Right Off

I can't help but musing whether the Right aren't seriously like the guy we parked next to at the Lawson Markets. He had a normal cute dog in the cab but his vehicle was adorned with xenophobic stickers like 'We grew here you flew here' and another one a map of Australia and the forceful and dimwitted legend 'Fuck off we're full'. He then committed the trifecta for right wing boorishness by having some anti-greenie stickers on the back and something about riding cowgirls.

I almost wished he had come back to the car park when we were there so I could rattle him a little. I get the feeling - and this too may be a generalisation - that these thugs get away with it because there's nobody to stand up to them. The left are too busy being pacifists or weak, or both.

I am born of (at a guess) fourth or fifth generation Australians on my mother's side and I 'grew here' but my father really did get off the boat - in the fifties. So I am able to see both sides. I can also remember what a whitebread underpopulated monoculture was like. It was as lacking as Mr non-PC Sticker.

Stoner awarded Young Australian of the Year

That's a headline too good to pass up!

Beating about the Bush (administration)

You want to know where to find the silver lining on eight years of Bush jr? This will be the real test on whether the American public have learned anything at all.

They've had a government that has committed all the atrocities normally associated with the kind of tinpot dictatorships that they're so proud of being better than. A leader who waged war with a foreign country and spent a trillion dollars of their money fighting it, even after it had been revealed to all and sundry that the reasons given (weapons of mass destruction) were bogus. A leader who has clamped down on dissent to unprecedented levels and set up a Department of Homeland Security in response to a disaster that he could have averted - that he was specifically warned about, an attack on American soil.
A leader who diverted resources to a loser war and handled things so deplorably that New Orleans suffered more than they needed to, by a wide margin.

Kill crazy imbeciles normally get locked up.

They don't get to hand over millions of dollars of other people's money to their chum's old company and they don't get to sit back and order the killing without repercussion.

For every Idi Amin who lives out his miserable life in exile, there are those tyrants who are brought to rough justice: Caeucescu's being shot like a dog by a populace who had had enough, Saddam's hanging. One can be sure, though, that no American leader, no matter how corrupt or how terrible, will ever suffer the same.
The good ones get assassinated and the bad ones live on. If you were a Christian you could ruefully note that it is still the Devil's time when Nixon and Kissinger die of old age. (Not that I want to see anyone getting shot - a trial for war crimes would be good. Then maybe they could stack Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al naked in a holding cell with an unmuzzled guard dog snarling in their face. It's only fair.)

Congress have utterly failed to reign Bush jr in any kind of meaningful way. He makes Reagan's record one trillion dollar budget in 1987 appear modest when he doubles that in fifteen years and proposes a three trillion dollar budget this year. Even THE superpower can't sustain that kind of rampant spending. A responsible and sensible administration would be looking at ways of decreasing the deficit.

For all that abuse and so much more - environmental bastardry not being the least - we didn't even get a Ronnie joke or a Nixon diplomatic bridgebuilding; it is possible that we will never again be able to design a whole desk calendar full of Presidential gaffes. You couldn't write satire better than Bush's accidental lamebrained pronouncements. He really is a fuckwit.

So, in conclusion, if America can see what the worst has to offer, maybe they will learn from their mistake and be more careful next time.

LJ hooker

Yes I've started a LiveJournal presence. It does seem kind of cool. Some differences and some similarities to MySpace. With the opportunity to interact with likeminded people, it's not as quiet as Ye Olde Blogger, which is really the boothill of the online community when it comes to interaction.

But, for all that, I'm going to keep Touched By The Son running. I'm - don't know if proud is the word - of the fact that I keep my blog updated where most folk let theirs run down. I figured out how to maintain a difference: my LJ will be for commenting on my writing "career" only. That way I can keep this spot for all my wildly contentious, not to say libellous, commentary and plow on with my song lyrics at MySpace, and my comics blog at Tripod. Whew. And other people have problems keeping one blog going.

Of course, it does come with the turf. I scoff at people who call themselves writers and then never write anything. Getting published is another matter. Judging by some of the crap that makes it onto the shelves it must be who you know or what bullshit theory you can affix to what you produce, rather than the quality of the work or the talent and creativity that go into it.