Janet Albrechtsen, and a glove laid on the media while the lads Howard and Costello box on ...

(Above: much fun can be had, and hours wasted, googling images that evoke the spirit of Costello v Howard, the rumble in the jungle, the smack down of smack downs).

Choices, choices ...

A Wednesday so full of riches, it's hard to know where to start.

There's Janet Albrechtsen in the Oz doing her best to polish and buff her statuette of John Howard, though it seems that over the years it's had some minor damage - but at least it's only a small chink, a tiny chink.

One tiny chink in legacy of street-fighting man, she scribbles, explaining how John Howard was a wondrous performer, a prime ministerial legend, and blaming the media elite and the Howard haters for lining up to whack the former PM:

Published this week, the much anticipated memoirs should have been an opportunity to mark John Howard's success as one of Australia's greatest prime ministers. Instead, much of the media will focus on his failings. That the media does so with relish betrays their frequent inability to deal fairly with Howard when he was in office and now with his legacy.

The relishing media?

I guess that Peter Costello must be "much of the media", since the smirker spends his entire column in today's Fairfax rags roasting Howard slowly in Failure in 2007 was all Howard's doing.

By golly, Albrecthsen will have to use plenty of clear Kiwi polish and elbow grease, and perhaps a little spit, to burnish her Howard to a fine conservative shine:

Convicted criminals and smelly shoes aside, the launch of Howard's 711-page tome yesterday is a timely reminder of Howard's permanent legacy.

711 pages! That reminds me of the good old days in Smith street Collingwood, when they used to sell books by their weight. Sadly, Costello looks past that weighty tome, and finds a moral gnat who should have written a decent tome but didn't. Couldn't:

It would have been the book of an elder statesman. He could have shown a spirit of generosity. And it would have enhanced his reputation. But it is not the nature of the man...

...The title of his book is designed to hide the obvious truth. This Lazarus is not rising. This Lazarus was terminated by the voters of Bennelong in 2007.

Lordy, lordy, that's better than Keating v. Hawke. Will it one day be set to music and score a theatrical triumph?

Meanwhile, Albrechtsen gets to brooding about cultural dieticians and their long-standing monopoly over our national identity, presumably referring to Robert Menzies' record eighteen years in government but settling for Howard's way ...

He encouraged Australians to reclaim our birthright to remember and celebrate the finest parts of our history as well as acknowledging the shameful episodes from history. On multiculturalism, Howard's way is now Europe's way.

Sayeth the smirker?

When there was a genuine spirit of goodwill about Aboriginal reconciliation in 2000 it would not have hurt to embrace it and walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It didn't mean you agreed with every demand every person walking that day wanted to make. It would have shown a generosity of spirit.

Ah, it seems a generosity of spirit is sadly lacking in John Howard.

We could spend all day comparing and contrasting Albrechtsen's impressions and Costello's column:

It gets tiresome to hear critics deride Howard's "conservatism". So swap "conservatism" for straight-forward common sense. That will drive them crazy. Yet, here lies his true legacy. Why else has the Labor Party, at the last two elections, tried to mimic Howard's policies? So many of his policies are now accepted, with bi-partisan support, as the more sensible way forward for the nation.

Oh I don't know that it gets tiresome, and I don't know that her notion of straight-forward common sense drives Howard's critics crazy, unless of course the smirker is crazy, mad as hell and not going to take it anymore:

During the difficult period when I was attempting to implement the GST, a highly confidential memo written by the then-president of the Liberal Party, Shane Stone, mysteriously leaked out of the Howard office. Howard never managed to find out how it happened.

The essence of Stone's complaint was that the government was seen as ''mean and tricky''. The charge was principally directed at me. But as the years wore on the description was more frequently levelled at Howard.

What? The man who invented core and non-core promises mean and tricky? No never, or at least hardly ever ...

Eventually even Albrechtsen has to get around to the elephant in her column, which is to say the Howard-Costello feud, but charmingly, while giving Howard a mournful sigh for his role in the affair, she still manages to blame the "media".

A four-time winning prime minister does not need to attack Costello as "elitist" or refer to Costello's "rank amateur pressure". Howard's legacy is now hijacked by the media revelling in past leadership animosities, rather than recalling how Howard changed the nation for the better.

