Regime uncertainty and base partisanship

The Catallaxy Files site regularly presents a rich seam of idiocy. Most recently I was amused to read resident Perfessor Sinclair Davidson blaming Rudd and Gillard for Howard Government policy.

The argument is that spiralling energy costs commenced at mid-2007 specifically with the release of the Shergold report on emissions trading.

That enunciation of “vague government policy” contributed a significant inflationary effect on energy prices, by virtue of a handy little construct known as regime uncertainty.

But the Perfessor notes...

We can hardly blame events in 2007 on the Rudd-Gillard government. Well maybe we can.

Well, of course we can! You see, on the release of Shergold’s report...

At that point climate change policy became bipartisan with the Howard government adopting ALP policy...

See how it works? There ain’t nothing that can’t be blamed on the GillardGillardGillard.

There’s a slight  difficulty, however, for the Perfessor’s account: Climate change policy in fact became “bipartisan” somewhat earlier than he suggests.

Howard announced Shergold’s Task Group on Emissions Trading in December 2006; thus, it was obviously firmly Coalition policy before even then.

And the Task Group released an Issues Paper in Feb 2007, which surely would have given investors the jitters well before the final report was issued at end-May of that year.

Still, I’m sure such trivial details will present no difficulties for the Perfessor.

Nor will the fact that Gillard after all has now delivered certainty for the energy sector.

Or that Abbott’s blood-oath to repeal carbon pricing arrangements — which, it’s been argued, he’ll be unable to do — can only serve to undermine that certainty, with the consequence of more regime uncertainty to further exacerbate our energy price woes.

So, next time you open another shocker of a power bill... Blame Tony Abbott.

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Argument clinched

QED...

That’s almost three months without any increase in temperature.  This clearly falsifies the theories of climate scientists and means we should ignore anything they say.  If you disagree then please stare without blinking at these lines until it sinks in.

And in case you can’t believe what’s in front of your own eyes, there’s a graph as well...

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Energy driven

On ABC TV’s Media Watch last night, Jonathan Holmes made a sterling attempt to unravel the controversy over alleged death threats to climate scientists in Australia.

It’s much as I suspected: A concatenation and endless loop of misreporting, claim, counter-claim, self-righteous indignation, partisan posturing, etc.

From the material presented by Holmes and the Media Watch team there can be no doubt that a number of climate scientists in Australia have been subjected to abusive and threatening approaches — whether by email or other means — by some of the more unhinged exponents of climate ‘scepticism’.

Yet some prominent and even not-so-prominent mass-bloggers are still in denial on that point. Andrew Bolt still wants the story to be about who said what to whom and when. He simply can’t let it go because he has for many weeks now invested so much of his credibility into ratchetting up the invective to the nth.

Meanwhile, Bolt’s stablemate at News £td, Tim Blair has summed up Holmes' efforts thus:

In the short term, yep, a win for Holmes. But in the long term, warmies have never understood how much energy these evidence-avoiding tactics drive into the climate debate.

That’s kind of an interesting formulation: Abuse and threats resolved as “energy driven into the climate debate.”

Well, after all, this is the guy whose response to an actor’s public fantasising about shooting a journalist was to entertain the actor over drinky-poos.

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Tim Blair cherry-picks for cheap point-scoring

It would now appear to be okay for conservative and right-wing pundits to cite the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project as a realistic tally of Iraqi war dead. At least, that’s the impression one might take from a post at Tim Blair’s blog, in which he favourably cites IBC figures.

Then again, it may simply be a case of Blair cherry-picking a convenient number in order to score a cheap political point off one of his perennial hate-objects, Kevin Rudd, for “his repeated support for the bogus Lancet figure.”

Blair has, of course, consistently held the Lancet (Johns Hopkins) study on Iraq war mortality to be “bogus”. But if the Lancet figure is bogus, what might Blair make of Iraq Body Count’s tally, given the IBC people themselves openly concede:

Iraq Body Count (IBC) compiles data from news reports to provide a baseline number of confirmed fatalities, but it should be noted that many deaths will likely go unreported or unrecorded by officials and media.

