The winds have changed in the land down under. After 11 long years we Aussies have realised that such policies as screwing over education in favour of those with money, race-baiting and villifying refugees, giving employers the legal means to sodomise their employees, ignoring our indigenous population and our sordid history with them, using fear as leverage to gain popular support for right-wing ideological warmongering, dismissing climate change as a hippy fantasy, creating a massive transfer of wealth by handing out tax cuts to the wealthy and generally letting the right have free reign are not good policies for a modern, democratic state.
With this realisation Australia has stood up and cast out the ideologues, not unlike the former blind man who, after his cataract operation, realised the puppy he had been loving and feeding for years, even though it would often viciously attack him, was actually a disease-ridden rat.
John Howard and his malignant crew have been told to hit the road and we’ve given them nothing but a lunch-box packed with a legacy of shame (and salubrious pensions).
In a little under a year you, my Yank brethren, will have the chance to do the same. Stay angry.
Good for Australia for getting rid of their own form of the Corrupt Bastards Club! Of course, your elections probably had more substance than ours — I doubt as much fuss was made about abortion rights, cleavage and how the candidates do their hair. (Hell, Howard didn’t have any hair and I don’t even want to think about his ‘cleavage.’)
It’s shaping up to be a Dem blow-out as the leading Bush-GOP candidates and their party self-destruct, but then we have to get the Dems to act like a progressive opposition party for a change. It won’t be easy, but thanks for the good wishes and best of luck with Kevin Rudd.
Comment by RS Janes — November 29, 2007 @ 9:49 am