As I Please: Rupert Murdoch's Brave New Rules For The Great Ever-Altering Game Of Worldly Dominion
Thursday, 3.35 pm
So now we know how it happened, at last.
Bill Shorten was 'rewarded', wrongly it seems, for making Gillard the leader, or so we are told by the Murdoch decrypters who selflessly search out and ponder these things. And Tanya Plibersek, who stuck by Rudd through his last hours and spoke out against Gillard leading, was also 'rewarded', for some reason, for being Gillard's enemy. And Mark Arbib, whose factional numbers cut down Beazley midstream and uplifted Rudd into the empty saddle was also 'rewarded' (if you can keep up with this logic) in spite of his having wrongly done this, because he changed his mind later on; and Kim Carr punished because he did not.
I hope all this is now perfectly clear.
Because 'reward', the Murdoch moral philosophers currently tell us very persuasively, is a bad, bad thing. The man who saves the nation from Rudd should be punished for it, not rewarded, much as a man who saves a child from drowning is always rightly punished for it. Well, isn't he? Of course he is. Shorten helped the Party get rid of Rudd, and thus keep Abbott out of the Lodge and a probable twenty years of wayward, malicious, hydrophobic power, so Shorten should be punished for it. Of course he should.
Where did this new rule come from? That good deeds should not be rewarded?
For it's very, very, very, very new. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who brought his disabled plane down in the Hudson and so saved a lot of lives, was acclaimed not condemned for it. The crack team under Yoni Netanyahu, Bibi's brother, who rescued the Entebbe hostages were highly praised for it, and given medals. The team under Howard Florey who invented penicillin and saved a billion lives got the Nobel Prize for it, not prison. Yet the team who rescued us from an Abbott-Hockey-Bishop-Truss-Morrison-Barnaby Era and a restored and brutish WorkChoices must cop a shellacking for it, under the new, bizarre, infallible Murdoch rules-of-thumb.
For Murdoch and his people understand well that any word can be made to seem bad if it is said with a certain vocal colouring. 'Liberal', for instance, and 'Leftist', and 'Bleeding Heart', which describe the sort of people who favour a fair go for other human beings, are made to sound evil, or mad, or laughably mistaken, merely from the way the word is said, and repeatedly said, or sarcastically said, or with waggled forefingers satirically said. I and Marr and Mungo and Phillip Adams are called 'tired old Lefties' because we do not favour, say, the torture of children in Woomera, or the killing of children for WMD they don't have, and their parents and uncles and cousins don't have, and somehow this is a bad thing. How is it a bad thing?
It was also thought by Murdoch that if you say,'Do you know who I am?' to a Woy Woy waiter you should lose your future in politics for this, even after the Woy Woy waiter is shown to be schtupping a staffer of the Robertson Liberal candidate and may well have made the whole thing up. It was thought by Murdoch that because Gordon Brown used the word 'bigoted', accurately, in a private conversation that Sky News unlawfully bugged, he should lose the Prime Ministership for it; and he did, indeed he did.
It is thought by Murdoch that if you suggest some people or group of people were behind anything that has happened you are subscribing to a 'conspiracy theory' and only fools do that, since Caesar, Jesus, Thomas A Becket, Richard II, Lady Jane Grey, Cranmer, Essex, Ralegh, Charles I, Louis XVI, Danton, Robespierre, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Olaf Palme, Jenny Lindh, Uday Hussein, Qusay Saddam, Osama Bin Laden and Moammar Ghaddafi were all killed or shot at by lone madmen and there is never more than one person involved in any murder and only an idiot, a 'conspiracy theorist', would think so. There are no conspiracies, ever. You'd be mad, really mad to think there were.
