The one you derailed yet again with your “obsessively onanistic analyses of the Luvvies”?

like that crazed little mouth-breather, John Greenfield, obessively turning minor skirmishs where he obtained a slight flesh wound on the buttocks into crucial battles that turned the tide against Saurons hordes.

On obsessions, flesh wounds and such I gladly leave the battlefield to you and your fellow Warriors. Now, if we can get back to the topic…

last saturday was the blackest of black days for the enlightened side of politics
as a whole generation of liberal leaders were put to the sword, their rotting corpses heaped into piles and the toxic stench chocking the throats of all liberal supportersand their bones will be buried in an unworthy urn, tombless with no remembrance over them.

Ooh, I love it when you talk dirty.

when i came to it seemed the whole world had changed

Look on the bright side. You’ll still be able to wake up the next morning with birds singing and the sun stealing into the room, knock the head off a morning glory and enjoy a good crap with rest of us.

last saturday was the blackest of black days for the enlightened side of politics
as a whole generation of liberal leaders were put to the sword, their rotting corpses heaped into piles and the toxic stench chocking the throats of all liberal supporters…and their bones will be buried in an unworthy urn, tombless with no remembrance over them.

as i watched the pride of the liberal party being wiped out it felt like a hot dagger was thrust into my chest and the still beating orb torn from my bosom and cast asunder.
as our mighty leader was vanquished by an ABC wench a black pool opened at my feet, i dived in…there was no bottom.
when i came to it seemed the whole world had changed…i was a stranger in a stranger land, the peasants were talking an undecipherable language…the earth had been knocked off its axis.

but though we seem but dead do not be mislead for we will regroup and mount a challenge to your arrogance…

“That’s me thank you very much. Second longest serving Prime Minister of Australia. Four terms. I brought in the Goods and Services Tax.”

Seriously Zap, mate, you gotta let go of this hatred of people who don’t worship Howard. It’ll just eat you up from the inside and you’ll end up like Rob, hollow, inarticulate and bitter, or even worse like that crazed little mouth-breather, John Greenfield, obessively turning minor skirmishs where he obtained a slight flesh wound on the buttocks into crucial battles that turned the tide against Sauron’s hordes.

Also, anyone that bangs on about a left-wing MSM has clearly never noticed the steadily growing ratio of advertising to editorial content.

In the long run I think, that like Menzies, Howard will be really be remembered mainly for his eyebrows.

Cap’n Quiggan’s got a nice political obituary of him here where I added my two cents worth.

I also think it’s amusing that Howard, a cricket tragic, currently has two key stats on his record. 2nd longest serving PM and 2nd sitting PM to lose his seat. There’s some sorta zen nutshell summary of his career in that.

Conservative governments often seem to do this: they champion their economic management credentials, and rightly so, because economic management is one of the most important jobs politicians have. (We are affected in the most fundamental ways by the economy of the state or nation we live in.) But it usually creates the illusion that those conservative governments are concerned solely with the economy, or, more particularly, with money; and so they become open to the criticism that they are not concerned with people’s happiness, only with the satisfaction of personal greed.

You’re right, of course. Howard probably won’t be remembered as the best politician of his generation, though in five or ten years time people will be much more disposed to look kindly on him, I think.

You haven’t really left yourself anywhere to go, have you? I mean, if Howard’s the greatest, it’s all downhill from here, right?

Incidentally, strictly for entertainment purposes, of course, could you please some of the things that would make Howard the greatest, that he actually did?

If you can get to six you get a metaphorical lollipop. Not counted is anything connected with “presiding/reigning/miraculously making the best/most profitable/fun times economy,” for which the blame is tangential at best.

My question is, in eleven years, what did he actually do, that these historians will presumably champion over previous PMs like Chifley, Curtin, hell even Menzies?

i just made that up

No. You’re kidding?

Anyway, subscription required so no link, but Friday’s AFR contained an article by Pamela Williams which should be required reading for anyone reflecting on the election result. We have dodged a bullet by about 1.7% TPP.

howard will be remembered as the greatest politician we have ever seen because what he achieved was considered impossible.
it should have been impossible to win 4 elections on the trot with such a hostile and intemperate media constantly slandering and smearing the great man to the point of psychotic neurotic dependency.(i just made that up)

it has become apparent that the sole reason of living for so many of the fairfax harpies and ABC luvvies is to act out their sick fantasies and channel all their frustrations and hatreds towards one entity…..if anything went wrong in their lives just blame john and janet.
in this sense howard has become the enema of the left destined to expunge all manner of intemperate thought….a convenient whipping boy for their sad lives.

and so it goes for the media fed fools who inhabit this fetid swamp who seek to demean the great man’s achievements.
no labour government will ever have to fight against such overwhelming odds with the constant background noise from the chattering class eating away at the social fabric.

