Now Alan Jones attracted a lot of outrage with his suggestion that he hoped that Scott Morrison would “shove a sock” down Jacinda Ardern’s throat. Of course, Alan had to apologise the next day because some people wilfully misinterpreted this literally when all he meant that Jacinda herself should “put a sock in it”…
Of course, this begs the question, why did he bring Scottie into if it was the NZ PM herself who was meant to place the offending sock in a place that was nonspecific in Jones’s apology? I mean, there’s a world of difference in Don Corleone saying that you should hold your tongue and him saying that he hopes that one of his henchmen rips out your tongue…
Mm, that analogy may be inappropriate because it suggests that Scottie is merely a puppet of Alan Jones who’ll do exactly as he’s told when we all know that our PM doesn’t take orders from Jones, even if Malcolm Turnbull thinks we should cut Morrison some slack because he has to operate in the real world. Yes, Malcolm is bitter and never misses a chance to remind us about Tony Abbott and his inability to do that. However, Turnbull was even nastier when went on to say about ScoMo, “He’s not a dictator or a president, he’s a prime minister, like I was.” I didn’t actually think that Morrison was quite that wishy-washy, but when Turnbull says that he resembled him as a PM, it’s a pretty nasty assessment.
I mean, Scott Morrison has been getting on the front foot and actually doing positive things like ignoring the investigation into GetUp! which found that they weren’t a political party and announcing that he’d be doing something about them because they were hiding something and that they were “a wolf in wolf’s clothing”… Now I’d think that a wolf in wolf’s clothing is being pretty upfront about who they are, but I guess that’s why I’m not leader of the Liberal Party.
Anyway, this is about Alan Jones and climate change so I shouldn’t be distracted by things like Turnbull telling us that Liberal leaders can’t do anything about climate change because of the strong minority in the party opposing it. Yes, I guess one can infer that just leaves the weak majority who’d like to do something but you know how minorities dictate everything these days…
I shouldn’t even get distracted by the Deputy PM saying that the Pacific Islanders shouldn’t worry about climate change because they can always come here and pick fruit. I particularly shouldn’t get distracted by that comment because, when I try to imagine just what he meant by that, my head hurts in ways that make me wonder if this guy is the best the Nationals can do as leader, what would the worst look like? Before you say Barnaby Joyce, remember we could ask the same about him…
Anyway, let’s take Alan at his word and accept that he wasn’t trying to encourage our PM to assault the leader of New Zealand. I mean, after all, we know that Alan has a history of saying something that gets misunderstood. For example, he didn’t mean to incite the Cronulla riots when he read out texts like: “Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and wog bashing day …” He went on to caution people shouldn’t take the law into their own hands, so he wasn’t endorsing vigilante justice even if those Lebanese guys deserved it…
And when he said that Julia Gillard should be put in a chaff bag and thrown into the sea, he didn’t mean a literal chaff bag, any bag would have done. Of course, this did mean some ambiguity about the word “sacked”, when he suggested that Opera House chief, Louise Herron, should be sacked for refusing to acquiesce to his demands over a horse race.
And when one of Turnbull’s lawyers contacted him, the old rascal realised that calling Malcolm “a traitor to the nation” may have been open to misinterpretation.
Then, of course, was his comments last year when the leadership of Turnbull was under threat: “The n—– in the woodpile here, if one can use that expression – and I’m not going to yield to people who tell us that certain words in the language are forbidden – the person who’s playing hard to get is Mathias Cormann.”
Yes, Alan Jones deserves a second chance. We all make mistakes and say things that we don’t mean in the heat of the moment… It’s just that most of us don’t do it on radio because we don’t have our own sock jock show. Whoops, I meant shock jock.
So let’s be like Alan’s employers and forgive him so long as he promises that this is the last time, as well as promising that he really means it this time. If he doesn’t, I think that someone should show him the real meaning of “shock” and actually give him a literal one…
Oh, I just realised, that last statement could be misinterpreted and someone could think that I was advocating strapping electrodes on Jones and giving him electric shocks.
Whoops. Sorry, Alan. Hope that doesn’t happen.
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