Looking away from the down under navel for a moment, the Mittster's campaign for the presidency of the United States of America continues to amaze and delight.
You'd have to be an insect under a rock - or perhaps a NSW resident trying to remember that Bazza O'Farrell is premier cockroach (Voters can't name 'do nothing' Premier) - not to have caught up with the Mittster's latest goof ball.
The aggregators have had a field day with the Mother Jones' tape (they've released the "full secret video" here) with stories like Mitt Romney's '47 Percent' Includes Real-Life Millionaires.
Even the wretched David Brooks labelled the outing as a country-club fantasy, the sort of thing self-satisfied millionaires say to each other, reinforcing every negative view people have about Romney. (under the quaintly labelled header Thurston Howell Romney, subject to loose NY Times paywall).
For those who don't know the Thurston Howell reference - shame on you, shame on you - he is of course the millionaire played by the immortal Jim Backus in Gilligan's Island. Backus was also the voice of Mr. Magoo. Pure comedy gold as in the line, oh Mr. Mittster you've done it again.
The pond's only quibble with Brooks is that he should have worked in a reference to Thurston being the third in a line of country club twits.
This is the sort of nonsense that makes politics watching so addictive, especially as a squabble immediately broke out amongst the commentariat as to who could take the credit for the joke (Thurston Howell, the political epithet).
Enough already, and back to the domestic comedy stylings of Paul Sheehan, who turns up today to announce his desire to pour petrol on the flames and really get Muslims in Australia agitated by allowing Dutch MP Geert Wilders to do a little Muslim bashing down under (The anti-Mulsim MP not allowed to visit Australia).
The pond was in Berlin the day that Wilders' party got its butt kicked by Dutch voters, losing 8 seats, and dropping to 16 in total in the new parliament. On returning to Amsterdam it seemed clear that the Dutch had tired of relentless monomania on the matter of immigration (good links at Geert Wilders the big loser as Dutch voters put stability before intolerance).
The comedy here? Well after Sheehan cries crocodile tears about the way Chris Bowen is allegedly making it hard for Wilders to score a visa to Australia, and pumps up Wilders heroic anti-Islamic stance, he manages a series of epic conflations:
If Bowen drags the process on for another week he will have stopped, via the back door, a conspicuous parliamentarian and opponent of Islamic fundamentalism from visiting Australia.
This is a perfect metaphor for a government whose policies have caused the cost of processing asylum-seekers to blow out to more than $1 billion a year, and the numbers of illegal arrivals to surge, while at the same time tightening the restrictions on legal immigration.
Say what?
It's the perfect trick. Leap wildly from Islam to asylum-seekers, flinging the tar brush around with gay abandon like a shearer who's chopped off not just the balls ...
So the Sri Lankans seeking to come to Australia are Islamic? The perfect metaphor is as clear as mud, but do go on:
If this pattern repeats itself with Wilders it will not play well in an electorate that is clearly offended by religious fanatics who use Western democracy to attack Western democracy.
This is a hot button for Australians judging by the thousands of people who reacted to the demonstrations seen on TV. The large reaction was far more significant than the small demonstration.
Newsflash. No one - not even the Dutch these days - pays much attention to Wilders, who brought his decline on himself by walking away from budget talks and carrying on like an election-precipitating ratbag. Wilders wild talk of abandoning Europe and the Euro and returning to the guilder caught the pragmatic Dutch voter's attention, put the focus on the purse and put religion back in the box. If Germany goes down, so do the Dutch.
If Wilders doesn't show, no one outside the rabid right and Sheehan and the Bolter will notice. He doesn't have much to offer the Netherlands, and even less to offer Australia by way of insight.
But do go on:
Normally a small group of radicals – and this was a demonstration by no more than 200 people – are consigned to the idiot fringes in the way that Trotskyite groups are largely ignored despite their attempts to gain attention via protests.
It would have been much healthier for the media and the public to similarly ignore this idiotic fringe group last weekend. But judging by the viral and visceral reaction of the public, there is a feeling that too many people have been murdered, assaulted, threatened or intimidated in the name of Islam.
Say what? So Sheehan's idea of refusing to pay attention to ratbags is to make sure Wilders can spread his ratbaggery and shit-stirring as wide as possible down under?
