Posted on 10/10/2004 8:44:22 PM PDT by Pikamax
Nothing will save us from gullibility and greedy self-interest By Alan Ramsey October 11, 2004
A small book turned up last week entitled How to Kill a Country. It was written by three Sydney academics about our "free trade" deal with the United States. They could as easily have been writing about what, spare us, happened on Saturday.
How on earth could we have put this scheming, mendacious little man and his miserable claque back in office for another three years? Worse, how could we have brought them to the very brink of absolute control of the nation's entire parliamentary process and authority?
Very easily, as things turned out, to the cost of the rest of us and our national self-respect.
For almost nine years this Government, incompetent in most everything except mediocrity, debauched its word and the people's trust, along with voters' gullibility, their ignorance, their taxes and, in the end, their greedy self-interest.
It deceived and dissembled about joining us with Washington's military adventurism in Iraq, and it went on deceiving and dissembling, irrespective of the heightened threat to our national interest, to keep our minuscule presence there purely for the political pleasure of George Bush and his cronies. Advertisement Advertisement
Then when we reached the one time every three years of a people's audit, 4.6 in every 10 of us turned round and said, thank you, gimme the money and flog us for another three years. Most times, despite the thick and the avaricious and those who feel it's just all beyond them, we get it right as a nation.
Not this time. This time we've really buggered things. A politically immoral man who, by any civilised measure, disqualified himself from public life, has been given a pat on the back and even more power. This time the people's will has got it dreadfully wrong.
Now we all have to pay for the comfortable idiocy of the manipulated minority. And it is a minority: the 46 per cent who voted for the Coalition, or 4.6 in every 10. The other 5.4, in the main, wanted something better, and were denied by a lowest common denominator system in which all the spoils go to a degraded 50 per cent plus one.
I thought we had more brains, more self-respect. I was wrong in thinking enough voters "just might" see through the confidence trickery of John Howard, master illusionist and toad of a human being. I apologise for nothing.
However, don't get snowed by the spin merchants about the size of the Government's win. Howard's real achievement is the Coalition's Senate victory. In the House of Representatives, Labor went into the election with 63 seats, the Government 83, with three independents and one Green MHR.
By midday yesterday, with a bit over 10 million votes counted in an electorate of 13 million, the most likely result, after the doubtfuls are finally sorted, is that Labor will have a net loss of between one and three seats, no more.
Labor's loss was great in votes, not seats. It's primary vote (38.3 per cent) is only marginally better than under Kim Beazley's losing leadership three years ago (37.8 per cent). What is different this time is the Liberal Party (40.3 per cent) out-polling Labor in primary votes (as distinct from a joint Coalition vote of 46 per cent).
That happens rarely: twice only in the Liberals' 60-year history, the last time, ironically, in the Fraser victory of 1975 that buried the government of Latham's political father figure, Gough Whitlam.
Still, Latham's time will come. Believe it.
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Me Thinks You Protest to Much...
Sour grapes I presume...
ACADEMIC TENURE...... NO ONE SHOULD HAVE A JOB FOR LIFE ... AND THEY DONT HAVE TO SHOW UP..... DO ANYTHING..... BUT BE LIBERALS......
WE NEED COMPETION IN EDUCATION ESPECIALLY AT THE UNIVERSITY LEVELS.......
The fact is, HOWARD IS A GREAT AUSTRALIAN.
Unlike coward pot-smoking Canada, Australia helped us in our effort to rid the middle east of terrorists.
John Howard spear headed that effort. He got the boys into Iraq, and he's committed to seeing it through.
Paul Martin, Canada's PM, had a different idea. He thought the UN should be allowed to work it out. He bailed on us.
Howard and Martin exemplify the two directions our "allies" have taken. One stayed with us, the other sided with the terrorists.
I say three cheers for Australia,
and three jeers for Soviet Canuckistan.
Actually, it was Chretien who bailed on us. And not because he did it out of principle. It was because it was politically expedient for him(in the beginning he was leaning towards joining us in the war).
But it doesn't matter anymore.
Sounds like a whiny liberal socialist complaining about a tax cut.
Cannuckistan???? ROTFLMAO
Mmmmm...sweet music. If you think this is fun to read, wait until the morning of 3 November.
Australia, Australia, we love you, amen.
I really can't wait till we get swamped with editorials such as this when Bush wins a second term--I'll be laughing for weeks on end =D
He just knew that Latham and Labor would carry the day,LOL. He's astounded-in shock,really. It's just beginning to turn to bitterness.He's one of SMH's primary socialists,Margo Kingston is another,she's acting as if there's been a coup d'etat by a dictator,not a duly re-elected Prime Minister.This goes to show the depths of their self-delusion and arrogance-no other outcome was conceivable,and now that it's happened,the only explanation is that the electorate is too stupid or greedy to live.
Goodness, someone is in quite a snit. :o)
War One, War Two, Frozen Chosen, the RVN, Kuwait, Afghaniston, Iraq.
AUSTRALIA WILL BE THERE!!!
The loony left strikes again, showing us that stupidity knows no boundries. it also shows us what sore loosers they are.
I wouldn't worry too much about Canada's loony Liberals, they won't be in power much longer either. These cheap submarines from the salvage yard are just another nail in the coffin for the corrupt, moraly bankrupt Liberal party of Canada.
Another thing which is ironic, It that the loony left labor party of Australia supports the loony left liberal party of Canada, represented by Paul Martin, shipping baron, who's company, Canadian steamship lines, destroyed Australia's shipping industry unions.
Good job Australians, you kept a good man in control. Now you can sleep better at night for a few more years knowing that he is not afraid to protect the country, and not afraid to help keep the world a safer place as well.
Textbook totalitarian thinking: individual greed and weakness will ruin our economic and political systems; democracy is stupid and weak and elects the wrong people; only the intelligentsia can be trusted with power.
It's a bit surprising that this sort of thinking still holds sway long after its exemplars in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia have gone the way of the dodo.
No doubt we can look forward to a US version of this if we overcome Lurch and Silky Pony and re-elect W.
Also from today's Sydney Morning Herald (Paul Sheehan)-
"On Saturday night the giant, lumbering road train known as the will of the people, aka the democratic process, smashed through the pretensions, delusions and manipulations of the unelected and unaccountable who presume to tell Australians what to think and who to be."
No kidding!!
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