Clarification: At the time of writing, I believed that Mr Textor was referring to the Indonesian President, but I’ve since learned that he was actually referring to Indonesian Foreign Affairs Minister Marty Natalegawa. I therefore offer my apologises to Mr Textor for thinking that he could be so disrespectful to the President, but have left the original article so that you can see what a difference it makes to the points I was making.

Apparently, Mark Textor of Crosby/Textor fame (the Liberal strategist) was a bit upset with Indonesia’s President:

For those with poor eyesight, it says: “Apology demanded from Australia by a bloke looks like a 1970s Filipino porn star and has the ethics to match”.

Although The Australian only thought that he “appeared” to take a swipe at the President and reported it thus.

Of course, this was removed fairly quickly. But it does make one realise why they’re so keen to get rid of the Racial Vilification Act. It just suppresses our free speech. Back when I was growing up, we could call an implement for digging an implement for digging and no-one found anything offensive about it. (Apart from a few overly-sensitive people on the receiving end, and they should just harden up!). Strangely that does remind me of the expression, if one finds oneself in a hole, stop digging. But, I best stop this before the Liberals will accuse me of being unpatriotic, and accuse me of not supporting the diggers.

Mark Textor is a Liberal strategist. One therefore wonders if this was his attempt at strategy. “We’ll attack Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono by making fun of what he looks like and calling him names. I’ll start”. Then some bright spark at HQ pointed out that even though they could hours of sophisticated fun trying to come up with a name for the Indonesian President to rival “Juliar” and “Electricity Bill”, that SBY wasn’t actually standing for election in Australia, so it didn’t matter what they called him, he might actually just do something like say stick your boats where they fit or have the Indonesian navy escort the asylum seeker boats all the way to Darwin.

Still, it would be wrong to suggest that the Liberals are actually racist, in spite of the fact that by suggesting that the Indonesian President looks like a Filipino porn star, Textor seems to be suggesting that “they” all look the same. And, I’m sure that he wouldn’t have been thinking about the recent problems in the Philippines when he said Filipino. Any suggestion that this is why Abbott keeps telling every Asian leader that their country is Australia’s best friend because he thinks that Asian is just one big country is also wrong.

True, the last Liberal Government refused to apologise to the stolen generation, because the people who did that truly believed that it was a good thing to take children off their mothers. After all, what chance would an Aboriginal mother have of raising a kid properly. And yes, Howard did say that we’d decide who came into this country and the circumstances under which they came. Nothing racist about that. As for Cory Benardi and Scott Morrison’s anti-Muslim comments, well, Islam is a religion, not a race. And they’re more than happy to have workers here on 457 visas – just so long as the workers are either doing jobs that no Australians could do, or working for less than the award rates.

But none of this makes them racist. To suggest that it does it just one more example of the Left calling people names instead of arguing about the issues.

But I’m being distracted from my original intention today which was to reproduce my “Liberal Excuses Bingo” Card from before the election. I think we can presume that we can put a big cross on one in the top row. I think we can mark in texta. Or should that be Textor.

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