Murdoch makes up new sins: that's what he does in his day job most mornings, midnights and afternoons. Stephen Conroy uses the phrase 'fucking fantastic' and must, Newscorp now says, be sent to the backbench for it. 'Fucking fantastic' is a phrase that is used, or heard without offence, by eighteen million Australians every week. Yet Conroy must be sacked, or censured, or made to apologize, or otherwise publicly shamed for it. Howard need not apologize for having frogmarched us into a war that killed a hundred thousand children who did not, as he alleged, possess atomic bombs and neither did any adult around them, but Conroy saying 'fucking fantastic' is different, it's a serious matter. It's in a different category of plain and manifest iniquity from killing children. Saying 'fucking fantastic' is unforgiveable.
And 'reward' is unforgiveable too; rewarding your allies instead of your foes unthinkable. Rewarding good deeds like ousting the vapid sleepless dipstick tyrant Rudd is especially unthinkable, in the upside-down Murdoch world (like Alice's Wonderland) where all good deeds are punished.
They have to be.
Rupert said so.
Discuss.
So now we know how it happened, at last.
Bill Shorten was 'rewarded', wrongly it seems, for making Gillard the leader, or so we are told by the Murdoch decrypters who selflessly search out and ponder these things. And Tanya Plibersek, who stuck by Rudd through his last hours and spoke out against Gillard leading, was also 'rewarded', for some reason, for being Gillard's enemy. And Mark Arbib, whose factional numbers cut down Beazley midstream and uplifted Rudd into the empty saddle was also 'rewarded' (if you can keep up with this logic) in spite of his having wrongly done this, because he changed his mind later on; and Kim Carr punished because he did not.
I hope all this is now perfectly clear.
Because 'reward', the Murdoch moral philosophers currently tell us very persuasively, is a bad, bad thing. The man who saves the nation from Rudd should be punished for it, not rewarded, much as a man who saves a child from drowning is always rightly punished for it. Well, isn't he? Of course he is. Shorten helped the Party get rid of Rudd, and thus keep Abbott out of the Lodge and a probable twenty years of wayward, malicious, hydrophobic power, so Shorten should be punished for it. Of course he should.
Where did this new rule come from? That good deeds should not be rewarded?
For it's very, very, very, very new. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who brought his disabled plane down in the Hudson and so saved a lot of lives, was acclaimed not condemned for it. The crack team under Yoni Netanyahu, Bibi's brother, who rescued the Entebbe hostages were highly praised for it, and given medals. The team under Howard Florey who invented penicillin and saved a billion lives got the Nobel Prize for it, not prison. Yet the team who rescued us from an Abbott-Hockey-Bishop-Truss-Morrison-Barnaby Era and a restored and brutish WorkChoices must cop a shellacking for it, under the new, bizarre, infallible Murdoch rules-of-thumb.
For Murdoch and his people understand well that any word can be made to seem bad if it is said with a certain vocal colouring. 'Liberal', for instance, and 'Leftist', and 'Bleeding Heart', which describe the sort of people who favour a fair go for other human beings, are made to sound evil, or mad, or laughably mistaken, merely from the way the word is said, and repeatedly said, or sarcastically said, or with waggled forefingers satirically said. I and Marr and Mungo and Phillip Adams are called 'tired old Lefties' because we do not favour, say, the torture of children in Woomera, or the killing of children for WMD they don't have, and their parents and uncles and cousins don't have, and somehow this is a bad thing. How is it a bad thing?
It was also thought by Murdoch that if you say,'Do you know who I am?' to a Woy Woy waiter you should lose your future in politics for this, even after the Woy Woy waiter is shown to be schtupping a staffer of the Robertson Liberal candidate and may well have made the whole thing up. It was thought by Murdoch that because Gordon Brown used the word 'bigoted', accurately, in a private conversation that Sky News unlawfully bugged, he should lose the Prime Ministership for it; and he did, indeed he did.
It is thought by Murdoch that if you suggest some people or group of people were behind anything that has happened you are subscribing to a 'conspiracy theory' and only fools do that, since Caesar, Jesus, Thomas A Becket, Richard II, Lady Jane Grey, Cranmer, Essex, Ralegh, Charles I, Louis XVI, Danton, Robespierre, Lincoln, John Kennedy, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Olaf Palme, Jenny Lindh, Uday Hussein, Qusay Saddam, Osama Bin Laden and Moammar Ghaddafi were all killed or shot at by lone madmen and there is never more than one person involved in any murder and only an idiot, a 'conspiracy theorist', would think so. There are no conspiracies, ever. You'd be mad, really mad to think there were.