I’m always bemused by this sort of dogmatic pre-emptive lobbying, which predicts the history of the present in a predicted future. Attempting to shape present views in the light of an imagined future’s imagination of the past, which happens to be the present, is an impressive appeal to Clio’s authority, and supplies a refuge for the die-hard ideologue. I especially love these sort of statements when you get around to actually studying history, and you go back and read what the present lobbied you about in advance. The study of the history of the present’s view on the future’s view of its own history is a book on my “too write” list. Apart from that, I’m delighted to see that conservatives are accommodating so well to the change of government. Future historians will no doubt assess this as a praisworthy factor in their accounts of the long, peaceful, prosperous period of wall-to-wall Labor that commenced in 2007, which they will commonly all come to refer to as the Golden Age in Australian history.

So, zap-bot… got anything in the arsenal besides “if you disagree with me you’re sick”?

The man who immortalised himself as “Lazarus with a triple bypass” has reached from just beyond the point of political extinction to achieve his ultimate personal aim; denying Peter Costello his chance to lead the Liberal Party.

Yes, it will be interesting to see how Milne redirects that energy now that what’s his name is gone.

Note for Howard’s culture warriors: Bemoaning a lack of decency and scruples is a far cry from “political correctness”. The outstanding “cultural dietician” over the past decade is Howard. The diet: red meat for racists via dog whistle and actions that spoke louder than (conflicting) words. He did it ever so politely too, and he could rest assured that the inevitable criticism would unavoidably sound strident and intemperate so that he come over all offended and hurt.

Malcolm Frazer, Fred Chaney, Petro Georgiou, Malcolm Turnbull and, I hazard, even Peter Costello would probably agree with all of this. Not enough Libs did though, which helps explain their present predicament.

We should aspire to greatness. Even with our blog comments.

It’s a blog comment, not a submission to Nature ;)

Despite the unprecedented and corrosive bile of the Luvvies and Not Happy John (or what I call Not Happy Now and Never Will Be) crowd

and this

Keating left the political atmosphere so poisonous in this country

and this

Hopefully, a more sophisticated connection between similar cultural shake-ups throughout the rest of the Anglosphere and indeed Europe will shame the obsessively onanistic analyses of the Luvvies we have all had to endure over the past few years.

cut both ways, and demonstrate that simplistic characterisations are never far from the surface despite our best intentions.

History will be relieved at Howard’s graciousness in defeat. Keating left the political atmosphere so poisonous in this country. With Howard, Costello, Vaile, and maybe even Downer so surgically zapped from the political culture, politics will be able to be performed pretty much on a clean slate. It is better that our debates reflect the here and now and the future, rather than feeding on old animosities. As a result, we (the country) will be able to get a lot more policy done during the next three years.

Like Fraser, Howard will be marked down for either wasting/abusing the Senate majority and for his bizarre waging of a war against trade unions that Hawke won in the 1980s. Similarly, his allowance of the slide in ministerial standards, and cynical refusal to allow public access to information will be rightly seen as a low-point. OTOH, it was precisely these qualities of the Keating government that saw the likes of Margo Kingston and Robert Manne vote for Howard against Keating in 1996.

Unlike our tawdry antedeluvian fourth estate and the blogosphere that basically follows the MSM, future historians will assess Howard’s “culture war” policies in the context of the post 9/11 world. Historians will despair that during this period the universities, the ABC, and Fairfax press ceded to News Ltd. the role of the country’s main agenda-setter of public debate from Aboriginal affairs, tax reform, abuses of DIMIA, the DPP, federal police, the Israel/Palestine conflict, freedom of information, etc.

Hopefully, a more sophisticated connection between similar cultural shake-ups throughout the rest of the Anglosphere and indeed Europe will shame the obsessively onanistic analyses of the Luvvies we have all had to endure over the past few years.

My take is that right up there will be Howard’s profound effect on ALP ideology and values, and the real New Class of Australian politics; “Howard’s Battlers.” that highlights just how close the two main parties are, and how remarkably cohesive Australian political values have been over the past generation.