As for the media ignoring a demonstration in city streets that turns violent, what planet is he living on? (surely not the same one as Xenu?)
But best of all is the conflation of murderous Islam with a little agitation in the streets. That's rich coming from a country just recently out of an illegal war in Iraq and still helping make a mighty mess of Afghanistan.
And that's the problem. If the protestors had wanted to make a point, they might have taken to the streets and peacefully protested all sorts of things, including the way that Israel is busy producing its very own ghetto complete with wall (will it ever turn into a tourist attraction like the Berlin wall?), or the fighting in Syria, or the war in Afghanistan or the use of drones in Pakistan.
They might have looked balanced by protesting the treatment of Coptic Christians in Egypt, being even-handed about the fighting in the Sudan, urging tolerance for eaters of pork, and campaigning against male and female genital mutilation (well there had to be some way to work in a reference to Brendan O'Neill's epic bout of stupidity and plea for religious freedom and the right to mutilate in The Circumcision Wars).
Mohamad Tabbaa seems to have realised this belatedly in He's my brother - why angry Muslim youth are protesting in Sydney - forced video at end of link, as he explains all the things that the Muslim youff in the streets were actually protesting about, and then produces this epic Sheehan-style distortion, as he explains it wasn't about the video, it was about all the other things he mentions ... even if to all intents and purposes, the street protest was about the video, at a time and in a style of many other demonstrations around the world about the video.
Yep, it was but it wasn't:
So no, this is not entirely about some poor-quality YouTube clip. These youth are basically protesting against the broader context of Islamophobia, within which this clip is not only being produced and propagated, but also defended as freedom of speech.
Beginning to make sense?
But there is still a problem. How do we know if these are the real concerns of the youth since they haven't articulated them in such a manner?
Uh huh. How on earth do we know, we mere literalists who literally took the agitated youff at their agitated word?
So it comes about that Tabbaa knows the real concerns of the youff, who are simply incapable of articulating their concerns, but which he can decipher through the ether. They weren't in the streets protesting about a YouTube clip, even though they were in the streets protesting about a YouTube clip.
And then Tabbaa delivers yet more grist for the mill for those right-wing players eager to lure Wilders into the storm, and whip up more mayhem:
To begin with, many Muslims in Australia do not simply give up their identity as belonging to a global community merely because they happen to live in Australia. Many have not bought the liberal idea of individualism, and so see events happening on the other side of the planet as personally related to them.
Epic Sheehan-style conflation, as if somehow all Australians operate on a liberal idea of individualism, and as if somehow belonging to a global community - might that be establishing a world caliphate? - provides the right to bung on a do in the streets, when it would have been simple and easy to arrange a legal and peaceful demonstration (heck they could stage a do every Saturday - it would help keep the youff off the street by keeping them on the street peacefully waving placards).
Tabbaa blames the leadership and the oldies, but wild and woolly talk of a world community will evoke memories of the good old days when the Irish were relentlessly persecuted by the establishment for their loyalty to that whore of Babylon, the church of Rome, an international conspiracy right up there with the UN.
The Catholic church long ago gave up its claim to world hegemony, and it's about time that the likes of Tabbaa understood that it's not a question of liberal individualism, but a secularist state where all religions may contend without the right to control or dictate to the public at large.
In a secularist state, you take your licks - which includes the right of others to assert your religion is a fraud - and if you have a political problem, you seek a political solution. It's perfectly possible to have a phobia about Islam, or Catholicism, or any other kind of religion, and yes that's what freedom of speech is about. Even if it involves Geert Wilders bunging on a provocation in Australia.
And if you do take to the streets to make a point, please make it clear what the hell you're talking about, so we don't need retrospective explanations of the real issues at hand.
Step two involves showing a little intelligence, like an actual desire to debate issues and win popular support, as opposed to simply enjoying the adrenalin of a stoush in the streets.
It's boring, it's dull, it's certainly not Sheehan stirring up trouble, or Geert Wilders frothing and fomenting, but equally it's not youff in the streets bunging on a do, so dumb and inarticulate, they don't even have a clue what they're really protesting about and needing Tabbaa to explain it to them and to us.
Why that makes them sound as clueless as the Mittster ...
(Below: the bouffant Gert Wilders, giving John Edwards a real challenge, contemplating the Dutch election result).
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