Bollinger Bolsheviks

"There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds struggled over the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcasses of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some spectator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which - having sunks into the soil of their own weight in wet weather - they had the appearance of trying to hide themselves."
Charles Dickens

If these were cruel times, there was always the sneering of the left. Australia has been over-run by the politically correwct and intelligent debate is almost impossible. Their moral superiority is unbearable, their blind spots legion. We truly hope there will be more blessings; the idylls of the rich, the massive stone mansions, the staggering amounts of money in Sydney, barely able to count their millions while to the west lies kilometre after kilometre of the mortgage belt; where no one can make ends meet and hundreds of thousands, according to yesterday's papers, face eviction. The daily grind was so difficult that people had become snappy, unhappy, everyone felt a road rage incident coming on and more than a thousand peole feld the city every week to a better life, usually in North Queensland.

I was the last single person left alive from my group of friends, back there in the 70s when we thought our partying ways would change the nation's psyches and believed, fundamentally, that the world was changing on its access and we were part of that. Now the focus has shifted, the momentum is elsewhere, and the country is ruled by a pack mentality that is both immature and brainless. It's impossible to disagree with these people, or even debate these people, without being called either racist or right wing. It's hugely significant, they will tell you; as the country prepares to say sorry based, ultimately, on a biased and one sided report. But the momentum of the so-called culture wars has made it impossible to get out of the way; and the Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson looks old and out of date by even asking to see the wording of the apology before signing on.

Kevin Rudd our PM ridiculed Opposition leader Brendan Nelson yesterday for refusing to join up to the movment without seeing the words first. And that, probably, is fair enough. But pack mentality requires otherwise; and the wise and free flow of ideas has now long gone. Sterile chimpanzees parrot the things they've been taught. My son is about to finish high school having carefully avoided ever reading a single novel. And he's actually doing quite well. The English cannon is out of date; or at least out of fashion. Academics deconstruct everything; and there is nothing left. Sitting in their well paid jobs; none of them have actually done an ordinary day's work in their lives. And these pestulant idiots have taken over our entire intellectual and cultural life. And we are lost, truly lost, as we frog march in unison into a mindless future; a country wrapped in secrecy and conformism; the left at its worse, the right in disarray; intellectual ferment nothing but a sad joke. Halleluyah; protect us from the mindless. They are everywhere. The fools have won. The idiots have taken over the assylum. And the incompetent born to rule arrogant hopelessness of the right is as much to blame as the smothering conformity of the left.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/keating-monsters-mcguinness-on-eve-of-funeral/2008/01/31/1201714106728.html

The late Paddy McGuinness was "a liar and a fraud" with the journalistic "morals of an alley cat", former prime minister Paul Keating says.

In a stinging opinion piece in The Australian Financial Review today, Mr Keating accused McGuinness of having a "prejudiced, capricious and intellectually corrupt mind that was all over the shop depending on what suited his miserable purposes at the time".

Greg Lindsay, founder of think tank The Centre for Independent Studies and a friend of McGuinness, said the attack was "astonishing and unworthy".

"Keating said he doesn't normally speak ill of the dead, so he could have done it at some point in the future," said "It was obviously in bad taste, Paddy's funeral is tomorrow.

"No one should be immune from criticism but the body isn't even cold.

"I would have thought that when Paddy was alive and they could have just slugged it out in a Balmain bar.

"As for him being a liar and a fraud, that's astonishing. I find it astonishing and unworthy of Keating."

Mr Lindsay said he had had many debates, and disagreements, with McGuinness during their decades of friendship.

Not the easiest man

"Paddy was a friend of mine for 30 years, he wasn't the easiest man to be friends with but I admired his mind," he said.

"Paddy was a good economist and even Keating said that Paddy grudgingly said he did good work.''

Writer Keith Windschuttle, who wrote for Quadrant magazine while McGuinness was editor, also criticised Keating's timing and comments.

"Keating should have made his accusations when Paddy was alive and able to answer him back," Mr Windschuttle said.

"It is cowardly and dishonourable to make them now he is dead."

Herald columnist Paul Sheehan said that Keating and McGuinness actually have a lot in common.

"The irony is that Paul Keating has a great streak of Paddy McGuinness in him," Mr Sheehan said.

"Keating is a bilious public character, he is a head-kicker.

"He has dissipated his prestige as a former and successful prime minister by kicking the hell out of the people, particularly [former prime minister] John Howard for the last 10 years."



Gucci Socialist. Limousine Liberal.