3.00 pm Wednesday
Interesting to see Abbott flailing in defeat and saying ‘a protection racket for the Member for Dobell!’ again, and again withdrawing it; Pyne, more puce and petulant and skinned-feline than ever, yelling at the Speaker and the Speaker yelling back; and Albo moving Pyne be no longer heard. Clearly this column is getting to them; and, of course, Carr’s coup in getting Schapelle an early-mark which Bishop could never do.
Their moment is passed, they are Yesterday’s Men, and they both may go to gaol for conspiracy or be got by the Speaker (who is not their friend any more since they tried to expel, disgrace and imprison him) for deceiving the House, and they know it. They don’t believe it, but they know it. How did it all go so wrong? They were so happy, creating that frenetic blur, that fog of spin, and hoping the Government would fall before it dissipated.
Bishop’s niece the radiant Sky Virgin Ashleigh is on the sound-track averring troubled suspicion that Carr may have traded imprisoned children for Schapelle and how horrible that would be, how horrible; but it isn’t working. Twenty million Australians are in favour of the trade, and only half the Liberal front bench against it.
4.15 pm
Albo magnificent, as always, and cut off by the Sky Virgin just when he was proving Pyne a serial story-changer, but giving him enough time to say of Abbott, ‘He’s not a judge, he’s not a legal expert, he’s a hack’; and noting how Abbott, given the chance to join an extendable debate about Craig chose not to, and now he’s in a better mood, wants to do it today instead. Ashleigh is now asking Oakeshott to kill Craig please, pretty please, but he won’t do that.
They’re suffering now, as they’ve suffered before, when the Bakhtiyari boys (now dead) showed up at the British Embassy looking like baseball-hatted little boys, the humanisation of their quarry. Craig flummoxed them by proving to have a Harvard degree, a good record as an advocate for nurses, a husband, a father, and a worried, framed and persecuted man. Their tactics belong in the days of Kill the Bosch and the babies spitted on the bayonets of German devils. Once you see and hear, in motion and living colour, the man you are demonising, it doesn’t work. People have got eyes. They can see. And this is too great a handicap for the Liberals. They need unseen monsters. They need bogeymen. They wanted a Craig that looked like Schwarzennegger. And he looked like Henry Fonda.
7.50 pm
Carr did well in all the interviews I saw, a comforting presence, a soother-over of troubling questions. But they keep asking if there was a deal. What do they prefer, that ahe die after years of madness at forty in a place she hates? Or that she comes home in August, and inconvenieces Abbott, who thinks the price for her was too high?
On 7.30 we see Anwar Ibrahim charged again with sodomy by men who want him out of politics. He denies again, after having done seven years for it. The comparrison with Craig is irresistible. Abbott wants to make an Anwar Ibrahim of Craig Thomson, and persecute him into the grave.
And so it goes.
Name:
If it all ends in tears for Abbott the irony should be noted.
For all the years the DLP kept Labor out of state and Federal office in the 50s and 60s, they will finally be responsible for keeping us in for a change.
I await further dispatches from the front.
Agreed comrade. The longer the opposition refuse to back down over Thomson the sillier they will look, and that is already difficult.
Crikey are ignoring all of this which shows how lost they have become.
It appears more and more as if McClymont bought a bad bill of goods from Kathy Jackson and dummied up stuff to prove it.
And with Jackson’s boyfriend being a union bustin serf choices HR Nicholls type why would anyone believe him.
What is forgotten in all this is that even if Thomson used the card for every hooker in Sydney it was a non crime and there would not have even been a sanction by the courts over it.
And the only crime noted was the supposed non-disclosure to the AEC, why didn’t one quasi legal government body simply phone the other and ask before accusing Thomson of lying.
The FWA report was the biggest load of baloney I have ever read and trying to drive a man out of his job with such a level of harassment over nothing at all is a disgrace.
And they cry crocodile tears over Slipper supposedly harassing a worker.
The Noalition and their cheer leaders make me want to vomit.
But then the fucking moron redhead should not have caved into their bullying by forcing Thomson out of the fold based on nothing.
If that is her level of care and loyalty to a member of her own party I want nothing to do with it.
David Hicks, where are you now your country needs you as PM?
When did I or anyone say that?
Tread very carefully. You can lose this megaphone forever.
Would you be against his dad as PM? Or, say, Mayor of Glenelg?
Why?
I would much prefer Terry Hicks to be running the government than the entire ALP. And that’s no insult to Terry Hicks – he seems like a gentle, quiet and conservatively-living man who did what any father would do to help his son.
The mayor of Glenelg I know not (and could not be bothered Googling)- but I expect that if he or she’s not a loopy standard model Commugreen or some sort of Nu-Labor apparatchik, could run rings around our woeful PM and associated single-celled organisms… sight unseen.
You really are on something today. Hicks senior struck me as a very ordinary human being indeed; the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.
“Twenty million Australians are in favour of the trade” – geez Bob… why bother starting a whole polling company when you can just conjure brilliant factoids like this?
“Another EllisImaginePoll. The one Mike Carlton Trusts.”
How many are against it? How many want her still there, going mad? For ten more years?
Hands up.
You first, Simon.
God, you’re bad at this.
How many are against it?
Ten million? Twelve?
Yes, yes I am bad at making stuff up. You however…
Are you for her coming out? Or staying in?
She has done enough time for what she claimed as hers but her father should have rotted and died there instead. Still, more fool her for copping it as her bag. At least the family have made heaps of money out of it – and likely a lot more to come.
I’m in favour of her complete disappearance. I wonder if some visitor has slipped her a copy of Papillon… she could be sewing together bags of coconuts as we speak, make her way to CI, and her convincing tan will lend credence to some cock and bull story (no airline slippers and little toiletry bag to lose on the perilous voyage – and saving $10,000), and be set for life pretending to be from paki-imeanafghanistan. What a ripping end to the life story. Too bad it will be written in crayon.
As I have ssid elsewhere you are banned for life — for shallowness, ignorance and cruelty.
Abbott or Pyne; now which is the bigger fool?
The ex attack dog (“rabbit dog” perhaps), or the attack poodle?
Damn, I can’t decide. Any suggestions, dear readers?
They are both putrid Doug.
That’s a cop out Marilyn. I expected at least a few expletives! Bob may think it frightens the horses, but they are probably old nags we could do without.
Pyne is the greater fool. He shows no sign of conscience. Abbott’s occasional anguish is proof he is ever so slightly more self aware.
Anguish? It might be something he ate, in the same way a baby is thought to smile when it really only has ‘wind’.