Monthly Archives: October 2012

Citation sought

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On Instapundit, two matters of local interest to have come up together one after the other. First this under the heading, “THAT’S NOT AN EXTREME SPORT, THIS IS AN EXTREME SPORT: New Extreme Sport Of Flyboarding Takes Off In Australia” which then links to this from The Telegraph in the UK:

Merely a day in the life of a typical Australian, as we would all know.

But then there’s this which came next (which means, as found on the page, it now comes before the above):

ANSWERING THE VITAL QUESTIONS: The Oxford English Dictionary wants to know whether Prince Philip is responsible for coining the phrase ‘blue-arsed fly’.

The text with the story:

Prince Philip is known for his blunt talk and colourful turns of phrase.

Now the Oxford English Dictionary wants to know whether the British royal consort is responsible for coining a memorable entomological term.

Editors say Philip uttered the first recorded usage of “blue-arsed fly” in 1970, telling a photographer he’d been “running around like a blue-arsed fly”.

The dictionary is appealing to readers to submit earlier uses of the term. It notes the variant ‘blue-assed fly’ was first recorded in 1932.

My Dinkum Dictionary naturally shows it (with the correct spelling) but was published in 1988. It is truly an Aussie phrase, but how far can we go back? We need to help out our Pommy friends at Oxford. Anyone have a citation before 1932?

Blinded to reality by their own moral virtue

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The left may think of themselves in a positive light as defenders of the faith or something, but their disgusting behaviour over Alan Jones is beyond contempt and genuinely a matter for serious concern. This is from The Age.

Macquarie Radio Network executive chairman Russell Tate said ‘the nature, tone and volume of the reaction to Jones’ remarks, and in particular the threats being made through social media to companies advertising in Jones’ program and the disruption being caused to their businesses, have made it necessary for MRN to call some “time out”.’

‘Some simple facts need to be acknowledged.

‘There is almost universal agreement that Jones’ remarks were unacceptable, wrong and inexcusable. Alan himself acknowledged that from the moment he first advised me of them. He immediately arranged a media conference to state that publicly and apologise to the Prime Minister,’ he said.

‘Although the remarks were not made on 2GB, our position from the outset has been that a personal, unconditional apology was a necessary and appropriate response. I encouraged Alan to repeat the apology on 2GB when he first returned to air last Tuesday morning following his media conference. His apology was unambiguous and unconditional.’

Mr Tate said the threats to boycott Jones show were coming ‘almost entirely from people who do not listen to Alan Jones or 2GB at all – probably never have done and never will.’

What 2GB will now do is run Alan Jones without ads until further notice. Jones did still have advertisers but Macquarie is going to shield them from the derangement that is the specific province of the left. The leaders of the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics and the members of the National SOCIALIST German Workers’ Party were all made up of these very types.

Satire at its finest, some even intended

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The American election is turning into one of the great comedy moments in history. First there’s this, which is actual intended satire. It is Obama’s debating notes that he kept while at the podium:

But then there’s this, which is from a hilarious article in The Washington Post whose point is, after three pages of boredom, that if Romney is any good at managing, why doesn’t he have more money:

And if he is not a billionaire, doesn’t it suggest that he was not a great private-equity investor after all, thus torpedoing his claim to understand how to create jobs and get the economy back on track?

Something to keep in mind on Nov. 6.

Their idiocy knows no bounds.

Romney also had a set of notes: In the interest of equity and fairness, I should also attach Mitt Romney’s speaker’s notes.

Promises, promises

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We went to see Promises, Promises the other night which from its title may sound as if it’s in some way related to politics but unless you think a story of adultery and a woman trying to take a man from her husband has something to do with politics, it isn’t really. It is based on the 1960s film, The Apartment, about a fellow trying to work his way up the corporate ladder by letting a number of executives from his business use his apartment for liaisons with women, the main pairing being the head of the department who has promised his latest fling that he will leave his wife. And while the stage production is done tongue and cheek and played mostly for laughs – it is a musical with its feature song, “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” – I found the morality of it quite disturbing since the one person who is portrayed to have been the innocent, almost no more than a bystander, was that other woman who knowingly and with malice aforethought took up with a married man and was specifically carried along by his false promise that he was about to leave his wife and children to be with her. She instead ends up with the man who has loved her from the start in a storyline that is intended to be seen as an uplifting finale which only reminds me how our communal moral compass has shifted and the shifting can be traced back, as with the film, to the 1960s.

There was a time when no one who behaved as that woman did would have been seen as anything other than a moral vacuum and not to be trusted under any circumstances. How the world does change. By the way, Shirley Maclaine played that young woman in the original movie version of The Apartment. It’s quite remarkable how similar she looks to Julia Gillard.

Millions who tuned in have now tuned Obama out

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The cartoon is priceless and dedicated to all ye Republicans of little faith. The text is from Hugh Hewitt who puts the current state of play just as I see it myself:

It is a recession, folks, and it is headed this way, accelerated by President Obama’s election year campaigning for growth-killing tax hikes and the promise of energy-production-destroying anti-fracking rules and other EPA job killing moves in December. (The recession has already arrived in the Eurozone.)

The economic reality most people feel is the price at the pumps –double what it was when President Obama took office– and the knowledge that they have of the joblessness of friends and family and the job insecurity they and others worry over. The cluelessness displayed by President Obama on Wednesday night has become the symbol of his entire presidency, and his aimlessness in answering direct questions is what most distressed independent voters who moved so decidedly towards Romney in the Frank Luntz focus group that shocked long-time watchers of such groups.