Murdoch makes up new sins: that's what he does in his day job most mornings, midnights and afternoons. Stephen Conroy uses the phrase 'fucking fantastic' and must, Newscorp now says, be sent to the backbench for it. 'Fucking fantastic' is a phrase that is used, or heard without offence, by eighteen million Australians every week. Yet Conroy must be sacked, or censured, or made to apologize, or otherwise publicly shamed for it. Howard need not apologize for having frogmarched us into a war that killed a hundred thousand children who did not, as he alleged, possess atomic bombs and neither did any adult around them, but Conroy saying 'fucking fantastic' is different, it's a serious matter. It's in a different category of plain and manifest iniquity from killing children. Saying 'fucking fantastic' is unforgiveable.
And 'reward' is unforgiveable too; rewarding your allies instead of your foes unthinkable. Rewarding good deeds like ousting the vapid sleepless dipstick tyrant Rudd is especially unthinkable, in the upside-down Murdoch world (like Alice's Wonderland) where all good deeds are punished.
They have to be.
Rupert said so.
Discuss.
Labels: y
posted by Bob Ellis @ 09:34
14 Comments
14 Comments:
It is totally consistent Bob! On the principle of "four legs good, two legs baaaad" everything the government and Gillard in particular does is baaaad, by definition.
The demotions seem eminently sensible to me by the way; McClelland is my local member and I have yet to see him do anything much, either as member or as Attorney General. Kim Carr seemed rather unimpressive in his rare ventures into the limelight. I agree with you on the promotions - Shorten, Plibersek and Arbib are amongst the brightest and best, despite the latter's delinquencies.
I am delighted to see you agreeing with me over the removal of Rudd; as you may recall it has been a theme I've pushed for the last 18 months.
Now if only we can encourage Julia into becoming a Labor Prime minister . . .
Testing.
Yes, a Labor Prime Minister who wants to lock up children in an alien country where they will be whored and undereducated, and lock up Assange, and send back Hazaras, and give the Pakistani Taliban the ingredients of atomic bombs, and continue with Australian deaths to prop up Karzai, and not interfere in Port Moresby, and not criticise China for executing accountants and selling their body-parts to Hong Kong millionaires, and yell 'Americans can do anything!' and put Arbib in vharge of the money, is my kind of Prime Minister all right, and your too I expect.
Why would we ever consider anyone else?
A wonderful read Bob. We differ it seems on a few issues but they detract not a jot from your style and punch.
Some things are indefensible, but those which do merit comment are :
The Pakis aren't getting anything, only India. The IAEA has approved sales of Uranium to them by the USA, and will do so for us when appropriate safeguards are applied.
The UN has control of the mission to Afghanistan, and we should be there unless and until the UN withdraws. It is a police action and some casualties are inevitable from ieds and the like.
New Guinea is a sovereign state and no-one should interfere except through diplomatic channels (and I'll lay odds they are running hot)
Executing accountants? Sounds like a good idea to me, as long as it includes the economists and other bean counters :)
No, in China a lot of people found guilty and shot with a single bulket in a sports field are accountants who have embezzled funds they shouldn't have. A bill for the bullet is then sent to their parents.
Lovely country.
Shorten and the like did not rescue Australia from an Abbott Government. On the contrary, they near well brought it about (unless there is a result closer than a one-seat margin, of which I am not aware). Had those bold, brave members of Rudd's cabinet got over their fear of him and quit whining in the corner, spoken to him directly and perhaps even delivered some kind of ultimatum, the Labor party would still to this day hold a clear majority and probably be cruising along quite nicely (i.e. better than they are now) with re-election in 2013 a very likely prospect.
Did those who ganged up on Rudd consider anyone or anything other than themselves and their desire to take revenge on their boss (something most of us want to do but don't, because we tend to recognise that not everything revolves around us and our precious pride)?
