Posts by Craig Ranapia
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is that a trick question?
Not really: I've worked with my share of charmless egomaniacs, and maipulative, paranoid rat bastards. While the preferable option is 'none of the above'. if I had to make up my mind Vanstone seems a much better option than the cesspool that appears to be the Environment Minister nowadays.
Political blandness seems to be a growing trend. I don't know if it's a good thing.
Yeah, I go back and forth on that myself. I guess it all depends on what you mean by 'blandness' - on one level, I firmly believe that in politics as in life, when you try to be all things to all people, you ultimately end up meaning nothing to nobody. But there's a happy medium where holding a firm point of view doesn't mean you're closed to the possibility that you're wrong, or the 'other side' might just have a point.
I also utterly reject the idea that poitics is a 'trade' or a 'profession'; because that just turns politicians into a secular priesthood, and the rest of us are unfit to approach the altar. Not so sure a representative democracy can really work like that, and it's sure not healthy when we have MPs whose (to use some ghastly psychobabble) life experience is limited to scaling the greasy pole. No disrespect intended to folks like Simon Upton or Darren Hughes, but isn't there something a little sad about folks who enter Parliament in their 20's and don't seem to have had any other passion or experience in their lives that getting into politics?
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@julian. apparently one of vanstone's favourite japes, upon arriving at the office was to pick a junior staff member an watch them squirm as she asked, "what can you do to make me look good today?"
Hum... would I choose to work for Vanstone or or these arrogant and paranoid creeps?
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he's going to let the libs continue to hang by their own petard.
Oh, I wouldn't get too smug yet. I thought Malcolm Turnbull was supposed to be goneburger in Wentworth and as the late, not so great Tony Blair could tell you, landslides have such a nasty habit of falling on your head. :)
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Is that what it amounts to? A nasty coincidence of a rag-tag bunch of ill-conceived notions and a couple of sparks of almost-conspiracy and suddenly we've joined the ranks of the International Avengers against the Axis of Evil et al.
Can we really be that dumb?
Oh come on, Sara... while I've been critical of the Police response, I don't think this can be quite so easily dismissed. And does it make me one of the 'International Avengers against the Axis of Evil' that I still believe it would be nice if the perpetrators of the Rainbow Warrior bombing (which I will never apologize for calling an act of state-sponsored terrorism) had, at least, served out the balance of their sentence in a New Zealand prison?
And, sorry, I think it's utterly beyond the pale to even be talking about murdering a politician - any politician, and do expect our law enforcement agencies to take any such threats extremely seriously. I just don't know why I need to keep repeating that.
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Finally, as for Costello spitting the dummy, someone I know Who Knows reckons the bugger is much too lazy to stick it out as Leader of the Opposition without a guaranteed payoff at the end of it. Better to quietly chug along on the backbenches rather than do that tedious graft.
Oh, don't you love sore winners? I don't know Someone Who Knows, but you don't have to be a bloody genius to figure out that if you think you lost the election due to voter fatigue, perhaps its not the best strategic move to put in the top slot the man who's been #2 for thirteen years, and whose colleagues weren't exactly keen to put him there when it might have done some good.
Now I'm sure Rudd would have been atypically animated if the Libs had handed him a chance to slag off the leader of the Opposition as the Liberal Party's answer to Kim Beazley. But they've done him more than enough favours for one electoral cycle, don't you think?
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When Helen was last in Sydney for APEC the Chaser showed up at her press conference to ask her all manner of questions that required an answer of six - she was onto it very quickly and played along well.
Oh for fuck's sake... meanwhile the real journo sat APEC seemed to spend more time compaining about being herded from photo op to staged presser than committing actual journalism... The more I think about it, the more I come to conclusion that Rudd is the perfect Hollow Man for a Hollow Media.
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I suppose it's more honest than just emailing back with:
"the Minister thanks you for your comments, which have been noted"Well, Rich, I guess I draw a line between being 'honest' and 'robust' and needing some time out on the naughty step to consider the appropriate tone for a Minister of the Crown to take when communicating with citizens. As I've said elsewhere, I don't think it requires any imagination if an opponent of the CUB responded to e-mails in favour with "Are you a queer?"
Forget about buying elections. Perhaps someone should buy Carter sone Fair Trade decaf and a copy of a basic guide to etiquette and/or customer service.
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I watched Rudd on Rove on Friday night in anticipation of the election. I thought his calmness and composure was perfect for the occasion, and Rove gave him a fair amount of stick
Meh... that's akin to saying Larry King asks difficult questions... like whether you can remember the title of the book/movie/CD you're shilling. :) Rove is great fun, but let's not pretend its probing current affairs journalism. And considering how heavily control freaked both Rudd and Howard were, I doubt Kev would have done Rove if it was. It is really strange how feral, yet curiously lightweight, Australian campaigns and political media (for the most part) really are.
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And predictably we saw the same sort of nasty misogynist smears directed at her that some still direct at female politicians over here.
And interesting see Gillard herself very carefully not playing the 'gender card' - which is very smart, consider that the presumptive next President of the United States is raising hackles by having her proxies dismiss any hard questions about her performance, voting record or actual policy as sexism. As I said, Idiot/Savant, I think reasonable people in this country don't regard women in politics as some delightful novelty. Dare I say it, perhaps we even take women seriously enough to judge them on their performance rather than their gender?
Quite. I guess it helps when you're awash in mining money the way Australia is.
Yeah, but you'd think a media that were actually doing their fraking jobs would test someone who was saying on the one hand the mining boom wouldn't last forever (which is a statement of the blindingly obvious, IMO) while spraying the pork around like a woodchipper in a piggery.
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It's no accident that both Howard and Keating (having apparently settled a 16-year feud) provided what fire there was in the Labor campaign (which also, remarkably, saw the rehabilitation of Gough Whitlam). Both men wrote what can only be regarded as typewritten assassinations of Howard in the last week of the campaign, and Keating was swiftly into print again afterwards with this assessment
Of course it's no accident. If there had been any signs of a backlash - and even by the standards of Ocker punditry, Whitlam and Keating made Mike Moore look lovestruck - then Rudd could neatly disassociate himself. But you've really got to wonder what Rudd really believes in, and how he's going to handle doing anything that can't be smoothed over with bland bormides and might actually be unpopular. I'd also have to say the media coverage was deeply unimpressive, when it came to sceptical analysis of the eye-watering amounts of pork both Labour and the Coalition were throwing around, and policy that (when it existed at all) was written on the back of a press release.
Sorry, Russell, but anyone who would describe either the Coalition or Labour as fiscally conservative is just not speaking any reality-based language I'm familiar with.
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