Is there any more desperate, pathetic and meaningless abuse of the English language than to attempt to construct a radical centre?
The pond might as well attempt to construct a radical pond, or a radical doughnut (with extra radical cinnamon please), or an innovative radical centrist harness with which to work the horse ...
Of course, with the greatest respect, Pearson himself is in something of a crisis because he backed the wrong horse, got hitched to the wrong leader, and now finds himself on the radical sidelines ...
(and the rest of that story here).
Pearson has of late taken to talking how at 35 he made a mistake in his career path, and how he should instead of gone into politics, because he's gone as far as he could as an "outsider".
But he was never an outsider. He was just a gambler who backed the wrong horse. Suddenly, according to him, indigenous affairs is in deep crisis, but it might just be that Pearson is in deep crisis, and indigenous affairs is in just the same sorry mess as when his departed hero - now off to deplore teh gays and such like with his fundamentalist conservative Christian cohorts - started his showboating routines in the north ...
Never mind, it wasn't Pearson regretting the departure of the most singularly useless and radical politician to grace the stage in recent times that got the pond going. It was only the feeble attempt at a "radical centre" ...
It's ironic how something that gathered momentum as a bit of Jules Feiffer satire - with his invocation of the radical middle back in 1962 - keeps turning up like a bad penny as the 'radical middle' and 'radical centrism', as if Tony Blairism wasn't "radical ugh, how awfulism".
Never mind, the bizarre notion can be Greg Hunted here ... and it's time for a radical cartoon break ...
The real pity of this radical distraction is that the pond wanted to celebrate yet another contribution by the real radical brains at the core of the radical reptiles of radical Oz ...
Oh not that new old furphy ...
Sadly, the radical splash at the radical Oz doesn't reveal the radical origin of the radical bromancer's radical thinking ... so let us radical google instead ...
Yes, the great minds of the bromancer and Rush Limbaugh think alike, radical peas together in their radical pods.
It led the pond to thinking that Rush Limbaugh is to blame for Greg Sheridan, or perhaps Greg Sheridan is to blame for Rush Limbaugh ...
Or perhaps they've just fortuitously arrived at a shared monumental stupidity ... because this is what happens when you've got nothing better to do with your time than fill in dead air with drug-laced rants on a radio station, or scribble deadhead columns for the reptiles ...
Indeed, indeed, and if working in Congress is the way to get legislative experience, why that explains what legislative experience is good for ... stalemates, an inability to compromise and extreme devotion to pork-barrelling ...
The pond would have red carded the bromancer for a breach of Godwin's Law, except for the way that it gets its current dose of US politics from Colbert ...
You can watch that one here, and perhaps then you'd like to follow up with Colbert's A Simon & Garfunkel Tune For Every Candidate ... nothing says youth vote like a song from 1965 ...
Well the pond's still crazy after all these years, and one reason is reading the bromancer.
It wears you down, that steady moronic Santamaria-laced drip, drip, drip, and so we must turn to understanding why Obama is responsible for everything wrong with the world ...
Uh huh. The pond is beginning to understand. It's like the commentariat shouting out a deeply unhinged conspiracy theory that Obama is responsible for everything wrong with the world.
It's simple, it's understandable. It's deeply nuts, and the meme is essentially unchanged since the day he was elected president and it ran through Faux Noise and the reptiles of Oz like a virus-laden mosquito or a birther scam...
Thus far of course the bromancer has managed to avoid the actual requirements implied in his click-baiting, trolling splash on the digital front page, but now he must get around to it ...
And there you have it.
An infinitely stupid man offering an infinitely stupid analysis which absolves the Republican party and its many Murdochian supporters from any responsibility for the state of politics in the United States in this seminal year ...
Because somehow the readers of the New York Times were the ones that got Obama elected ...
Now it would be possible to get pedantic and wonder if there have ever been any other celebrity candidates, and not just a Kennedy ...
(more cartoons here).
And it would be possible to wonder how any sensible person could have voted for a McCain/Palin ticket. Lordy lordy, did they dodge a Palin bullet there ... much as some people still celebrate dodging Mark Latham ...
