Poison Deviny

Classic Miranda, 2011: “Just how the money is spent was revealed by Simon Benson’s report in The Daily Telegraph this week: $2.5 million is spent each month to house extra asylum seekers in motels and other accommodation outside detention centres. For 13 days in November alone, the bill at the Darwin Airport Inn was $778,000 - that is $60,000 a day for a motel that has 136 rooms.
Even if the whole motel were booked out by the Department of Immigration, the price works out to be $440 per room, per night - or almost double the quoted rack rate of $235 for the motel’s most expensive room: a two-bedroom business suite. We should not be surprised at this laissez-faire attitude to taxpayers’ money - that is the hallmark of this Government and will be its lasting legacy.

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““At the heart of our plan for a stronger economy is getting government spending down…” said Mr Abbott.

Presumably down from Howard government levels. In those 11 years there was not one in which government spending was reduced. It grew by an average of 3.7 per cent in its final five years. Current projections for spending growth have an average of 1.5 per cent. And for fond memories you don’t put into the economic equation a global recession which took more than $140 billion from the tax revenue of the new Labor government, a plunge more severe that anything which hit the Howard Budgets. Memories have to be selective to be attractive, as there are bits of the golden age which can never be polished, even by Mr Abbott. For example, the Regional Partnerships Program which ran for eight years makes Labor’s Building an Education Revolution scheme look like a a well-oiled economic mechanism of integrity and efficiency. The BER never funded a Queensland coastal hotel which boasted gaming and strippers, but a 2005 Senate inquiry was told that’s just what the RPP did. As the Auditor General reported in 2007 on the $330 million spent by the RPP, “The manner in which the program had been administered over the three year period to 30 June 2006 examined by ANAO had fallen short of an acceptable standard of public administration, particularly in respect to the assessment of grant applications and the management of funding agreements.”The audit found “instances where no application for funding was received prior to funding being approved”. They were instances either of psychic accounting or pure electoral pork barrelling.”

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/it-takes-selective-memory-to-call-Howard-era-a-golden-age/

Classic Miranda, 2007: But if quotes from Howard don’t satisfy, listen to Major General Jim Molan, who was deputy chief of operations in Iraq under US General George Casey during the intense fighting of the January 2005 elections, the pre-election battles of Najaf, Tal Afar, Samarra, Fallujah and Mosul and of Ramadan 2004.

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—	What a surely unbiased perspective.

Classic Miranda, 2007: Four years after the invasion, there is understandable cynicism in the community about Iraq and our part there. But our soldiers on the ground often have a different story. And with a new strategy and more troops this year there is cause for cautious optimism, as Prime Minister John Howard said last week in a speech to mark the anniversary.

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Classic Miranda, 2004: The UN is proving feeble, its reputation tarnished by the Iraq oil-for-food corruption scandal, in which billions of dollars were skimmed in bribes by corrupt UN officials and contractors to provide luxuries for Saddam Hussein instead of food for starving children.

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—	And it turned out the Australian Wheat Board was one of the biggest bribers. The Liberal Government knew about it and didn’t do anything despite millions in kickbacks which probably got used to buy weapons to shoot at our troops who the bloody Liberals made go fight in Iraq in the first place.

But in recent times the reception has changed. Now there is a sort of desperate intensity as they grab his hand in shopping centres. Mr Howard, they say with bitter regret, come back.

This is the tale of John Howard’s busy new life after politics, as history finds him his place of honour.

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But Howard still pervades politics; asylum seekers are still demonised, surpluses are still chased as the priority, our troops are still fighting the wars he sent them to fight and indigenous and homosexual Australians are still treated like second class citizens. We are still living in the Howard era.

But he’s still fighting for our minds; giving his stamp of so called credibility to Ian Plimer’s joke book. He’s trying to fight a science war when he couldn’t win the History Wars as leader of the country. The guy said the election of Obama would be a boon to Al-Qaeda; but I don’t think he really believed it. He won four terms by playing on a nations fears; until the public realised he was the real boogeyman. Did anyone believe his losing office would stop him trying to scare us?