IBC’s tally, then, will understate the death toll virtually as a design effect of their methodology. It may also be noted that IBC, unlike the Johns Hopkins study, does not attempt to capture ‘excess deaths’ from flow-on health effects of the war.

So, maybe Rudd’s support for the Lancet study is not so wide of the mark after all.

Further, perhaps it’s Blair himself who “needs a correction.” Being opinion editor for a major daily newspaper, he should at least have some competence on the topic over which he’s dissing on a public figure.

But let’s face it, such considerations are decidedly off Blair’s radar. It’s fairly evident by now that he couldn’t give a rat’s arse what the actual Iraq war civilian toll might be.

Blair’s blogging activity has always been heavily reliant on name-calling and schadenfreude. ‘Disinformation’ is, however, perhaps too strong a word for what Blair actually does, since no-one with any sense would trust in the veracity of someone who notoriously has no interest in fairness.

And anyway, from his readers’ perspective, his function has always been to pad out a ‘conservative’ narrative with a kind of quasi-cool schtik. It’s a vaudeville, more than anything else.

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Elsewhere: Will there be another one of those glorious Gillard defeats that make the country better?

Jeremy Sear (or whoever’s now controlling that blog) makes a pithy, pertinent point:

Here’s hoping her Prime Ministership enjoys another great achievement during the ALP National Conference, that of her being rolled by the rest of the ALP on her opposition to marriage equality.

Great things are possible when Julia Gillard is Prime Minister and she doesn’t get her way.

Quite so. Where to begin?

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Andrew Bolt pays “very great respect indeed”

And why would he not, when the payees are three actual scientists who have aligned themselves with his crankish views on climate science?

Bolt’s dubious praise is actually a petulant expression of spleen in response to a feisty defence of orthodox climate science by Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb.

From the outset Bolt refuses to dignify Chubb with the title ‘Professor’, referring to Chubb simply as ‘Mr Chubb’ in the heading of his post.

He then introduces a video of his interview with his three tame scientists with the following:

... here’s a video of me paying very great respect indeed to three scientists who do agree with Chubb on one thing — that scientists like them are indeed treated with contempt, but not by the people Chubb means ...

Yep, “vewwy gweat wespect indeed” — that ought to fix Perfessor Chubb’s little red wagon.

Well then, what did Professor Chubb say to provoke such a puerile, tongue-poking performance from our good Doctor Easychair? Perhaps it was this bit:

[Chubb] also attacked “entertainers” in the media who had the privilege of an audience but not the responsibility to go with it. “For many in the media and politics and for the plethora of so-called commentators, undermining science is becoming an increasingly popular pastime,” he said.

Note that Chubb wasn’t specifically referring to Bolt as one of those ‘entertainers’, but — since clearly everything’s about him — Bolt has clearly taken to heart what he regards as a stinging jibe.

Notwithstanding his doomed efforts at fact-based commentary — which sadly requires a competent grasp of actual facts — I do hope Doctor Easychair comes to realise what an honourable thing is the role of entertainer in our lives.

On this blog alone, his endearing antics have been the subject of around two dozen out of 800-plus over almost 6 years. And his contribution to the wider blogging community is inestimable.

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Assange guilty of anything and everything

Interviewed recently on ABC radio, computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier pithily observed:

In the United States the reporting about the expulsion of Mubarak in Egypt has been entirely dominated by Google and Facebook, and to a lesser degree Wikileaks, and everyone talks about it as the Facebook revolution, and every headline is about the Facebook revolution in Egypt.

And the problem with that is that I think there’s sort of this orgy of narcissism involved where we’re seeing our own American tech companies as being at the centre of the universe. And I’m concerned that what it really does is it makes us find yet another way not to actually listen to what somebody in Egypt might really be saying. For all our talk about all this openness and connection, I think we’re just using it as a way to look at ourselves, instead of them.

There’s very likely some truth in Lanier’s off-the-cuff remarks. In an interview last August for The Observer, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange related...

. . . the story of the Kenyan 2007 elections when a WikiLeak document “swung the election”.

