Julie Bishop, and the prawn's gambit strikes again ...

By way of passing time and in anticipation of a nodding off into a deep relaxing sleep, I was reading Julie Bishop's The Hapless Liberal Prawn's Gambit, and Unanswered Questions on Libya, when I came to this:

The Prime Minister should now state whether she supports direct action to affect regime change within Libya, and if so, what form that action should take.

On one level it's a breathtaking bit of pious stupidity, since nowhere in her piece does Bishop state whether she supports direct action to affect regime change within Libya, and if so what form that action should take. Even on a fair dibs analysis, that's cheating at marbles, and gutless to boot.

But what really got me going was the use of the word "affect".

Now "affect" can mean to have an influence on or effect a change in: Inflation affects the buying power of the dollar (here), but surely a more appropriate word would have been "effect":

1. Something brought about by a cause or agent; a result.
2. The power to produce an outcome or achieve a result; influence: The drug had an immediate effect on the pain. The government's action had no effect on the trade imbalance. (here)

The difference being the desire not to just have an influence, but to achieve an outcome or a result. So it becomes:

The Prime Minister should now state whether she supports direct action to effect regime change within Libya, and if so, what form that action should take.

And then I began to brood about the way the deputy leader of the Opposition in Her Majesty's Parliament has no grasp of literacy or the English language, and I immediately realised why the rest of her column was full of straw dogs, bales of hay, and blather, including quoting John McCain, which raises the question of senility and its impact on elderly politicians, but not much else.

Bishop is trying, in ever so genteel a way, to pin the Libyan action on the Ruddster and the Gillard government, as if they were at the head of the pack galumphing off to war:

The benchmarks for what the Prime Minister would regard as ultimate success for the intervention should also be articulated.

The Gillard government cannot now distance itself from the military engagement that it urged other nations to undertake.

Yes, the Europeans and the United States headed off to implement the no fly zone at the urgings of former chairman Rudd and current chairperson Gillard ... and it's now up to the Gillard government to define the terms and measurements to be used to judge the ultimate success of the intervention.

I began to wonder where Bishop might have been, when the Liberal party began the urgent business of defining the criteria with which to judge the ultimate success for the intervention later known as the illegal war in Iraq, and how clearly these criteria were Articulated. Implemented. And Achieved.

Or perhaps I could just contemplate the pigs passing through the air in the pale moonlight ...

And it was at that point that I realised why the use of the "affect" had such an affect, or perhaps even an effect, on me.

Because confronted by silliness of an extraordinary parochial kind, there's nothing left but pedantry.

Still in her amiably artless way, Bishop provides a distraction from the ructions in the NSW Labor party ...

All the same, it's a tad disturbing to contemplate someone as the shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs who makes Alexander Downer look like a rocket scientist in stockings ...

(Below: oh the memories, the memories).