Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Bob Ellis Wants to Make Us Cry

This is truly depressing. I had just started to get my hopes up for this election, and now Bob Ellis goes and dashes them before the campaign even kicks off. It's a brilliantly, brutally detailed hypothetical of how Howard and co are going to win the election, despite the polls and Workchoices and everything else. And it's awfully plausible.

Highlights/lowlights:

- "Hammer Gillard's private life and toxic socialist history under privilege".
Done! But always time for more of that in Canberra. Reds under the bed! Hey, she's even a redhead. That screams "untrustworthy commie feminist".

- A Senate inquiry into Peter Garrett's history of drug use as a youngster.
Labor seem so desperate not to let Garrett become a liability that they haven't let him be an asset. Never mind that he was a friggin' rock star or that a few months ago government MPs were climbing over themselves to announce their own druggy indiscretions: pot can ruin your life. We saw it in those TV ads. Won't somebody think of the children?

- Turning up in Bali during the election campaign to say: "I know it's in mid-election, but global warming is important, and I'm here to discuss it with China, the worst offender. Kevin Rudd cares so little about it, he's still back in Australia, selfishly campaigning."
If the Kyoto-dissing, global warming Johnny-come-lately Howard manages to convince us that he's a better climate warrior than Kevin Rudd, we deserve everything we, as an electorate, get.

- Bush's prearranged bombing of Iran.
I can totally see the nuanced, cautious Kevin Rudd being painted as an Ahmadinejad apologist, plus a few well-timed bombs over Tehran would freak the hell out of people. Vote conservative, there's a war on!

- Howard calling the election on Melbourne Cup day, when people are too drunk to register to vote
All too believable... and I find it kinda funny, I find it kinda sad...

I feel like those people who periodically threaten to skip the country if Howard gets elected again.

1 comment:

Diego Luego said...

Bob Ellis appears so lugubrious that he always makes me want to cry.

Other more totalitarian countries would have found some excuse to put old Bob to the sword or rather the firing squad. Here he has condemned himself to the long slow intellectual death of irrelevance. I think he has always underused his fine mind.