You had to feel for Marcia Langton on ABC TV's Q&A panel this week, stuck between two men so terminally pompous, out of touch and in love with the sound of their own voices you felt at times they might fall stiffly off their chairs and writhe on the ground in private ecstasy.
You have to feel for SMH readers, twice a week your dribble causes them to fall from their chairs, writhing in pain.
Malcolm Fraser and Peter Carey, fresh from the Sydney Writers' Festival, are the sorts of self-styled intellectuals who give thinking a bad name.
Miranda Devine, journalism, bad name. You see where I'm going here.
Now comes news that Fraser formally quit the Liberal Party in December because it's too conservative for him. The former prime minister quit in spirit a long time ago. He seems eaten up with the need to settle old scores and be proved right on every little point, a sad state to be in at the age of 80.
And he's probably right, unlike the current Liberal party, Fraser didn't paint refugees as an invading horde of heathens intent on destroying our way of life. Nor was he an advocate of free market policies, both of which seem to now be the core of the unfortunate group of people that make up the Coalition.
He has always gone out of his way to malign and belittle John Howard, his one-time treasurer who well and truly eclipsed him in the PM stakes. How it must have rankled that some half-deaf nerd from Canterbury Boys' High could best him
Or, he thought John Howard was a terrible PM.
He showed himself on Monday night to be no better a friend to Tony Abbott
Perhaps because Mr Abbott is the reincarnation of John Howard?
Better yet was his confident claim that the British and American governments knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and the Howard government, if it didn't know, "should have".
He's obviously been reading too much Green Left Weekly, or perhaps he gets his history from the Hollywood conspiracy genre of Green Zone. Even the host, Tony Jones, didn't pursue this fruitcake line.
While spruiking his memoirs earlier this year, Fraser denied that he had become a leftie, insisting he had not changed but the Liberal Party had lurched to the right.
Haven't we been over this already, or is it just that all of Miranda's dribble just melds into one mind numbing lump?
The odd thing is that he would have done a lot more damage to conservatives if he'd remained in their ranks. Instead, he's turned into the crabby old Muppet Statler, harmlessly heckling the rest of the cast from his balcony seat.
That may be true Ms Devine, but at least he's doing it at the age of 80, rather than in his 40's or 50's like some people.
No comments:
Post a Comment