John Della Bosca, Kate, Tim Blair cracks a joke and living in the rum state

Today the reading takes its theme from the splash in the Daily Terror on the fate of a woman who loved a state Labor minister too well and not too wisely.

I was a fool to love him, she cries (learn more here), explaining how all her friends told her she was being stupid:

One told me that, "Here's this fun girl and then there's an old fat politician in a suit with a big question mark over him."

They meant that you can't trust a politician. Looking back I now realise I was never on a level playing field.

I used to think I was smarter and, to be honest, a lot of my anger is at myself.

I realise now I was naive and he played me like a fool.

I don't want to be identified because I'm already embarrassed about having had an affair with John.

On and on it goes, and the end result is I began to feel some pity for John Della Bosca, getting tangled up with the payback bitch from hell.

As for the explanation of keeping her anonymity and maintaining the rage by doing yet another rant for the Daily Terror, somehow the excuse is that she's embarrassed about having an affair? With a fat old politician?

Honey, you do the crime, you do the time.

Well we know how much Tim Blair hates anonymity on the intertubes, so we turned to him for a revelation, an expose of the woman by naming names. After all, if someone's dumb enough to fuck a state Labor politician, surely there should be a naming and a shaming ...

But no, we just get links to other journals celebrating the juicy scandal, along with a quip that there were two big warning signs at the start of the affair: the woman lived in Newtown and met him in an art gallery. (Lotsa Bosca).

Given Blair's ability to bash academics, it's strange that he missed the biggest sign of all - she's a postgraduate student and therefore disbarred from reading The Punch, Chairman Rupert's contribution to lowering the IQ on the intertubes.

The days of John F. Kennedy being able to fuck anything that moved in private, including the girlfriends of mobsters and movie stars, have long gone, but it's quaint that anonymity for the woman scorned remains a pious reality in the press.

In the United States the moll tucked away in Argentina for benefit of Republican governor was quickly outed, but the best Rick Feneley and Andrew Clennell can do in The Sydney Morning Herald is provide an obscured photo of a house in Newtown, the love nest for the furtive "liaisions" - sic, so and thus. (you can find the love nest photo here, but be warned it's just a bright window light in a Victorian two up two down obscured by trees).

These brave lads even provide a first name - it's Kate said this, and Kate said that, and last night there was no sign that Kate was at home, but still Kate of Newtown must remain a mystery.

But not her opinions:

I feel so stupid now.

I gave him so much yet I came to believe towards the end of the relationship that he just wanted sex and the cheap thrill of knowing that this young, attractive bird doted on him.

I now realise it was a game and he liked me being in love with him because it was all about ego.

I broke up with him once but he kept texting me to get back with him, so I did.

It is incredulous (sic) that he thought the way he treated people would not have consequences.

I was not one of his political minions who simply has to take being treated like dirt.

For a man who is a master tactician he should have known that it's not smart to totally stuff someone around who is in love.

If you want to have the hedonistic type of life where you can sleep with someone other than your wife without consequences, then don't get into politics where you are supposed to represent a certain level of community values.

I wouldn't say "moral fibre" because no one expects politicians to have that these days.

Ah well, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and we can understand the comfort of anonymous rage, but I do so wonder where Tim Blair's outrage at the anonymous behavior in the blogosphere and on the intertubes has gone, as private payback goes wild in public.

But today's sermon wouldn't be complete without a word from Bob Carr, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, under the header As you give Della a kick, remember his successes.

Ritualistic exorcism is part of democracy. Hence John Della Bosca's political corpse lies in the sawdust and every citizen is entitled to stand in line and thrust another blade in his flesh.

Et tu, NSW citizens?

Carr then outlines everything that Della Bosca achieved in the area of negotiations with James Hardie, about water allocation for the Snowy, about the Kings Cross injecting room, and about a whole of life care scheme for catastrophic accident victims. On and on it goes, celebrating the deeds of the man and the Labor government, until it ends with a maudlin flourish:

Right now he is sprawling in the political mud.

Join the mob. Give him a kick.

But not if you have been catastrophically injured in a motor accident or had campaigned for the Snowy waters.

And not if you ever wore James Hardie overalls.

In tone it reminded me of that great speech by Mark Antony in Act 3, scene 2 of Julius Caesar (freely available on the intertubes and via Project Gutenberg(:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar ... The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it ...

And so on, and as I read it, it occurred to me that Carr is still in profound denial at the state of NSW under Labor, a state that he did much to promote by ignoring infrastructure and splashing out on panem et circenses such as the Sydney Olympics.

Now of course he's long gone, off to millionaire's row at Macquarie Bank, spending his time arguing for the opening up of the book industry to fierce competition, while the NSW Labor government shelters behind fixed four year terms and a wave of public hostility.

Speaking of Newtown and Kate, it's just as well she has two strong good working legs to trot off to her affair with Della Bosca, because if she was in a wheelchair and wanted to get down to Newtown railway station, she couldn't. Not unless she minded rolling down a very large stairway. (About the only discreet thing about this state of affairs is that the state government didn't hang up a shingle saying "No crip passengers wanted here").

And you can multiply those complaints about, and observations of, decay around Sydney and the state by hundreds, if not thousands. If the wretched opposition manages to keep verging towards the centre, and sounding managerial and structural, rather than ideological and mad loony right, they'll canter in at the next election.

So for all Carr's righteous indignation, hard rain is going to fall, and voters will go sobbing to the ballot boxes, saying "state Labor? I was a fool to love them." There'll be a kicking then, and instead of Della Bosca being the one in the mud taking the blows, I think I'd rather imagine it was smug Bob Carr's phantom head copping a pounding.

And what part will Della Bosca's foolishness play in all this? No more than a passing example of the hubris and delusions, and yes - in a way the hedonistic desperation of the cabin'd, cribbed and confined world - of the political class.

Was it only four years ago that John Brogden resigned as Liberal leader and then attempted suicide for calling Bob Carr's Malaysian-born wife a "mail order bride ", along with allegations that he'd sexually harassed two female journalists? (Lateline transcript here)

At times like this, you might think we're in the final days of the decline and fall of Rome, if you have enough hubris to imagine Sydney bears some remote connection to that empire, but I like to think of it as just another day in the Rum Colony. With a new Rum puncheon rebellion always just around the corner ...

It's entertaining, just don't expect the trains to run on time. Or be able to access the station to wait for them if you happen to be old or handicapped or otherwise considered useless and irrelevant ... while the media spends its time lapping up the revelations of a sex scandal between to consenting adults, one known, one unknown (let's not get into the unknown unknowns).

It's a funny old world, no doubt about it.