Alas, those in the media so eager to demonise Howard have missed the real story of his autobiography. Howard has always been underestimated by his critics. Mocked as the boring suburban solicitor, he is the antithesis of Keating's big picture rhetoric and cleverly acerbic attacks.

Legacy hijacked by the media? The media so eager to demonise Howard?

Week in week out, here at the pond, we blame the media for everything, including the imminent downfall of western civilisation, but we try to do it with tongue in cheek, and in a way that is at least semi-comatose and aware of the real world.

Albrechtsen has always been a painfully dishonest columnist, and dragging "the media" into the middle of this feud is typical of her fraudulence.

Because in this particular case, the media is roughly equivalent to the vulgar boys at Tamworth High School who would gather in a circle around the rough lads going the biff away from the eyes of the teacher, and yell "fight, fight, fight".

The media?

Doesn't she mean John Howard, who wrote a book containing mean spirited thoughts on the smirker?

And now Peter Costello has written a column savaging John Howard.

These lads don't need the media. Who needs the media, when two fine boxers are willing to step into the ring and get it on, in Ali v Smokin' Joe Frazier style. No, the media needs them, and long may they box and spar their way into terminal retirement ...

Costello is outraged by Howard's tricky gymnastics and lack of generosity and demeaning remarks, and his refusal to step aside graciously:

When is a promise not a promise? When is a deal not a deal? It was all just a distraction from what I belatedly realised: John Howard was never going to stand aside for anyone. He never had and he never would.

This might have been the right thing, according to his family. But that was not the point. The point was whether he did the right thing by those MPs who would go on to lose their seats in the 2007 election. Some of them have never had a job since.

Oh Petey, Petey, scribbling for the Fairfax Media, and sitting on the board of your very own Future Fund - talk up setting up a nice job for yourself - and working away at BKK Partners is all honest work (and the intro to their web site is just so spiffy and Flashy). And you've always got your parliamentary pension ...

Meanwhile, all good things must come to an end, and so we proceed to Albrechtsen's final verdict:

While his dogged tenacity brought him down in the end, history will record that it explains the Lazarus-like success of Howard as one of the West's great modern-day political leaders.

Uh huh. By golly that spit and elbow grease and polish has worked a treat.

But what about "the media"? What's his judgement? What's the smirker's final call? Who will win in the battle of the Man of Steel versus the Iron Chef?

If you happen to believe, as I do, that we have had a bad government for the last three years, you realise how important it was for the Coalition, in 2007, to do everything it could to renew itself and extend its term in government.

The failure to do so was not in the interest of the nation or its people. I cannot take the credit for that. The principal credit for that failure must go to the person who was responsible. It belongs squarely to John Howard.

Oh Petey, Petey, there there, and never mind. I know it still rankles, but he always had your measure, and spent years kicking you from pillar to post, exploiting your hopes and your dreams and desires, and he's still kicking you around today, hoping to sell oodles of memoirs on the back of a Howard-generated controversy, and only now, long after there's any point or usefulness to it, are you kicking back at him ...

It's a bit like hearing the news that Nick Minchin's labelled the Iraq war a debacle, that his heart sank when he heard the United States would invade, and that his doubts about Rumsfeld were deep. (Minchin's heart 'sank' over Iraq). Way to go Nick. Frank and forthright, and totally useless and irrelevant, but good to see you're still toeing the line over Afghanistan ...

Meanwhile, Albrechtsen mentions Iraq too ... as being responsible for the invention of shoe-throwing ...

Damn those Iraqis and their outrageous ways, and now here in the antipodes shoe throwing is becoming fashionable.

Is this yet another John Howard legacy, in much the same way as Bob Menzies must be held accountable for Vietnamese restaurants, bakeries and dry cleaners? Though come to think of it, that's a pretty handy legacy. No wonder Malcolm Fraser put up his hand ....

But we digress.

Oh no, Petey, Petey, put down that shoe. No, no, don't. Haven't you thrown enough verbal shoes already, and nicely 'polished with spit' shoes at that, worthy of a school cadet or a suburban solicitor.

Remember, it's the media that's demonising Howard, and hijacking his legacy and mocking his boring suburban solicitor ways.

Janet Albrechtsen tells me so, and if it's in The Australian, that wretched demonising, hijacking shoe-throwing rag, it must surely be true ...

(Below: wait, there's more, hours and hours lost in googling fun, but please keep the complimentary steak knives away from the lads as they go to it).