The huge polling margins that declared Romney a winner in the debate took away a lasting impression of the president because it is consistent with the suspicion that has grown up around the 100+-rounds-of-golf playing Commander-in-Chief, the one who jetted off to raise money on the day the nation learned of the brutal murders of our ambassador and his aides in Benghazi and who then participated in the cover-up of that slaughter.

The wandering-in-answer Obama Wednesday night was the same guy who doesn’t sit down with the press (and now we know why) and who cannot defend his record though offered repeated opportunities to do so by Jim Lehrer.

The takeaway from the first week in October, as the voting begins across the country, is that President Obama was as unprepared for the debate as he was for the presidency.

He isn’t doing his job because he can’t do his job.

The cluelessness President Obama displayed erases any argument that his on-the-job training has equipped him for a second term or earned him a second chance.

It was the worst debate performance by a sitting president in the history of these meetings, and millions who tuned in have now tuned out his appeals for one more chance. Not this time. Not with conditions this serious.

The single most telling image of the Obama presidency

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I had the same thought as John Hinderaker at Powerline, if you’ve lost The New Yorker . . . . It also says something of the genius of Clint Eastwood that his bit of performance art has now become the single most telling image of the Obama presidency. We have all known it for a long time, but the secret is now out and spreading across America. One can only hope that it will be decisive in November, but who can tell? Since I cannot see why anyone should have voted for Obama in the first place, I equally cannot see why they might not do it again.

The media and Mr Jones

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It is, I suppose, the role of a Government to find someone to blame when it oversees a wreck largely of its own making, but it’s not the public’s role to believe it just because the Government says it. The Australian economy has been kept on course through the highest terms of trade on record and a commodity boom made in China, but with it coming apart at the seams they are down to congratulating themselves on a fine performance in getting interest rates to fall when the reason for the fall is the rapidly softening economy they have so incompetently taken down.

But what has cheered me some has been watching the Alan Jones business unfold because it does appear that this ALP meme has been comprehensively rejected on the right side of the divide in spite of the tremendous media beat up. This is part of what I think is a larger story in which the ancestral media are no longer able to call the shots in the way they once did. It was a private meeting, the comment was universally recognised as beyond the pale, Jones is not a spokesman for the Liberal Party and he apologised as soon as he heard himself saying what he said. No one defended Jones’ comment, least of all Tony Abbott.

There were a couple of letters to the editor in The Australian that I thought captured the difference. These followed an article by Janet Albrechtsen headlined, “Selective moral outrage of the media”, an interesting piece to find within the media itself:

THANK you for Janet Albrechtsen’s counter-balancing piece. I was starting to worry I was the only one who could see through it all. The hypocrisy of the Labor mouthpieces and the ABC’s manufactured outrage has been breathtaking.

I disagreed with what Alan Jones said, too. But in view of the generally nasty level of rhetoric from Labor, I sometimes wish the conservatives would get some gumption and throw a bit back occasionally. After all, it’s only politics, isn’t it?

And then this:

A MAN is publicly crucified for days over one poorly chosen word in an hour-long speech to Liberal university students at a private function. Aren’t universities the places where people speak out?

Yes, the remark was over the top, but it should be considered in context. Did the hurt come from a private comment to a small and contained audience or its public disclosure?

On the premise that any publicity is good publicity, a radio station may well have gained listeners and its advertisers increased customers. And the public attention may just encourage more Australians to give serious thought to our future government.

The power of the press has been a tide on its way out for quite a while, going back to the universal backing of the republican cause having had no obvious effect on the outcome. The Government does, of course, hate to see its failings brought to the attention of the nation, but the reason such reports are so devastating is because almost everywhere you point your torch you find that what the Government has does has almost invariably made matters worse.

Lazy and disengaged

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Here is John Sununu calling Obama lazy and Andrea Mitchell being astonished at the very idea. How do people not know this? My post from 3 October:

Obama is the laziest, least involved President possibly ever. He really cares little about policy and has no taste for the engagement of the political process. He likes the pleasures of office, just doesn’t like what it actually requires, like knowing things in depth and thinking things through to the end.

Meanwhile, about that interview with Sununu:

Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, a Romney campaign co-chair and top surrogate, railed against President Barack Obama today after last night’s debate, telling MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that the president was ‘lazy and disengaged.’

‘What people saw last night was, I think, a president that revealed his incompetence, how lazy and detached he is, and how he has absolutely no idea how serious the economic problems of the country are,’ Sununu said on MSNBC’s ‘Mitchell Reports.’

Mitchell was taken aback.

‘Governor, I want to give you a chance to — to maybe take it back,’ she said. ‘Did you really mean to call Barack Obama, the president of the United States, lazy?’

‘Yes. I think you saw him admit it the night before when he delivered the pizzas’ to the Obama campaign’s Nevada field office, Sununu said. ‘He said, “They’re making me do this work.” He didn’t want to prepare for this debate. He’s lazy and disengaged.’

For true hilarity, you have to watch the video and read the article. Worth every moment, just to see how clueless these media people are.

And then to add to it all, there is this from Jon Stewart who’s beginning to think that maybe Obama’s just not that smart:

The liberal freak out over Barack Obama’s poor debate performance continued on Thursday morning. Left-wing comic Jon Stewart appeared on Good Morning America to lament the President’s ‘very difficult night’ and jokingly warn, ‘I’m concerned that he may not reelect us. He may walk away.’

The comic even admitted Obama might not be as smart as he first imagined. Stewart mocked, ‘You know, I used to think the pauses, he was just trying to think of smaller words for the little brains to figure out what he was saying. This time, I really think the pauses were just, “I like food.”…”My children are nice.”‘

To watch the video you have to go here.