The leak exposed massive corruption by Daniel Arap Moi, and the Kenyan people sat up and took notice. In the ensuing elections, in which corruption became a major issue, violence swept the country. “1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak,” says Assange. It’s a chilling statistic, but then he states: “On the other hand, the Kenyan people had a right to that information and 40,000 children a year die of malaria in Kenya. And many more die of money being pulled out of Kenya, and as a result of the Kenyan shilling being debased.”

Assange here quite arguably has overstated WikiLeaks’ contribution to that “chilling statistic”. It’s clearly absurd to suppose that the people of Kenya had no idea, before the WikiLeaks material was published, about the tribal and clan-based corruption that has blighted the country. But apart from all that, much of the 2007 violence was in reaction to disputed election results.

It might more accurately have been said that the WikiLeaks material probably helped, to some significant degree, in bringing the problem of corruption in Kenya more sharply into focus. The extent to which WikiLeaks ‘contributed’ to the 1,300 killed, however, is at best a matter of loose conjecture. To claim otherwise is perhaps a symptom of the narcissism Lanier described above.

When in December Assange burst into the headlines with the Swedish ‘sex charges’, his self-aggrandising claims regarding Kenya allowed motoring writer and blogger Tim Blair to declaim wildly about Assange’s culpability in...

tipping an already-volatile African nation into further mayhem.

Assange’s apparent non sequitir about 40,000 children dying of malaria was readily lampooned by Blair with the throwaway line: “So another 1300 corpses won’t matter much.”

Following Blair’s post, Andrew Bolt posted on his blog this brief item:

Tim Blair says WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is claiming credit ... for inspiring the murder of 1700 Kenyans.

(Yep, Bolt inflated the 1,300 figure by about 30 per cent, but perhaps in his paranoid make-believe world, another 400 fictitious corpses don’t matter much.)

While Bolt seems to have taken (Blair’s claims about) Assange’s claims at face value, obviously because it suited his ideological position against Assange, Blair in the above instance seemed to view it all with some scepticism, presumably because he wanted to portray Assange as unreliable and given to exaggerated claims such as “attempting to take credit for the Climategate scandal.”

Blair is probably quite correct to be sceptical about WikiLeaks purported role in the Kenya violence, but when it suits him he’s quite comfortable about exploiting the factoid of Assange’s culpability for those 1,300 deaths, such as in a later post in which he juxtaposed Assange’s Kenya claim with the following more recent statement:

WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed.

Neither Blair nor Bolt had anything to say, of course, on the crucial point of whether people in Kenya “had a right” to the leaked information. As far as they’re concerned, it’s all about Assange — and, of course, themselves.

If the people of “already-volatile” Kenya are permitted in the picture at all, it’s as hapless victims of Assange’s wicked meddling and volatility-tipping. And the brave resistance by many Kenyans during the 2007 crisis is reduced to being merely an outbreak of “further mayhem” whose only meaning is resolved as an indictment of Assange.

Assange will by now be well acquainted with the perils of being a ‘mover-and-shaker’. It may even occur to him what an easier gig it would be to just shout from the sidelines.

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Comment hexed

Below the fold (click READ MORE if you’re on this blog’s front page) is a comment by Caz that disappeared from this thread soon after she posted it there. I’ve tried to repost the comment several times, but then those reposts soon disappear again.

I’m re-posting Caz’s comment here partly ‘for the record’ because it’s worth reading, and partly to see what happens. I’ve taken the precaution, however, of enclosing it in a meme-proof layer... just in case...

