The Voice: Remember When The Liberals Were Still Deciding Whether To Invade Iraq?
At the moment we’re witnessing the Liberal Party at their absurd best. Julian Leeser asked if the Reserve Bank would need to consult the Voice before it altered interest rates.
Now, Leeser is allegedly one of the Liberals who supports the Voice but that didn’t stop him asking the sort of question that is clearly designed to make people a little nervous about the scope of the Voice. Either Mr Leeser is clearly going along with Peter Dutton’s wrecking game or he’s a complete idiot… Of course, the two things aren’t mutually exclusive and it could even be suggested that the latter is merely a subset of the former.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that people don’t have the right to question the Voice or even to oppose it. I’m just suggesting that when you ask if a body like the Reserve Bank – who doesn’t even have to consult government before making a decision – would suddenly need to consult a body that’s no more than a… well, it’s no more than a Voice, after all, isn’t it? The Reserve Bank doesn’t need to listen to the government, the government doesn’t need to listen to the Voice and nobody needs to listen to Julian Leeser if he’s just going to ask questions like that.
I remember when good ole Johnny Boy Howard was contemplating whether he should invade Iraq along with his other two amigos, George and Tony. No decision had been made. Ok, ok, our troops were gathering in the Middle East but no decision had been made. And ok, our special forces had popped across the border but just to see what it was like as a tourist destination. Then, a couple of days later, they discovered that it wasn’t a very good one because the Coalition of the Swilling was on its way.
I do remember at the time wondering why our troops weren’t being prepared for the mass casualties after Saddam released his Weapons of Mass Destruction. I remember wondering why weren’t being warned that it was more likely that we’d be the subject of some terrible attack here at home from those WMDs, how while we all needed to take extra care, the government was on the case and there were extra resources on standby in the case of biological or chemical attacks. And, I remember being a bit of a cynic, and wondering if that was because the leaders were well aware that there were none.
Of course, when none were found, some bright commentator explained that we’d given Iraq too much warning and that they were able to hide their weapons. Yeah, right, because that’s what you do when you’re about to be attacked: you hide your weapons so that the other guys win in a few days.
Anyway, I can’t help but think Peter Dutton’s calls for details on the Voice and the questions about whether the Voice will have the power to tell you that you can only have Pizza on Saturdays and that you can’t switch on the television on January 26th without an acknowledgment of it being Invasion Day, are nothing more than a way of leading up to a declaration that the Liberals tried to be bipartisan but Albanese kept answering their questions with answers that meant that if Indigenous people were given a voice it might lead to them actually expressing an opinion.
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Return to home pageI recall the weasel words Howard used to describe sending troops to Kuwait and Naval vessels to the area prior to the invasion.
“No troops are being deployed, they are being pre-deployed”.
Howard was the master of lies dressed up in weasel words.
For the LNP it’s simply imported US GOP-FoxNews performative politics and democracy for media agitprop, then win elections; the last element has become problematic, maybe because we don’t identify with the US like they do?
Jack Howard, a pompous egofixated lookatme sucker, pricked and poked by USA filthy deception, and G W (gutless wonder) BUSH, and Tony Blucking Flair, and Rupert the mangey Merde Dog, deserve the Maximilian, Charles I, Louis XVI, Nicholas II treatment and finishing touches. It is more and more a world controlled by inferior, loudmouthed, grubby, gutless, unseeing, egofixated, plodding, reptilian, rubbish, wormbrained wasters and pustular poxes, imposed on us all, unhappily, by perverted providence. And Farr Kyarz All. There’s no money in real morals and ethics, just in the perversions of it all.
I remember that the U.N. chief weapons inspector in Iraq was Hans Blix.
They sent Hans to look for the arms !
TM: …and Hans categorically said there were none, but Powell lied to the UN suggesting they were being made in pantech trucks while being driven around – absolutely ludicrous. The depths the US will go to just to have a war.
Those who were paying attention at the time noticed that the utterly, unsustainable WMD pretext for the invasion was quietly dropped and replaced instead with a demand for Regime Change in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was given a deadline by which if he had not resigned, then the Invasion, commencing with Shock and Awe, would be launched.
