Greg! The stop sign!
Anzus, GW Bush, Howard govt, International affairs - - Posted on June, 19 at 2:02 pm by Sean
In a post below, venerable Kennel notes some people’s unwillingness to admit error, specifically in politics. When the Oz today had an article about US foreign policy by Greg Sheridan entitled “Realism over idealism“, I was tempted to believe for half a second that Greg was about to come clean. Either he was going to renounce the mad plans of his neo-con heroes, or admit that we invaded Iraq in order to steal their shit.
Heh, ya reckon.
What we get from Greg is yet another dishonest piece of spin on behalf of Bush and John Gaddamned Howard (still!) via an article by Condi Rice. Greg’s review is crafted to make us think that he may have lost his doe-eyed adoration for Rice in particular and the Bushistas in general, to whit:
“The essay is not flawless”.
Given the record of achievement of Rice and the administration she serves, I think we can say that Greg beatifies her with faint criticism.
Regarding the US’s massive increase in military spending since 2001, Greg tries to paint that country under Bush as more dove-like than both New Zealand and Sweden. And we hate New Zealand and Sweden! Imagine governing for the people, and not starting wars! Anyhoo, after September 11, the US
…did not react with knee-jerk militarism but kept its military budget at normal peacetime proportions of its national wealth, not rising anywhere near its level during the Cold War, much less the Vietnam War…
I suppose we should expect this from the Oz, wherein Ms Albrechtson said yesterday that the imprisonment of innocents without charge or trial, their systematic, White House approved torture, and their continued imprisonment for years even after their innocence had been established, is in some way analogous to Mark Steyn getting sued because he’s a bigot. The NYT is the USA’s Paper of Record, and the Oz is our Paper of Fuckwitted Comparisons. Apparently failing to beat the Taliban at the same time as invading Iraq hasn’t cost as much as a percentage of US GDP as being ready to fight a global conventional and nuclear war at a moment’s notice against a fellow superpower and its many allies and satellites for 40 years.
And oh, Greg, didn’t that Vietnam War happen during that cold war? As part of it, indeed? I was under the impression that the US had to conscript for ‘Nam (unlike the current cock-ups), because most of its regular military was needed on the West German border.
Greg uses this “reasoning” to imply that the US has not been spending more on its military industrial complex since 2001, which is essentially a flat-out lie.
The remainder is as eye-rollingly bad. There are several paragraphs about how Condi mentions Australia (!!!!!), so, we’re, like, America’s besty and stuff! John Howard rules! I do think this is an insight into Greg’s megalo-philiac disorder, rather than a cynical sales pitch. He believes it, and it’s embarassing.
“Many nations much bigger than Australia get no mention at all”
Is that not worthy of the shallowest teenage girl in the playground?
He goes on to equate the promotion of democracy by past administrations with this one’s planning and conduct of a war of aggression (over oil, but he doesn’t say that). To finish he drags out the new right’s favourite piece of current political correctness, finally sinking our hopes that he had seen the light:
“Often enough the term neo-con has betrayed a kind of low-wattage anti-Semitism with, as one wag put it, con standing for conservative and neo standing for Jewish.”
Yeeeeeeah. I thought the invasion of Haiti killed more Marines than Iwo Jima, but that’s only because I’m anti-Peorto Rican.
None of Dubya, Cheney or Rice is Jewish so far as I’m aware. I’m also under the strong impression that the neo-cons named themselves, Greg. After all, if not they’d be called The Dangerous Morons.
UPDATE:
Nasking the Bear has kindly linked to the questions Greg asked the Sith Lord Cheney on the latter’s visit to Australia. Take it with a grain of salt readers, it comes from an unreliable source. Questions were:
Interview of the Vice President by Greg Sheridan, the Australian
Altitude Restaurant
Sydney, Australia
Q Sir, welcome to Australia. And thank you very much for making time to see me.
Q Of course, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about Iraq. But I wondered, sir, if I might start with Iran. And I’d like to ask you how dangerous for the world would a nuclear-armed Iran be?
Q And, sir, how far away from having nuclear weapons, do you think Iran is?
Q How bad is their interference in Iraq?
Q So would you share Senator McCain’s formulation that the only thing worse than a military confrontation with Iran is a nuclear-armed Iran?