Posted by Caz to Applied Hermeneutics at 27/2/11 3:20 PM See also his footnote: "There are people from the Wikileaks community who became uncomfortable with Julian Assange, and are attempting to rev up alternative leak sites. Some of these experiments might turn out well, and I might become an enthusiast for them." Utterly inconsistent, or rather, a point that is unsupportable from whatever argument Lanier thinks he has presented in his article (and I'm still not even sure what he thinks he has said, although commenters seem to believe he has made a sharp and compelling point of some kind ... I'm still digging to find it). How is one publication site, or recipient site for leaked material better than another? Will Openleaks (or whatever their name is) offer documents for publication received from China or North Korea? Do they have a bunch of academically qualified translators on hand to know what is and isn't valuable, what should or doesn't need to be redacted? That's one of the big problems with every recent critique of Wikileaks during the last 12 mths: it has become all about America, and the leaks from other countries that lead to real reforms, having exposed corruptions, are now in a waste basket, utterly ignored. That's the problem of the US and everyone else treating the US as if they're the centre of the universe. If it's not about them, it's unimportant. Which is utter bullshit. Assange has a sharp intellect, but he contributed to the current obsession by declaring the US a particular target, as if America is somehow worse than any other country - they're bigger, so on a scale, they are, but scale isn't the point, and Assange used to know that. He decided he needed more exposure, of his little hobby, he was tired of doing good, but not getting the kudos and the media coverage, so he went for the biggest target in town. Worse, he has continued to nominate the US as his pet target, despite holding onto goodness knows what documents from other countries, or relating to matters of import to a broader public. Assange dug the hole all by himself. It's so dumb and so obvious, but like some idiot politician or bastard CEO, Assange won't let it go. Lanier, ostensibly an intelligent man, has been suckered into believing that Wikileaks is all about attaching the US - despite prior years of evidence that it isn't, and regardless of the obvious limitations of any site accepting leaked material: they're at the mercy of access (more access in Western and most European countries, therefore, leaks will come from predominately English speaking countries), and language and political understanding (even if leaks come from a brutalised country, the material will not be in English, and few people in the world would understand the import of the content, even when translated).

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I do not say Andrew Bolt is a complete weasel

But I do say that Bolt’s performance yesterday following Prime Minister Gillard’s tears in Parliament is a study in the use of weasel words.

I do not say Julia Gillard’s tears in Parliament today, in talking about the Queensland floods and Cyclone Yasi, were anything but genuine. . . .

But I do say the tears follow much damaging criticism about Gillard being ”wooden” in responding to the disasters.

I do fear that to suddenly go from one extreme to the other will jar with many.

Again, I do not conclude that Gillard is insincere. I just suspect that they will not do Gillard the good they may have done had she cried in front of the victims instead.

I do not say that, if Gillard had actually cried in front of flood victims instead of in Parliament, Bolt would have written something like...

I do not say Julia Gillard’s tears in front of flood victims were anything but genuine.

But I do say there’s a time and place for everything, and though I do not lightly say so unless pressed to give my opinion, I suspect that a weeping Prime Minister unloading on already traumatised people may seem inappropriate to many people.

I do not say that alcohol is an effective remedy for a bad taste in the mouth.

But I do say that a drink after reading anything by Bolt might well be considered medicinal.

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Troll drollery assimilated

Whilst visiting Andrew Bolt’s blog in the course of researching my previous post, I encountered the work of a commenter posting under the name ‘Tracey Conlan’.

On a post of Bolt’s concerning attacks by Egyptian government operatives on protesters in Cairo, Tracey wrote:

More disgraceful behaviour by Kevin Rudd — the man is a joke — he is directly responsible for these attacks and must resign.

In fact, I have no doubt evidence linking him to the attacks will soon be found. Keep digging Andrew !

On another Bolt post, Tracey wrote in relation to Ross Garnaut:

What a pathetic man — I mean really — everyone knows there is nothing out of the ordinary in having multiple 1 in 100 extreme events like black saturday, Brisbane floods and an extreme cyclone in such a short time frame.

And even if their is a link to mankind activity with more extreme weather patterns, who cares — we’ll all be long gone and won’t have to worry about it by the time it gets really bad !

Tracey is obviously some kind of blog performance artist who’s taken it upon herself to satirise Bolt and his fans. Bolt’s rusted-on regulars have begun to wise up to Tracey’s trollery, so it perhaps won’t be long until she’s banned.

But the elegance of her work lies in that, to date, the moderators of Bolt’s blog seem to regard her shrill inanity as completely in keeping with the tone of the blog.

Long may she troll!

