along the way, well, it’s still cheaper that the alternative, and anyway, it’ll be all their fault. Somehow.

So is this about the second amendment? Oooh, that second amendment! It’s a tricky one! What does it actually mean? Well, for a start, which one do you want to use? There are, it would seem, two versions.

Here’s the one signed and ratified by the states:

‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’

And here’s the version hand-written at the time that hangs in the National Archive:

‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’

Oh, what a difference a comma makes! To Elroy, and others, this alters the meaning significantly but it’s a complicated issue, a matter of semantics and how English was written, used, and phrased in 1776. What the hell did it mean?

Elroy doesn’t pretend to know what was in the minds of the Founding Fathers as they negotiated the wording of the US Constitution way back when – indeed, that document’s inherent vagueness has kept many a law professor in Harris Tweed ever since ratification – but he would hazard a guess that the challenges faced by a collection of sparsely populated agricultural sharecropper colonies seeking to overthrow a monarchy manifesting itself as an absentee landlord and a ruling elite that put itself above the law are somewhat at odds with those facing a highly industrialized independent federation that wields supreme power with the largest economy and standing army on the face of the planet.

And it seems to Elroy that the gun lobby are as confused on this issue as anybody, if not more so. On the one hand they claim that the second amendment is sacrosanct to protect citizens against being taken over by the Federal Government, but on the other hand they say it is so citizens can protect themselves from each other. Or protection against marauding Muslims hordes. Or Mexicans. Or someone. Or something. Whatev.

Elroy reckons the second amendment was inserted to allow citizens to bear arms in order to maintain a militia in the absence of any state mandated facilities – y’know, armies and that –and if you ain’t in the militia, you don’t get the guns, but that’s just Elroy.

But unfortunately for the many thousands who die while looking down the pointy end of a personnel pacifier, those-who-should-know have obviously interpreted it as meaning everybody automatically joins a militia at birth which means, in turn, that the USA’s psycho-turkey shoot ain’t gonna end anytime soon. It’s sad, for as good ol’ Ghandi once quipped ‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.’

It really needs to be asked if the Founding Fathers’ logic, whatever is was, is any longer truly applicable as the effects that the second amendment is having today, now, in the 21st Century, can no longer be tolerated. The USA’s firearm death rate is the highest in the world, five times its nearest rival, and it is a society where not only are there are 300 million people for 250 million guns but where the solution to that seems to be handing out the missing 50 million as soon as is humanly possible.

And along with this excessive reach of firearms is its attendant culture, a message sung out long and loud from all corners of the USA that says it all right to own a gun – hell! Better make it twelve! What should be a privilege is claimed as a right actively and positively encouraged by all stratas of society. The rest of west looks at the USA with bewilderment, unable to fathom why the Americans give guns away in cornflake packets and then wonder why people shoot them at each other.

This has always bothered Elroy. How you can arm 5/6ths of the population and not expect them to go ‘Bang!’ at each other every now and then? It’s what guns are for! The NRA argue that if you are going to ban guns because they kill people, then you must also ban cars for the same reason, but Elroy says nay!

Cars are designed to move from A to B – death is a secondary, unintended function – but for guns, death is the primary function. In fact there is no secondary function – they certainly don’t go from A to B, unless you chuck ‘em. They might double as a hammer, or maybe a paperweight, but their overall positive input to society is, as far as Elroy is concerned, nil.

The last part of this sorry puzzle is history, the history of immigration and the white man’s attitude to other cultures and ethnic identities. With WW2 still within living memory, the Korean War even more so, and considering it takes at least three generations for host cultures to love the immigrant ones, Elroy hazards a guess that American Koreans are subject to the same racism that Asians are subjected to wherever they go in the west, Virginia not exactly being a Mecca for the international Korean diaspora.

So, if you take a vulnerable, first generation immigrant, isolate him and insert him into a alien culture of overarching selfishness, an education system that has lost the faith of both those it seeks to help and itself and a society that encourages the use and ownership of firearms, and then bully and ridicule said immigrant sufficiently while failing to deal with any manifestations of mental illness, the chances are you will create the perfect storm. That, Elroy claims, is the tragedy that led to further tragedy, and that tragedy will only be compounded by even more unless we as a society do something. Soon.

So, what to do? First, admit that making China the manufacturing base of the world has not had an altogether positive effect on the west’s erstwhile labor force, and return to localized industries of all kinds. People live locally. They spend money locally. They want to educate their kids locally and they want to be employed locally.

Furthermore, concede that the income gap has been allowed, nay, encouraged to expand into a yawning chasm over the past two decades or so, and then do something about it, if for no other reason than to ensure that no one tries to break in and steal your telly.

Here’s a rough guide, a rule of thumb to tell how healthy your society is: if you have citizens that cannot afford a roof over their head, or breakfast, that are forced to commit crime in order to supply themselves with the basic necessities of urban survival, a prison population expanding at a greater rate than even your national debt and an elite which conspicuously consumes massive amounts or resources just because it can, the chances are your society could do with a dose of income redistribution.

Next, increase education funding; make public schools like palaces; pay teachers the same as doctors and lawyers; build more of them, smaller, more community based and throw so much money at them they drown in the stuff.

Ensure that sick people are made well, without sending them broke into the bargain, and that goes double for mental illnesses. Doctors and nurses should be like firemen – have so many of them they can be left to sleep in public hospitals built like five star hotels.

There are solutions for the gun thing too. Here’s one – amend the constitution! It’s been done before! After all, as GWB says, it’s just a piece of goddamn paper. Here’s another ¬¬– stick them guns in the crusher, like we did down here in Australia. Oooh, it were luverly! Crunch! Grind! Wrench! Sproing!

Or…don’t make anymore! Think of the money you’ll save! Money you could put into schools and hospitals, not that you’ll need that many more of the latter if you stop shooting each other!

But here's the best: stop making bullets. This way the 2nd amendment remains untrammeled, people stop dying in such vast and indiscriminate numbers both in the USA and the rest of the world, and no one’ll shoot anyone unless they really, really have to. And hopefully, not even then. Win! Win! Win!

And it is the rest of the world we really have to be worried about.
Elroy wonders whether this message of death and hatred for ones fellow man is truly what the world’s beacon of light and democracy wants to be broadcasting. Hey, here’s a scary thought – maybe it is!

Gun culture has spread to all four corners and every empty pocket on the globe; in some countries an AK 47 is cheaper than food. Sub-Saharan Africa is teeming with despots and their followers armed to their rotting teeth with a depressing array of hardware manufactured by either America, Britain, Russia France or China. But the chances of world peace are, sadly, remote, as it just so happens that the five countries with a permanent place on the United Nations Security Council, the five countries charged with promoting and keeping world peace are… America, Britain, Russia France and China.

And America is not just content with sending its hardware across the world, it’s sending its operating software too, although too much of that is being sent back to the manufacturer damaged, some of it in boxes. In Iraq, gun-toting maniacs are merely yet another impediment to buying bread, and events like the massacre at Virginia Tech happen several times a week, but they are both responses to the same malaise.

Both are acts committed by people driven so insane by a culture that flaunts its riches with such vulgarity and wanton disregard for human life that, rightly or wrongly, they felt they had no other option but to explode. The difference is, in America they call it a tragedy and in Iraq they call it Monday.