ANTE EULOGY FOR A POLITICAL PORNOGRAPHER

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE DAY WHEN JOHN HOWARD WILL SHUFFLE OFF THIS MORTAL COIL AND CLICHES AND PLATITUDES WILL RAIN DOWN LIKE AN APOCALYPSE
This was written in March 2008. Nothing has happened since then to change my views on JWH.

Johnny who?

What a pathetic coward. John Howard waits until he’s out of the country before he makes any comment about current affairs in Australia, and when he does, (in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Thursday 6/3/08) he pretends that he wasn’t given the most humiliating thrashing any political leader in Australia, and possibly the world, has ever had. Howard slams the Rudd government for abandoning Work Choices as though it wasn’t the single most significant issue on which Labor won the 2007 election. Oh, and he makes no reference to the fact that the party he lead to utter ignominy abandoned every last link to Work Choices after being thrashed yet again by public opinion when Julie Bishop foreshadowed opposing the abolition of AWAs in the Senate. This is not mere denial: it’s outright contempt. And it gets worse. Howard’s Washington speech was entitled “Sharing our common values”. Our common values?

Yes, that’s right, the man who lost the right to speak for the nation in the most excoriating repudiation of the values he embodied for eleven and a half years still presumes to know what Australian values are, and pretends to have the right to speak on our behalf, as if we didn’t know what we were doing when we sacked him and his fawning cling-ons at the last election. The fact that he was not prepared to say to Australians in Australia what he said to his mates in a foreign country really says it all. He’s a gutless wonder. No that’s giving him too much credit. He’s just plain gutless – the most damning proof of which is actually something else he failed to do in this country. Who was conspicuous by his absence when Kevin Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generations?

Little Johnny has never embodied the values that underpin this country – doesn’t hold a candle to the Anzacs, for example, whom he was so fond of cuddling up to when in office, because he hasn’t learned anything from defeat, behaving more like Saddam Hussein claiming a great victory after the first Gulf War.

Howard hasn’t actually claimed a victory. He’s just refused to accept that he and what he actually stood for has been repudiated. Yet in his speech he said this:
“… a number of the more conservative social policies of my government have been endorsed by the new Australian government…The sincerity of its conversion will be tested by experience of office."

The man is utterly shameless. Not to mention narcissistic. He implies that the policies he refers to are his gift to the nation, and that only he could pull them off, when the truth is that they were opportunistic caricatures of what is actually needed: the NT intervention being the prime case in point. His brazen claim to be the better economic manager is another one. And the appalling state of our defence equipment is its own comment on his claim to be the bulwark of the nation’s security. Name any policy that Howard claimed to be the best at and you’ll find a white-anted reality behind a façade of political machismo.

The measure of Howard the coward is that he can’t admit that he was wrong. Worse still, he hasn’t got the guts to say in his own country that he still believes that his policies are the right ones for Australia. He has to skulk off to Imperial Capital to be feted by the powerful effete (sic).

Two further observations in closing.

Firstly, everyone in Australia is aware of the fact that the only other Prime Minister to lose his seat at an election lost it over industrial relations. What most people probably aren’t aware of is that the only other political leader who clung to government beyond his parliamentary term, as Howard did in 2007, also lost the election. There's probably a lesson in that. Anyone want to write an opera about it?

Secondly, remember “Aspirational Nationalism”? Remember all those discussions about what it could possibly mean? Well, here’s another one from when Howard was treasurer: “Incentivation”. Remember that one? Remember the bagging he got for it? My point is, he didn’t learn anything from that episode. He continued to live in a world of his own out of which he thought he could gift the nation with words and phrases that didn’t even have what it takes to become clichés. John Howard is not just a coward. He’s a empty vessel. In the end it really was appropriate that he did not attend the Apology. He isn’t worthy of it.

Let him have his day in the land of the brave and the home of the free, by all means. Let him wallow in the fantasy that he is the suffering servant rejected by his own household. But please, let’s not have a blow by blow account of it in the media. Not because as left-liberals, which he so contemptuously labels anyone who recognises him for what he is, we don’t want to hear “good news”, but because we’ve had a gut full of political pornography.