But the pond is weary.
Kerry Packer once famously observed that you only get one Alan Bond in a lifetime, so it has to be said that the pond is likely to get only one fuckwitted bromancer in its increasingly short lifetime ...
If the answer is Greg Sheridan, why did anybody bother to ask the question.
And so to a pleasant distraction ...
Yes, it's your ABC - it's not the pond's - at work once again ...
The infinitely stupid argument here is the notion that Tony Abbott jetted off to the United States to have an argument with the fundamentalist Christian warriors with whom he will converse ... and will somehow, by the cogent power of his arguments, convert them to the liberal, forgiving, gay loving, gay marriage approving side to which he belongs ...
But then Uhlmann has always been a dimwit, as can be discovered by Greg Hunting him and his early days in the ACT here ...
Once upon a time journalists believed in free speech and the quaint notion that it was better for Tony Abbott to argue with fundamentalist Christians and press home his support of gay marriage than to muzzle those who disagreed with him ...
Or some such thing. Time for a few old cartoons ... you should know by now where to find the cartoonists.
Ah yes, with respect,Pearson is just another loud tory to be found sucking deeply on the public teat. Just another lawyer who's found a way to make it pay.
ReplyDeleteYanner calls for Pearson's portfolio
Malware was placed in charge of fraudband, Pearson in charge of fraudblacks. Both captain's picks. Both always right, always hubristic bullies, but charming to the gullible.
He's Not The Messiah, He's A Very Haughty Boy
'I was 35 and made the wrong turn': Noel Pearson reveals his greatest regret
Mr Pearson told the National Press Club on Wednesday that while he counted Mr Abbott as his closest friend and Assistant Minister Alan Tudge as "a co-fighter in our cause", reform required strong, Indigenous voices inside the political system.
In his address, he declared a new political movement bridging the left and right was needed to achieve real change for Indigenous people, praising independent Nick Xenophon as the best example of the "radical centre".
The closet lib Xenophon is the radical centre? A new Pearson political movement?
2007 rehashed 1990s rehashed ...
Hunt for the radical centre
There is a third group comprising indigenous leaders such as me and ALP president Warren Mundine, who are trying to advocate a synthesis of the rights and responsibilities paradigms. I believe that a substantial proportion of ordinary indigenous people also believe that rights and responsibilities must be acknowledged and realised together.
No such synthesis has coalesced and those seeking what I call the radical centre in this policy struggle are left straddling an ever-widening gulf between the two paradigms. In the lead-up to the federal election later this year, and with the prospect of a competitive ALP breaking the conservative hold on our national government, the rights tribe is emboldened and hopeful.
The responsibilities paradigm is ascendant, and Mundine and I are associated with this and have strongly contributed to it. Though we advocate a synthesis, and I have been involved in advocating and (more important) achieving human and land rights for my people, the way politics works in practice means that the weight of my contribution is perceived to be on the responsibilities side of policy. Only the primary leadership of society can lead the country to a synthesis of the kind that is needed in indigenous policy. While it is possible for individual advocates to have an intellectual appreciation of how dialectical conflicts can be resolved, only prime ministers are positioned to induce the necessary historical resolution of a new position.
Pearson's radical centre as middle Australia?
Cape crusader
Robertson, who had always regarded Pearson highly, was shocked by the contrast between the raging person in front of him and the composed, charismatic character of popular perception. ''Noel makes it very easy for middle Australia to like him,'' he says three years later. ''But scratch the surface a little and there is quite a different Noel Pearson, who middle Australia has never seen.'' ...
Where's the evidence to justify Noel Pearson's funding and his grip on Indigenous policy
DeleteRather than end reliance on government funding, the Cape York Welfare Reform Program has received more funding from federal and state government agencies than any other trial program per population base in the history of Aboriginal funding. A grant of A$133 million for the initial four-year period was jointly funded by the federal and Queensland governments. Last year, the Queensland government proposed to cut off funding(link is external), then changed its mind(link is external).