In honour of Tracey’s work, I’ve thrown together an Australian version of the Twat-O-Tron, which may one day be perfected to automate the kind of work Tracey has exemplified. See ‘below the fold’ (i.e., click READ MORE if you’re on this blog’s front page) to experience the . . .

BOLTaTRON

Click the Refresh button for fresh turdspurt

Yep, admittedly it loses it’s entertainment value after a few clicks, but there could be huge potential here.

Note this version simulates ‘rightard’ turdspurt, but pending sufficient commercial interest I’ve slated development for a ‘leftard’ version.

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Dr Easychair runs foul of Google

An old friend of this blog, Andrew Bolt – our Doctor Easychair – has been encouraging his readers to wantonly click on Google Ads for the Greens on his blog

The idea apparently is that each click on a Greens’ Google Ad will cost the party whatever the going rate is for clicking on a Google Ad, thus cumulatively sending the Greens into financial ruin.

Ingenious! . . . Except that prompting readers to click on Google Ads in fact violates the terms of the host’s (i.e., Dr Easychair’s) Google Ads agreement.

It was for a very similar offence that Tim Blair took Webdiary to task back in May 2006. I can’t actually link to that post of Tim’s because he’s apparently forgotten to pay the hosting bill for his old blog site. (Hit the link and you get the message: “The system path does not appear to be set correctly. Please open your path.php file and correct the path”).

But I can tell you Tim’s post was a riot of mirth about “ethical and accountable Webdiary” having violated the Google Ads terms, with dark hints of dire consequences. (I know this can’t be right, but it’s almost as if the Muftim was goading Google into clobbering Webdiary with all sorts of nasty consequences. Of course, we know our venerable Muftim is beyond such base impulses of Schadenfreude...)

Naturally we can now expect Tim Blair to do a searing exposé of Doctor Easychair’s recent naughtiness.

Or can we? Things’ve been rather quiet at the Muftim’s of late; when I looked today he hadn’t published a post since 5 November.

C’mon Tim, the blogosphere still needs you!

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Agonised decision

Greg Rudd, the PM’s brother, has paid out on bro’ Kev, setting Andrew Bolt a vexing moral dilemma.

Sibling dynamics are so tricky and incendiary that I tend not to credit what one says of the other, especially when that one is much less famous than the other he’s criticising. But Greg Rudd has chosen to make this very public, so I pass it on, even though I do not give his opinion much weight, and am torn about even publishing it (which is why it’s taken me half the day to decide).

Priceless! — as if Doctor Easychair was never going to “pass it on” to his followers at Rudd Hate Central.

Yes, denial of schadenfreude can be so tricky sometimes.

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Andrew Bolt’s lost post

The following is a post Andrew Bolt had apparently “dopped” but which has somehow been leaked to this blog:

In a rare moment of honest reflection, I thought I might take some time out to thank people like Jacob of the AppliedH blog for holding up to scrutiny some of my more deranged output.

For instance, most recently Jacob exposed my shonky claim that Kevin Rudd “gave aid to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.”

None of you, my faithful readers, challenged me on this, and I thought I’d gotten clean away with it until, with jaw agape, I read Jacob’s searing critique on his blog (which I secretly, and with trepidation, read daily).

By the way, even if one of you had challenged me on that barefaced lie, a retraction and apology would of course always be out of the question. On my blog you’ll never read anything like: “Thanks to reader Joe Bloggs for pointing out my gaping error.” It just wouldn’t gell with the flow of my obvious genius.

Despite myself, I have to admit that in my frenzies I do tend to tear apart anything to hand that represents restraint, order or the related discipline of reason. I just can’t help myself, so it’s important that people like Jacob are out there, somewhere, calling me to account on this rubbish you all devour so willingly. But fortunately for me, AppliedH is Australia’s least-read blog.

To my legions of readers who’ve helped make my blog “Australia’s most-read political blog,” I’d like to try to tell you how very sorry I am for having sucked you all in with my manic bids for more attention, cash and power.

Here goes. The fact is I’m not very sorry at all. You’ve only yourselves to blame for falling for the heady brew of lies, half-truths and populist cant that I retail here so shamelessly. Truly it’s said that there’s one born every minute, and boy have I struck the mother lode.