Perhaps they should have cast their minds back to the Sorry Speech and tried to remember not only how important that was to people, but that Rudd was the one to do it, and do it in such a way as to make that speech and that morning totally unforgettable. Perhaps they should have attempted to properly acknowledge that their prime minister was, essentially, as popular (if not moreso) than Bob Hawke, Labor's longest-serving PM. Perhaps they shouldn't have shoved to the back of their minds the fact that Rudd - having tried pushing the Emissions Trading Scheme through parliament twice, unsuccessfully - was persuaded by Gillard (as much a sceptic of man-made global warming as John Howard) to shelve it. Perhaps they should have got off the phone to Twiggy Forrest and actually fought for the full mining tax - a good, good policy - instead of falling to their knees to fellate the mining companies in between pleas for forgiveness. Perhaps they should have allowed the twenty-sixth prime minister of Australia, looked to with respect and awe from faraway corners of the globe as a result of the way he and his Treasurer combatted a looming economic catastrophe as the rest of the world clung on by their fingertips, to at the very least see out his first term.
No, Shorten & co. proceeded to impose Gillard on us. And, after almost losing government, they've allowed this uninspiring, inarticulate, unimaginative, uncaring, compassion-devoid, emotionally hollow, embarrassing guttersnipe to march on through the countryside and throughout the world in representation of us all, sapping the energy from thousands of people of my generation who otherwise might have given a hoot or two about Australian politics.
To Anthony :
Rudd should have been persuaded to resign "for health reasons" in time honoured fashion.
Your last paragraph is total bullshit.
Gillard is the one.
Rudd over Gillard for me. Beazley over Rudd.
The true villain, Kim Carr, put Rudd and Gillard together knowing they detested one another and knowing, or guessing, it wouldn't work, or wouldn't work for long. And he's being punished now for a fool idea by its principal beneficiary.
Sad, sad, sad.
Once you take talent out of the equation, once you reward something other than talent, it all goes to hell.
Rudd was adequate but very strange, Gillard mediocre in everything she attempted, and an atrocious judge of what would work, and Beazley an excellent man, and a great, lost Prime Minister brought down by the panic of midgets when Labor was on 54.
Sad,sad, sad.
To: Doug Quixote
That you think Rudd should have been made to resign "for health reasons" indicates your fondness and respect for deceitful contrivance. You thus fail to surprise when you state that "Gillard is the one". You're right. She's exactly your kind of politician.
To Anthony :
Not at all - it would have given Rudd a gentler exit, with plausible deniability and less good copy for the opponents.
As for Gillard, her record is that she is a person of her word; that the haters are only able to point to one alleged "lie" repeated ad nauseam is the exception that proves the rule.
I would quail at the thought of cataloguing Abbott's lies, deceptions and misreprentations, by way of contrast.
No, she swore loyalty to Beazley twice and twice discarded him. She swore loyalty to Latham and patronised him on the street. She swore loyalty to Rudd then said under him Labor had 'lost its way' and then made him Foreign Secretary which is, if you think of it, the first pathfinder of Labor's way. She supported gay marriage then opposed it. She disfavoured Nauru and has now, after many deaths, embraced it.
She spoke of the horror of the Christmas Island drownings and named only Australians watching, none of the drowned. She dragged a little boy away from his father's grave and with a cattke-prod envouraged him onto a bus and an aeroplane and, after two days' weeping in Broome airport, to the Christmas Island hillside where he watched for his mother to come back alive.
And this is a good person worth voting for?
Nah.
Don't think so.
G'Day Bob.
"And this is a good person worth voting for?"
You don't have to vote for her unless you live in the seat of Lalor.
Think instead of her team : Shorten, Swan, Corbet, Plibersek, Roxon, Wong, Smith, Albanese, Bowen, and Rudd.
Man for man and woman for woman far better than the alternatives.
Politics is always selecting the least worst option; "lie back and think of England" if you must.
Yes, you have a point. Buy the package, not the string.
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