Q Sir, on Iraq, what will success look like?
Q Sir, without providing the terrorists a date, do you have any sense of a time frame for when that might likely evolve, that situation?
Q Sir, Australia has been in Iraq and Afghanistan with the United States from the very beginning. But the troop numbers have been relatively small. Do you believe the Australian contribution has been meaningful — militarily meaningful in both those theaters?
Q Would it be a significant setback if all Australian combat troops were withdrawn from Iraq?
Q Sir, under President Bush and Prime Minister Howard, the U.S.-Australia alliance has become very close. There’s a new level of intelligence sharing and so forth. Have you been happy to participate in that process? Would you say the alliance is now closer than it was when President Bush came to office, closer than it’s been perhaps?
Q The new arrangements between Australia and the U.S. in areas like intelligence, do you think they’ll outlive President Bush and Prime Minister Howard? Do you think there’s a new institutional closeness between the two countries that will live on?
Q Sir, you’ve been Vice President a long time now —
Q Sir, are you concerned about the growth of anti-Americanism around the world, that this compromises the ability of free people to achieve the security ends that are necessary?
Q Sir, looking back now you would say the strategic calculus, it was right to mount the Iraq operation?
Q The benefits outweigh the negatives?
Q Yes, indeed. Sir, thank you very much, indeed.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you.
Good lord. Andrew Denton’s a more serious journalist than this bloke, and he’s just Doug Mulray’s sidekick whose gotten ahead of himself. At least when union players call the ref “sir” it’s usually proceeded by “Awww…” and followed by “no way that was fucking forward!”
Imagine Greg playing rugga though. “Oh, sir! Brilliant decision sir! We were a mile off side sir! Have you memorised the Laws of Rugby verbatim in their entirety sir?”
Posted in Anzus, GW Bush, Howard govt, International affairs |
June 19th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
The totally deranged Greg Sheridan should learn that the ‘con’ word here refers to con-job. i.e. the massive conjob that Australia endured during the recent Howard Decade of Horrors, the ultra-right wing snowjob that America has endured and foistered upon this globe for eight dangerously painful years, and the transformation of Great Britain into the world’s second biggest bunch of international thugs.
For centuries of untold suppression, lines of robotic nodding serfs, just like our idiotic Greg Sheridan, have mechanically typed their daily diatribes into printing presses around the world, perverting any truths into minced and mangled propaganda sermons and directives as dictated by their lords and masters who, through mere chance and fate, are merely supreme arseholes who happened to be born into a media baron’s cradle.
Incapable and not permitted any semblance of rational or original thinking of their own since the Gothenburg presses first rolled, the Sheridans of today prostitute their very souls for a few sheckles of gold from their Murdoch-esque paymasters or whatever lowlife media pimp owns and possesses them at the time.
Such morons actually come to believe that pure evil, such as the war criminals G W Bush or J W Howard, can almost be portrayed as nice, decent and civil if they keep typing more rotten tripe for the masses to choke on. Recent frogshit about Howard getting knighted being just one example.
Over these suppressed centuries, angry and thinking citizens, wishing to right the wrongs of the endless stream of bastards who rule us, wrote angry Letters to the Editor of the world’s newspapers and publications. These were quickly edited, cut, distorted, ignored or crunched - as the puppet master saw fit - and truth was always flushed down the sewer instead of being enshrined in history.
When blogs came along, the lines of nodding serfs hated them: What! Let the people have a say? Let the truth be revealed to all?
And today they’ll do anything to destroy blogs. They can’t swamp us with their arrogance and pollute our minds with their propaganda and trivia any more because only retarded wombats living under a rock in the Simpson Desert read The Australian newspaper, So, realising that they can’t beat us, they’re joining blogs eagerly to once again hijack everyone’s minds into their fruitcake views of the world.
In the last decade the western world has spun completely out of control, out of its correct orbit, while the Greg Sheridans of that disgraced profession of journalism were its astronauts, constantly firing the thruster rockets to disorientate us all.
If I’m not right, then can anyone tell me one good thing George W. Bush has ever done? One Howard lie that was actually true? One good reason for us to be needlessly invading other nations and murdering their families and children when they provoked none of it?