I’d like to be able to tell you I will delete my blog and somehow earn myself an honest living, but even I have to acknowledge the bleeding obvious fact that I’m simply not capable of it.

Thanks Andy, I’m genuinely touched.

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(UPDATE - This title has been re-itemised, and the updated pre-originals drop bottomed to the post.)

A very strange rewriting of the Bolt blog:

UPDATE - This item as [sic] been retitled, and the original pre-updates post dopped [sic] to the bottom.

Bolt also “dopped” a later post featuring a rather fetching image of former PM John Howard toasting our present troubles with Rudd, with (from memory) the caption:

“How’s that change you wanted working out?!”

Thus has Bolt ditched the cardinal rule of ‘blogging’ which requires the preservation of ‘the record.’ Bloggers all may now freely rewrite their histories with a free conscience. Thanks Andy!!

Now’s probably a good time to switch-off your computer.

 
UPDATE  (IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT)

That Howard toast to the people who have forsaken His Reverence has at last reappeared a mere 6 hours after Andy pulled it.

Never let it be said that the Australian Right would ever delight in the supposed misfortune of ordinary Australians.

 
PRE POSTDATE X

Please refer to the previous two updates which follow.

 
POST PRE UPDATE 2

This is to alert readers that there might have been an important update, but I carelessly dopped it.

 
PRE POST UPDATE 2

Yep, this post is still in the same place I left it. Just checking.

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Bolt’s frenzies continue

Yep, as unremarkable as it may seem, Andrew Bolt just ploughs on and on with his reckless cant defending the abuse by Israel of Australian passports:

The question is, if we supply fake passports to the spies of friendly countries, why not supply some to Israel?

Well, why not “supply some” to Dubai as well, for that matter?

To Bolt, it really does seem to be that simple. He’d have the things raining like confetti.

In his frenzies, he tears apart anything to hand that represents restraint, order or the related discipline of reason.

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‘Illegals’ bean counting

I admire a dude who ‘spreadsheets’ stuff, and evidently Tim Blair has been hard at it:

There are an estimated 450,000 illegal immigrants living in Arizona, which has a total population of just 6.6 million. Were Australia to have a proportionate amount of illegals, we’d be talking in the range of 1.5 million.

Damn straight! So, on those figures, the number of “illegal immigrants” in Arizona is approaching 7 percent of the population.

Now, according to the Australian Government, as at early-April there were a total of 2,498 people in immigration detention who “arrived unlawfully by air or boat.” (Note that this excludes hundreds — or, I forget, perhaps thousands — who arrived “lawfully”, often from affluent ‘western’ countries, but overstayed their visas.)

The Australian population is currently projected at around 22.3 million.

Therefore, the number of “illegal immigrants” in Australia is around just 0.011 percent of the population — that is, in the order of one six-hundredth of Arizona’s apparent problem.

So if Andrew Bolt now wets his pants every time another handful of poor slobs “arrives unlawfully”, he can just thank God he doesn’t live in Arizona.

And we can thank God too, because the screeching from Bolt, already most unpleasant to the ear, would go way beyond pain threshold.

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Andrew Bolt wants to kill a living national treasure

Not content with wanting to kill your and my Grandma with swine flu, Andrew Bolt now has Phillip Adams in his sights.

Bolt appears to think Adams — described by some (who are evidently more enormously fond of him than is Bolt) as a living national treasure — should be refused treatment and ejected from a Catholic hospital because Adams is a “militant atheist.”

“Was there not an atheistic hospital this militant atheist could have attended instead?” asks Bolt with the certitude of the clinically insane.

Given that, as Bolt almost certainly knows, there are no “atheistic hospitals” anywhere, the inescapable corollary is that Bolt wants Adams to be denied potentially life-saving treatment.

By Bolt’s logic, moreover, people with a philosophical aversion to the public Medicare system should be refused treatment at public hospitals. This would be another death sentence courtesy of Bolt, since there’s rather a paucity of emergency wards at private hospitals in Australia.