Classic Miranda, 1998: Miranda gets the scoop for the Tele’s coverage of the GST, which involved this nice bit of journalistic objectivity:

I’m surprised they haven’t done a headline for the Carbon Price along the lines of “WE ALL LOSE”.

Classic Miranda, 2004: It will probably take more time than usual for the burghers of Gnashville to regroup and rationalise an explanation for the result that can fit with their world view. So far all they’ve managed is The-Big-Lie-On-Interest-Rates-Is-The-New-Tampa. But as they pull and stretch the facts to fit, they ought to consider the omen from Paris which came just as the polls opened on Saturday: Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionism, died in Paris of pancreatic cancer, bringing to a symbolic end a destructive era of postmodern truth-twisting.

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Classy

Classic Miranda, 2003: And yet without introspection we lose much of what makes us human, because we need to know ourselves in order to develop a conscience, a moral compass, a sense of right and wrong. Without the humility that comes from knowledge of yourself and your own failings, everyone else’s behaviour will seem intolerable. You will be consumed with blind self-righteousness. Hence the rise of the busybody, the dobber and the petty tyrant in Sydney and hair-trigger rage from strangers about trifles. Lack of introspection leads people to take on hatreds and dimly understood positions without thinking through what they mean, only that perhaps: “War is bad”, “Bush is stupid” and “Howard is Hitler”. It leads to the ascendance of meaningless street politics in which hordes of what Lenin called “useful idiots” protest against McDonald’s or globalisation or war.

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Classic Miranda, 2009: “Mandatory detention, it is worth pointing out at every opportunity, was introduced by Howard’s Labor predecessor, with nary a murmur, even when about 350 children were locked up in 1993. It was Howard who ended the policy of detaining children.

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—	Yeah in 2004 after the HREOC held an inquiry embarrassing the government with all the disturbing details they dredged up.

Miranda Devine: We need to fight terrorism by being more like terrorists

It’s 10 years on from 9/11, so of course Miranda can’t sit in quiet mourning. Moral relativism, David Hicks and secularism have to be attacked hidden in the form of a remembrance piece.

“Passionate and courteous, they were formulating the debate we have been having ever since - do you appease the hatemongers, shower them with largesse, apologise for past perceived misdeeds, change your way of life in order not to cause future offence, or do you strike back at the terrorists and their supporters.”

Killing lots of innocent civilians in the process creating more terrorists out of those left to grieve or feel disenfranchised.

“We have so gentrified the idea of moral relativism that it is considered distasteful to talk about the “good guys” and the “bad guys”.”

They are not “bad guys”, they are people who have been indoctrinated into a cult. They are open to change if we don’t try to enforce it with guns. And the West are certainly not “good guys”. That sort of thinking is at the root of what makes people strap on bombs to kill innocents they think are evil.

“To banish God from Ground Zero is as much an admission of defeat as any for the most open - and most religiously observant - nation on Earth.”

You know not every American is a Christian Miranda.

“You see how awry is our moral compass in the fact we lionise David Hicks, who trained as a terrorist under Osama bin Laden, took up arms against our allies, and rushed back to Afghanistan to support his brother terrorists after September 11.”

We don’t lionise him, we think that fact he was held for so long without trial and then made to plead guilty to a charge under duress of longer imprisonment is wrong.

“We can see the West’s loss of confidence in the timid tone of the memorial ceremonies planned to mark the 10th anniversary of September 11 in New York. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decreed there will be no prayers or religious observances. This on its own is a sign of the decline of American self-belief.”

Maybe because as mayor he is part of the secular state and shouldn’t be organizing religious activities. And Christians weren’t the only people who died.

And yet, despite our self-doubt, as former prime minister John Howard points out, we are not beaten. “The way of life we treasure is still intact We are still an open, free society.”

Howard has little respect for freedom. Phone tapping, extraordinary rendition, holding people without trial, all these things have created an us vs them culture that has only made the divide between Islam and the West larger. And he supported and helped enforce it all. We have not won anything, we are still fighting and making little progress. And the terrorists got what they wanted, so many in the West have become as hate filled as they are. Not Miranda though, she’s always been hate-filled.