Greg Sheridan happily promotes and encourages all such lunacy from his rabid and batty right-wing leaking tub of dying journalism, I just hope that unspeakable kuntz like him and his ilk soon become extinct - like his so-called profession is headed into, and that history eventually writes them down for exactly what they were, like I said:
Kuntz.
June 20th, 2008 at 12:23 am
Good lord! Sheridan didn’t mention, even in passing, some awesome famous person he, personally, spoke to over drinks, and presumably fondled.
Must be a ghost writer.
June 20th, 2008 at 12:24 am
The thing hanging from the bridge that goes friendly on the natives in the following vid is representative of the freedom luvin’ Busheviks. Notice its carefully planned strategy. The curious onlookers are the Iraqis waiting for freedom…or Goddo. Just pretend. It’s all very subtle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaxwv1rndPI&feature=related
June 20th, 2008 at 7:00 am
“Often enough the term neo-con has betrayed a kind of low-wattage anti-Semitism ”
Is this comment from the same Sheridan who writes things like:
“It’s hard to believe Islamic opinion is not substantially more extreme in the Middle East. The task of reforming the extremism in Islamic cultures remains vast.”
Imagine if you inserted the word Jewish for Islamic:
It’s hard to believe Jewish opinion is not substantially more extreme in the Middle East. The task of reforming the extremism in Jewish cultures remains vast.
You could also add the word Christian.
Or what about this statement from Sheridan?:
“But given how much violence and extremism are generated in the name of Islam it is now just not satisfactory to dismiss all this as merely a perversion of Islam.”
Imagine:
“But given how much violence and extremism are generated in the name of Judaism it is now just not satisfactory to dismiss all this as merely a perversion of Judaism.”
or:
“…is there an element inherent to Islam itself that lends support to extremism?”
could become:
“…is there an element inherent to Judaism itself that lends support to extremism?”
So, is Sheridan demonstrating a kind of low-wattage anti-Islamic behaviour?
And are critics of some extreme Jewish-related & Israel-related organisations like AIPAC & pro-war/invasion characters like Kissinger & Netanyahu & Kristol & Krauthammer & Wolfowitz really just pointing out that some Jewish people & organisations might be extreme in their thinking?
Just like Sheridan points out that some Islamic characters & groups are extreme.
He doesn’t seem to worry that using the word Islam might lead to more taxi driver bashings…or Holocaust-like moments such as Abu Graib, the attacks on Fallujah & Mosul…the rounding up of various Islamic individuals in Palestine & the stamping of easily identifiable signs on their arms.
Double standards perhaps.
Or is Greg just expressing his views? Freedom of speech & all that.
Like this group:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Voice_for_Peace
N’
June 20th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Speaking of Greg Sheridan…
go to comment 21…in fact the whole article is worth taking in:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/06/18/ap-thatll-be-250-a-word-for-copy-paste-thanks/#comment-479463
The art of Democracy maintenance…;)
And in Greg’s case, the art of playing moderate when you’re not moderate at all. Shows how far RIGHT certain polies & their media ENABLERS took us. Eh…MR. JONES…? hmm…good song.
Going LEFT? Next stop THE LIGHT.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Where to start…
I too read Greg’s six foot pile of shit over at the abominable OZ.
True to form, a staunch cheerleader & apologist for the Empire. As usual, his one eyed masturbations pissed me off enough to think about posting a retort…but getting banned from his blog again, having recently been banned from the RWDB echochamber of ABolt, didn’t seem like a gratifying activity.
These Bushocon poodles really hate being laughed at, they take themselves oh so seriously, I suppose they’ve never stopped to doubt their own veracity in the face of the facts.
Steynfans & Howardhuggers all in a putrid miasma of ignorance.
I know I shouldn’t even waste my time, or brainspace, reading the ridiculous tripe therein but such bigotry can be perversely fascinating when you’re bored shitless (& the only net access I have outside of internal emails just happens to be News.com sites….funny that; or not). I have to wait ’til I’m home to indulge in more measured analysis such as here.
The more I ingest the PR of the New World Kings & their cattle the more sure I become that the world is a big fucking mess & apathy/ignorance enables blood to feed the dollar tree.
Flagwaving, applepie eating, biblethumping, guntoting(or wannabe) jingobots servile at the heels of the Bulls on Parade.