The whole thing represents a new low in Bolt’s demented campaign against his perceived adversaries on ‘the left.’ And the fact that Bolt’s post was inspired by one of his readers sets a new low in whoring for one’s readership.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine our raving national looney getting anything right. For instance, Bolt recently sneered:

Is GetUp! just an unpricipled [sic] Labor front, or will it attack Kevin Rudd as it attacked Tony Abbott for the very same policy [i.e., taking the ETS off the agenda]?

In fact, the supposed “unprincipled Labor front” posted an article and video attacking Rudd for just that, several days before Bolt’s post.

Astonishingly there are still some who believe Bolt to be a “thoughtful moderate.”

But in his frenzies, Bolt tears apart anything to hand that represents restraint, order or the related discipline of reason. Reading Bolt, I sometimes feel much like I imagine a Roman in the fourth century or German in the 1930s did, watching in despair as civilisation slowly crumbles.

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Andrew Bolt trivialises killer drug

Andrew Bolt’s blog is of course Rudd Hate Central and, as such, part of the rich tapestry of Australian political life, providing a relatively harmless outlet for those who have nothing else with which to fill their days.

Among other threats to civilisation as we know it, Bolt is currently excoriating Rudd for his “lack of courage” in shelving the Emissions Trading Scheme — the evil “tax on everything” Bolt previously excoriated Rudd for wanting to promote.

But it’s not just Rudd’s “cowardice” and “ineffectiveness” with which Bolt takes issue. It’s that Rudd wants to “distract you” from his failings with the announcement of a proposal to only allow tobacco products to be sold in generic packaging.

Rudd has downscaled his gandiose [sic] ambitions from saving the entire planet to saving just a few smokers... Rudd is treating voters with complete contempt. The very next day after his humiliating backdown on his emissions trading scheme he announces a trivial campaign on smoking, banking that it’s enough to change the topic from his deceit and cowardice, and talk instead of hios [sic] being “tough” and “bold”.

Truly, if there’s an anti-Rudd angle to anything, Bolt will nail it and package it for ready consumption by his boltoids. Not that he’s a pioneer in that kind of thing, just as the Rudd Government is no pioneer in “distracting you.” Of course, it’s all just part of the rich tapestry of Australian political life.

But I must take issue with and excoriate Bolt for his careless throwaway line about “a trivial campaign on smoking.” The proposals announced are not about “saving just a few smokers.” Potentially, the measures could save hundreds or even thousands of people (particularly, the young) from ever taking up the deadly addiction.

If Bolt wasn’t so blinded by Rudd Hate, he might see that potential is underscored by the threat of a major legal challenge from the tobacco industry. And if he wasn’t so addicted to attention, cash and power, he’d alert his readers to the merits of the proposal.

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Qantas CEO tries to talk sense into Andrew Bolt

...but to no avail.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce, interviewed on Bolt’s radio station regarding the Iceland volcanic ash emergency, has ever-so-politely refused to be sucked into Bolt’s narcissistic moral panic.

Mr Joyce is a brilliant guy and true conservative.

UPDATE 10:30PM

Clearly Alan Joyce was nowhere near sufficiently on message for Bolt’s purposes. In his entire approach to the matter Joyce in fact epitomised the conservatism Bolt farcically claims for himself.

Bolt kept hammering the Niki Lauda quote (“It was one of the biggest mistakes in aviation history to close airspace for a long period without having the right facts and figures”), and tried to goad Joyce into taking a comparable position. Then after Joyce signed off, Bolt had of course to give it one more emphatic run to drive home the meme to which he’s clearly now emotionally committed.

Bolt closed the segment saying that “without a doubt” litigation by international carriers against civil aviation authorities will ensue, which if it eventuates he’ll undoubtedly trumpet as vindication of the crusade he’s whipped up over this.

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Andrew Bolt in bid for more attention, cash, power

It seems Andrew Bolt has decided that the shutdown of European aviation, due to “alarmism” over the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland, is intrinsically linked to the global warmalarmist conspiracy.

It’s all somehow connected, don’t you see? Somehow...

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