Blubber, blubber bile and bluster
* Andrew Bolt
* From: Herald Sun
* March 05, 2011 12:00AMHOW suddenly sensitive they are, the journalists and Labor politicians now feigning shock at the "hate speech" of conservatives.
I'm not sure what's funnier about the Tony Windsors, Julia Gillards, Michelle Grattans and the rest of them.
Is it their wild exaggerations? Their even wilder hypocrisy?
Or is their comically transparent attempt to de-legitimise the righteous anger of voters furious at being lied to by this inept Prime Minister, now inflicting on us the colossally useless "carbon tax" she swore before the election never to give us?
Listen to independent MP Tony Windsor, who helped to install Gillard, now playing a message left on his phone by a constituent declaring in foul language he'd be glad if Windsor died.
A "death threat", whimpered Windsor. Yes, tut-tutted the media, failing to notice it was no such thing.
See also Treasurer Wayne Swan faint with shock after Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella likened Gillard's "delusional" state to that of Muammar "My People All Love Me" Gaddafi.
Here's how Grattan, the Age political editor, reported Swan's outrage at an analogy she called "unacceptable":
"Swan condemned the images the Liberals were using as 'dangerous for our country, they incite people', and pointed to the US debate - after the January shooting of a congresswoman and killing of several people in Arizona - about the link between inflammatory language and violence."Hey, Windsor used this very same false argument on ABC radio, claiming "shock jocks" whipping up anger over Gillard's tax lie could incite assassination attempts here just as Right-wingers in the US incited a man to shoot Gabrielle Giffords.
And he, too, wasn't contradicted by his interviewer, ABC host Fran Kelly.
But the fact is even this over-heated analogy is false. The man who shot Giffords was not incited by any Right-wing "shock jock" . His politics were of the Left, and the cause rattling his mad cage was a new grammar.
Of course, I should welcome this sudden support from the Left for my campaign to clean up public discourse.
But where the hell have you guys been? I'll be more precise: where are you hiding each time far worse abuse is dished out by the Left?
If we're to be shocked by analogies with some aspect of some dictator, can Gillard and Swan at least stop making such analogies themselves?
How often they've called global warming sceptics "deniers" -- deliberately linking them to Holocaust deniers, if not to Hitler himself.
And if they abhor incitement to violence, why didn't they criticise the ABC for screening, during a Q&A debate with former prime minister John Howard, a viewer's tweet "Will someone throw a shoe at this guy NOW" - just before a moron in the live audience did just that?
Why didn't they also denounce SBS when in January it screened a chat between Leftist luvvies from David Williamson to Jack Thompson, with celebrity Muslim Waleed Aly playing host and "musician" Dan Kelly entertaining the soiree with this ditty about the evil Howard:
Gonna jump that train and ride...
Just to get away from that c........r motherf...rMore questions. Did our tender-eared posse raise a bat-squeak of complaint about the ABC paying Marieke Hardy as a scriptwriter and internet contributor, when she'd tweeted: "Tony Abbott, I hope your c..k drops off and falls down a plughole."
Quick! Can Tony Windsor call the police about this "death threat", too?
Oh, here's another comment, not written by Hardy herself but left up on her blog after she'd said she'd seen former Liberal leader Brendan Nelson:
You should have taken a piece of glass and torn his face to shreds, only leaving trails of bloody skin dripping from his ugly skin...I won't repeat what Hardy's commenter suggested be done to Nelson's wife and his children.
I know, the apologists will say such comments have as little to do with Labor as ... well, as some donkey's bray on Windsor's phone has with the Liberals. Er, right?
I'm sure that's why Windsor and the rest also didn't condemn Melbourne Theatre Company for putting on a play by Hannie Rayson that portrayed then Treasurer Peter Costello as a liar and adulterer with a dead drug addict for a son - and showed him letting boat people drown and stabbing a refugee.
So let's bring it closer to Labor's doorstep. When Howard was PM, Lindsay McDougall, of the band Frenzal Rhomb, got musicians to contribute to Rock Against Howard, a CD that included tracks such as John Howard is a Filthy slattern and Gun Him Down.
H-Block 101 sung this advice on handling such politicians:
F...ing c..., here's a stunt.
Kick him 'til he's dead.Now guess who endorsed this muck?
Answer: Labor's national president and a former premier, Carmen Lawrence, sent McDougall a warm note, declaring "It's time to put an end to (Howard's) regime of fear." Greens leader Bob Brown also blessed the project, telling these barbarians how "mean, nasty and repressive" Howard was instead.
Even Peter Garrett, now Education Minister, said the CD was a "good idea".
So where were you then, Tony Windsor? Michelle Grattan? Julia Gillard? Wayne Swan?
Yes, it's a human failing to damn in others what you'd forgive in a friend.
And in the case of so many journalists, that means condemning in the Liberals what they'd forgive in Labor, no matter how much worse their sin.
Disclaimer: Andrew Bolt is an Australian newspaper columnist and radio commentator whose views are generally
conservative. Bolt is a columnist and associate editor of the Melbourne-based Herald Sun. He also writes for Brisbane's Sunday Mail and makes regular appearances on the Nine Network, Melbourne Talk Radio, ABC Television, and local radio. In 2005, Bolt released a compilation of newspaper columns in a book titled
The Best of Andrew Bolt - Still Not Sorry.
There's been a lot of controversy surrounding Andrew Bolt and his views are not indicative of Liberal politics in each and every instance. However, he's definitely conservative and definitely anti-Labor. When you read his articles, I feel that is a fair disclaimer so that you know his position.
That given - he's got a point about the whole "death threats" thing with Tony Windsor. I don't know whether you've noticed the title of the news article about Tony Windsor's "page" on Wikipedia. Someone (obviously using a proxy IP) edited the article to say Mr Windsor had been assassinated.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/mp-assassinated-on-wikipedia/story-e6frf7l6-1226016189995. The article's title is
MP Tony Windsor assassinated on Wikipedia - which is shock tactics. He wasn't assassinated; a page about him had a false assassination report added to it.
This is the actual bit:
"[Tony Windsor] became the first political to be assassinated (sic) in Australian history".
I've seen much, much worse editing going on on Wikipedia. Good lord, I could point you to pages of living people who are quite viciously defamed on a repeat basis - to the point that their pages have been locked from being edited by certain IPs and from identifiably anonymous proxy IPs. This is MILD. Of course I'm not endorsing it; but I am saying the media is misrepresenting something that is truly inconsequential.
(Oh, and some of the most violently edited pages on Wikipedia are about such emotive issues as... wait for it... the philological and linguistic history of the French language adn the Dutch language, the history of the Merovingian period, etc. Strong stuff! If you want to talk about death threats, blimey...!)
