Posted on 02/21/2006 7:39:57 PM PST by naturalman1975
EVERY politician has enemies. John Howard's fantastic luck in his decade as Prime Minister is that these are his.
Look at them -- shrill artists, damn-Australia mandarins, group-think academics, stuff-you activists, sour journalists, gimme-rights ethnic bosses and the other discords of this cacophony of hate.
When Howard on March 2 celebrates his 10th anniversary in power, he owes these yammerers, now almost toxic with impotence, a silent prayer of thanks.
For they have helped him to win four elections by demonstrating a truth few non-politicians know and even fewer politicians dare to exploit: that your enemies advertise your strengths better than can your friends.
Do I sound too mystical and obscure? Well, let me show just how Howard haters help Howard win, starting with an example from only this week.
On Monday, Howard was quoted in The Australian saying something to which, you'd think, only someone as mad as the President of Iran could object.
He said he was sure most Muslim immigrants would integrate well, but did note a slight hitch -- among them was "a fragment which is utterly antagonistic to our kind of society", and which oppressed women and was "raving on about jihad".
Even the Islamic Council of Victoria knows this so well that it's drawn up a plan to protect Muslims from a backlash should some jihadist nutters here do a London and blow up a train.
So Howard said something true, and said it moderately. And his enemies once more picked up his plain rock of sense and used it to cave in their skulls.
The ICV, despite itself preparing for Islamist terrorism, accused Howard of peddling a "stereotype". The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils attacked him for being "inflammatory".
They had their usual echo in the "elite" media. Howard "should have known better", than to "throw the Pauline Hanson voters a sly wink", fumed a Sydney Morning Herald commentator.
And there you have it yet again -- Howard's plain sense advertised and damned as outrageous by people whose obvious extremism would make the average voter flinch.
Even if you didn't like Howard yourself, would you really want to be on the side of such of his critics?
But you'll have noticed my example isn't perfect. This time no Labor politicians have (yet) tried to punch out Howard, too.
It seems Labor, at least, has finally learned not to be goaded into stupidity -- into monstering Howard just for saying an obvious truth, but one not endorsed by dinner-party moralists and snow-field socialists.
Of course, it should have learned this lesson long ago -- in 1996, when Howard won his first election.
It was during that campaign that Howard famously declared he wanted Australians to feel "relaxed and comfortable" about themselves and their country.
WHAT should he have said instead? That we should all feel edgy and in pain?
Maybe, given how many commentators reacted like imams at a cartoon convention. Howard was pilloried as a man without a vision, while Prime Minister Paul Keating sneered that "Mr Magoo" would make us "nod gently off to sleep".
Again and again, Howard's haters warned voters he'd make them comfortable. How often did we hear that reassuring message, and wince at the vicious tone of those damning it loudest?
The antics got worse when Howard unveiled his campaign slogan, "For all of us".
Again, what was the alternative -- "For some of us"?
Yet Howard was once more walloped by people who seemed insane. His slogan showed he didn't like Asians, claimed Keating. That he didn't like Aborigines, claimed black leaders. By wanting to look after all he was in fact "divisive".
On and on Howard's enemies complained how he promised to govern "for all of us". And again, many voters heard them, and seemed amazed by their contempt for such an of-course notion.
How often have we seen this pattern repeated, always to Howard's advantage?
In 2001, Howard campaigned on a line he thought up while speaking at his campaign launch about illegal immigrants: "We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances under which they come."
It shouldn't have caused a twitch of fuss. After all, which sane country lets through any stranger who turns up?
But, oh, the screams of outrage over Howard's "racism" -- screams that alerted even the dead to the fact that Howard, at least, believed a country had a right to control its borders. And that those who denounced him presumably didn't.
Just going through these quotations again, I have to laugh at how dumb many Howard haters have been, and how much they have helped the man they loathe by screaming that white is black if Howard wears it.
Remember their outrage two years ago when Howard made a perfectly natural point: "It stands to reason that if you believe that somebody was going to launch an attack against your country, either of a conventional kind or of a terrorist kind, and you had a capacity to stop it and there was no alternative other than to use that capacity, then of course you would have to use it."
Oh, the fuss. Dozens of journalists badgered Howard for weeks, wanting to know if he'd apologise for saying he'd rather kill terrorists overseas than let them kill Australians at home. Labor politicians and a shiny-shoed line of former diplomats repeated what a fool he was to be so hard on Aussie-killers.
So what message do you think most voters got from that -- about both Howard and the hysterics who condemned him? No wonder he won the next election, too.
But Labor is at last sniffing the trap it's fallen into so often. So when Howard declared after last year's Cronulla riots, "I don't accept that there is underlying racism in this country", Labor was careful not to contradict him too stridently.
Ten years after Paul Keating, it has finally realised there aren't many votes in trashing Australia as a racist nation -- which is one win at least to Howard in the culture wars.
That didn't stop others from attacking him as wilfully blind to racism, of course, just as they've berated him for running "concentration camps" and "crushing dissent".
Nor could they stop themselves from going feral over his speech last month on the need to be nicer.
"I don't think we are polite enough to each other and good manners is the basis of a more civilised society," declared Howard, famous for saying nothing ruder about his opponents than that Labor leader Kim Beazley "lacks ticker".
(Contrast that to the insults flung back at him by some Labor leaders he's defeated: "dead carcass", "a..elicker", "suckhole", "liar". Another reason for voters to distrust those who hate Howard the most.)
Yet again, he seemed to say little more than a conventional truth. But witness the outrage that such an evil man should say it.
"Howard is a major architect of the very ills he senses in the national psyche," retorted columnists in that Bible of anti-Howardism, The Age. Amen, said five letter writers that same day.
Don't you feel Howard's haters would jump from a plane without a parachute just in the hope of proving him wrong on gravity?
LOOKING back over Howard's 10 years of government, it is in fact hard to spot anything he should be downright ashamed of having said.
That's not to say he hasn't made mistakes -- whether claiming children were thrown overboard or believing Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction.
But he has had remarkably few outbursts of the kind that came to dog, say, Labor's Mark Latham, with his talk of a "conga line of suckholes" and his moronic boast: "I'm a hater."
It's this caution of Howard -- and his success in running the economy and fighting terrorists -- that has driven his opponents in the cultural elite so crazy.
Starved of a good reason to beat him, they've too often jumped him for merely speaking an unfashionable truth, and thrashed him so wildly that crowds have come from miles to watch.
And what have they seen? An imperturbable Howard being whacked for speaking sense by foes who must be fools. Such enemies can be worth more than friends.
This is a magnificent treatise. It explains beautifully the power and success of our own Bush. It is the insanity of Bush bashers that has lent him the greatest support. Thank God for Pelosi, Boxer, Dean, Gore, and on and on. The ridiculous stupidity of these morons has made perfectly clear Bush's absolute brilliance. The more they call Bush stupid, the stupider they appear.
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