Move On, Nothing To See Here
Remember that nobody likes a sore loser? I remember that. You expect when political allegiances change and the public swings behind the 'other side' that supporters of the previously powerful will have the dignity to crawl off somewhere and lick their wounds, and let the others have a go. Sure they can continue to disagree with what the current lot does, you'd expect them to do that - it's healthy.
But to read and listen to the vast conservative political commentarium who have spent the past decade or so triumphantly stirring up division, claiming to speak for the common man and woman against horrible elites (who, hilariously, weren't the ones actually running the show - how's that for a neat trick, making the the elite the same people being gleefully cut off at the knees), and claiming credit for a boom which they wove out of debt and which is now bankrupting us all, is sickening. It's as if they're still in power, like little Malcom Fraser's pique that the conservatives could possibly not be in power when Whitlam led the socialists into the capital, causing him to run off to dob to the GG. Conservatives in the past say 3 decades actually always assume they're in power, even when they lose elections, in landslides. Like the Republicans in the US, who all the way through Clinton's reign spent most of their time trying to find women who'd sucked his cock, rather than do anything in the way of genuine political opposition. They don't do opposition.
So there have been no mistakes in the past 10 years, apparently. The lunatic wars were right and just, and are going just swimmingly. The economies now spiralling earthwards with smoke billowing from the tail did that only in the past year, after the socialists got into the cockpit. Debt so large it can be seen from the moon, the rate of of which accumulated exponentially in the past 10 years, is all individuals' fault, because nobody told them to go out and borrow all of that money, all they were told was that things were going so amazingly, endlessly well that they should hock everything they owned to add another couple of inches to the size of the TV and add yet another property and a few million more shares to their own little portfolio. Now the new lot are going to put us all in debt, for generations to come, even though we already are, and it happened under conservative watch, and while they were at it they spent $500 billion dollars winning 3 or 4 elections, money which would be mightily handy right about now to stimulate things a bit, and which would have meant we didn't need to go into debt at all, to do that.
Let alone the succession of tax cuts, some of which are still flowing through, which will cripple the chance of government ever recovering some of the revenues it's going to need without some poor sod having to say "we need to raise taxes", at which point the apoplectic commentarium will trot out all the "socialists raise taxes and leave debts" horseshit. Maybe they do that to fix up the mess left by the conservatives, who from Thatcher to Regan to Bush slash and burn public institutions and common-wealth, creating momentary euphoria as the money rolls in, and then long-term squalor as the place falls apart. No mea culpa here, gosh no.
Lots has been said about the culture wars. These culture warriors are our own fundamentalists. You won't ever convince them of anything outside their own blinkered, spiteful little brains, because all they're really interested in is hate and winning. Decent TV shows and newspapers actually cave in to their incessant vile whingeing, and invite them to join previously balanced and moderate media instruments, to ensure that the war goes on everywhere. They moan that these instruments lack 'balance', meaning that they disagree with their own particular monomaniacal stream of fundamentalist filth.
Politics as a profession does this eventually. Notice how 'balance' in reporting for example has come to mean equal air time for opposing politcal parties? As if our media was just another arm of the respective party political machines? If you have a bad government, you'd hope that journalists of whatever persuasion would say so, but the way the pollies have set up the landscape now that's never going to happen, because they and their other acolytes are actually sitting there counting every word uttered and screening it for 'bias' (meaning something contrary to party policy). So increasingly we get streaming fundamentalist filth, but hey, it's 50% from each side.
The one possibly redeeming hope is that the vast majority of people rarely listen to them, as polls seem to show. But it's like the odour of celery that rots in a fridge, the way they frame things tends to cling and resist elimination, and we're all the time getting angrier and more outraged and more reactionary in the way we respond, to everything. Everything is either a scandal or a tragedy or euphorically great. We donate $150 million to a bushfire appeal without the slightest clue as to what anybody needs the money for - most people are insured, government is rebuilding the infrastructure, etc. It's that same, dualistic, thermodynamic boom and bust machine, this time with our emotions.
We need some calm and humour.
But to read and listen to the vast conservative political commentarium who have spent the past decade or so triumphantly stirring up division, claiming to speak for the common man and woman against horrible elites (who, hilariously, weren't the ones actually running the show - how's that for a neat trick, making the the elite the same people being gleefully cut off at the knees), and claiming credit for a boom which they wove out of debt and which is now bankrupting us all, is sickening. It's as if they're still in power, like little Malcom Fraser's pique that the conservatives could possibly not be in power when Whitlam led the socialists into the capital, causing him to run off to dob to the GG. Conservatives in the past say 3 decades actually always assume they're in power, even when they lose elections, in landslides. Like the Republicans in the US, who all the way through Clinton's reign spent most of their time trying to find women who'd sucked his cock, rather than do anything in the way of genuine political opposition. They don't do opposition.
So there have been no mistakes in the past 10 years, apparently. The lunatic wars were right and just, and are going just swimmingly. The economies now spiralling earthwards with smoke billowing from the tail did that only in the past year, after the socialists got into the cockpit. Debt so large it can be seen from the moon, the rate of of which accumulated exponentially in the past 10 years, is all individuals' fault, because nobody told them to go out and borrow all of that money, all they were told was that things were going so amazingly, endlessly well that they should hock everything they owned to add another couple of inches to the size of the TV and add yet another property and a few million more shares to their own little portfolio. Now the new lot are going to put us all in debt, for generations to come, even though we already are, and it happened under conservative watch, and while they were at it they spent $500 billion dollars winning 3 or 4 elections, money which would be mightily handy right about now to stimulate things a bit, and which would have meant we didn't need to go into debt at all, to do that.
Let alone the succession of tax cuts, some of which are still flowing through, which will cripple the chance of government ever recovering some of the revenues it's going to need without some poor sod having to say "we need to raise taxes", at which point the apoplectic commentarium will trot out all the "socialists raise taxes and leave debts" horseshit. Maybe they do that to fix up the mess left by the conservatives, who from Thatcher to Regan to Bush slash and burn public institutions and common-wealth, creating momentary euphoria as the money rolls in, and then long-term squalor as the place falls apart. No mea culpa here, gosh no.
Lots has been said about the culture wars. These culture warriors are our own fundamentalists. You won't ever convince them of anything outside their own blinkered, spiteful little brains, because all they're really interested in is hate and winning. Decent TV shows and newspapers actually cave in to their incessant vile whingeing, and invite them to join previously balanced and moderate media instruments, to ensure that the war goes on everywhere. They moan that these instruments lack 'balance', meaning that they disagree with their own particular monomaniacal stream of fundamentalist filth.
Politics as a profession does this eventually. Notice how 'balance' in reporting for example has come to mean equal air time for opposing politcal parties? As if our media was just another arm of the respective party political machines? If you have a bad government, you'd hope that journalists of whatever persuasion would say so, but the way the pollies have set up the landscape now that's never going to happen, because they and their other acolytes are actually sitting there counting every word uttered and screening it for 'bias' (meaning something contrary to party policy). So increasingly we get streaming fundamentalist filth, but hey, it's 50% from each side.
The one possibly redeeming hope is that the vast majority of people rarely listen to them, as polls seem to show. But it's like the odour of celery that rots in a fridge, the way they frame things tends to cling and resist elimination, and we're all the time getting angrier and more outraged and more reactionary in the way we respond, to everything. Everything is either a scandal or a tragedy or euphorically great. We donate $150 million to a bushfire appeal without the slightest clue as to what anybody needs the money for - most people are insured, government is rebuilding the infrastructure, etc. It's that same, dualistic, thermodynamic boom and bust machine, this time with our emotions.
We need some calm and humour.
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