Claiming that they had been tipped off that Saddam was dining at a restaurant the US tried to ‘take him out’, I.e. lynch him, half an hour before the deadline ended. Perhaps they were afraid that with his reputation for ‘brinkmanship’ Saddam was going to wait for the last minute before conceding power, thus denying them the war they had schemed so hard to achieve. Without even waiting to see if the assassination attempt had succeeded, which would have made the war unnecessary as Regime Change would have been accomplished, a bombardment started that was brutal and relentless with its complete disregard for ‘collateral’ damage. And so the destruction and wanton murder of the Iraqi people began, with no comparison to the initial restraint shown by Putin in response to prolonged provocation with the genuine threat to Russian National Security posed by NATO’s build up of a weapons and military personnel in Ukraine.
We all know John Howard, who encouraged Bush to ‘stick to his guns’ when the President was in doubt about whether he should go ahead with the Invasion given its huge unpopularity and the mass demonstrations opposing it, will never be tried for his war crimes. But can’t we at least have him cancelled now before the public statues honouring him for ‘turning the mob’ are erected and save future generations with a greater sense of justice than ours the effort of tearing them down?
What much of the commentary on the US v Iraq War for the benefit of the American NE Military Industrial Complex and international oil corporations shareholders, is that Saddam Hussain was a CIA -puppet, from the time a CIA agent picked him out of the gutter in Tikrit, protected him from Iraqi authorities offered him dictatorship after removing the Ba’rth Party by a violent ”Night of the long Knives” through the duration of his decades too long dictatorship, providing the anti-personnel gases used fatally against the Kurds and Marsh Arabs as a field test for the US manufacturer, up to the complaint about a neighbouring Arab country ”stealing” oil from a shared oilfield (to benefit a US oil corporation?).
.
Again, history reveals that when a country has the USA (United States of Apartheid) as an ally then is it really unnecessary to have any other enemies.
What a richness of embarrassments the LNP are. Come the referendum Leeser will probably be Julian the Apostate.
Great writing Rossleigh, but that famous photo reminds me once again how poorly humans behave toward each other.
In July 2022 I started a continuing blog on this site on matters pertaining to the Voice. At that time Dutton was sitting on the fence and he is till perched there today – he has to watch out for Haemorrhoids !
In the July 2022 blog (Whither Constitutional Change) I said this :
“So far the coalition has only said that it is open to supporting a referendum but wants to see more detail and the model to be put to the Australian people. This is a change in the position of the Morrison government. Indeed, Morrison ruled out a referendum quite specifically in the lead-up to the 2022 election; “It’s not our policy to have a referendum on the Voice” he told us. His minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, had favoured legislation for a voice and intimated that this would go before the parliament prior to the 2022 election but clearly, this didn’t occur as there was limited interest from coalition members and the then leadership.”
The more things change the more they stay the same !
Rowan Dean, SKY News presenter identified something on NSW election night that we have all missed :
“When we see people emphatically voting out Coalition Governments and installing Labor governments across the country, it’s pretty clear that what they want is more conservative policies. You’d have to be an idiot not to see that,” host Rowan Dean said.
Oh dear !
TM: LOL OK then, call me an idiot. (There is a reason why I don’t watch SKY News.)
BS: “And so the destruction … began, with no comparison to the initial restraint shown by Putin in response to prolonged provocation with the genuine threat to Russian National Security posed by NATO’s build up of a weapons and military personnel in Ukraine”
Sorry, I’m forced to call you out. “Initial restraint” – compared to what? There was/is not a genuine threat to Russia from NATO nor was there a NATO weapons build-up prior to the illegal invasion by Russia.
i distinctly remember JH being a clever arsehole. All ” nothing to see here” until it was a fait acompli.
I hope hell has a special place for nasty bastards like him.
The decision to invade was already made and all the lead-up stories about things like Saddam’s (non-existent) people shredder were simply examples of “manufactured consent”, where the public mood is manipulated to the extent that invasion seems essential for our own interests.
The same things are happening today with China – and getting louder.
As for Rowan Dean and all the other Sky monkeys, I hope the Libs play along and thus keep themselves in the wilderness for years. Who is currently to the right of the Liberal Party? They’ve been absorbing Nazis and Fundies into their ranks for years.