What makes the funding figure alarming is this money has been provided to only four communities ranging in population from around 100 in Mossman Gorge to 338 in Coen, to 1071 in Hope Vale and around 1500 in Aurukun. In all, that's $133 million over four years for 2961 people. No individual has been more critical of Indigenous funding than Pearson. Yet his own programs receive more money on a per capita basis than pretty much any other organisation in Australia.
Where is the evidence to justify funding?
The other concern of note to come from the report is that there appears to be very little qualitative evidence(link is external) of any social change coming from the Cape York program.
It is continually stated throughout the report that reliability and completeness are problems that are not overcome within the data ...
Dropping bombs and stoking feuds: the other side of Noel Pearson
Shortly after 11 am last Friday, Noel Pearson, chairman of the Cape York Group and a nationally prominent Aboriginal leader, walked into the newsroom of The Sydney Morning Herald and approached a senior editor. He proceeded to berate the editor, loudly, obscenely. He took off his jacket and told the editor he would “beat you to a pulp”. He also mentioned throwing him off the balcony. He dropped the “c” bomb repeatedly.
All in the middle of a metropolitan newsroom.
This is the other side of Noel Pearson, the unelected, unaccountable bridge-burner who has left a trail of damage and division that offsets and undermines his efforts to break the cycle of social dysfunction in many indigenous communities ...
Indigenous leadership in the north? Compare and contrast.
DeleteActivists confront Pearson on support for NT intervention
A proving ground for proud carers of country - Murrandoo Yanner
A zealot's fight to lift people up
Third are complaints over what might be called ideology. Yanner, who describes himself as a "Cape bushman" says: "I'll tell you what I think of Pearson and his mob. Pick up a newspaper from the 1950s or the 1960s, and it's word for word, white people saying the same thing as he's saying now. He's a paternalist. The reason our people take drugs, bash each other, is dispossession and the racism inherent in white society. We don't need the Great White Man to come in and manage things for us."
Chloe Hooper: Tracking Chris Hurley
Aboriginal elder Murrandoo Yanner held on assault charges
Yanner has been prominent in FNQ Aboriginal affairs long before Pearson. He's seen how it goes, and has the scars to prove that. I recall him relating an everyday occurrence in his community: the cops come cruising along, they see one of his mob walking along the side of the road minding their own business, and what so ordinarily occurs next is just a usual take-away transaction, or what they called due to the ordinariness: "ham, cheese, and tomato sandwiches" (unfounded automatic arrest on charges of drunk, disorderly, resisting arrest).
Rights, responsibilities, radical centre? It's not crafted for blacks.
As Cape York traditional owner Murrandoo Yanner has said, Pearson:
has always been a bully, because he’s got sycophants around him … talk to any of them for 10 minutes and they worship him; none of them thinks for themselves. That’s why he can’t stand in the same room as me. He can’t do all the bully and bluster because he knows I’ll throw him out the window.
Hey Bromancer --- President Eisenhower.
ReplyDeletehttps://books.google.com.au/books?id=syQy7usR3sUC&pg=PA116&lpg=PA116&dq=dewey+support+for+eisenhower&source=bl&ots=9qOasUVMqd&sig=qhGHrIWGHFdXZ1RscQdFVak2IRI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiWpOKciMzKAhVT3mMKHZ_EBvAQ6AEIJDAD
DeleteIf we are looking for people with no legislative chops who parlayed their celebrity status into a Presidential term (or two), we need look no further than Mr "Father of his country" himself, George Washington. The Bromancer's grasp of history seems a bit sketchy, but surely that name would be familiar even to him?
ReplyDeleteWashington's sole legislative anything was to speak at the Constitutional Convention on the vital issue of size of congressional districts. Otherwise, he was, a la Obama "present". Like most good generals, he was skilled at delegating, and he had a host of excellent people around to delegate to - Hamilton, Jay, Ellsworth, Jefferson, Adams etc - all lawyers, btw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Judges#Themes_and_genre
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Helms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney
http://www.amazon.com/Time-Get-Tough-America-Great/dp/1621574954/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1439920842&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/America-Again-Re-becoming-Greatness-Werent/dp/0446583995