We thought this video was a comic exaggeration:

Manic Times takes you behind the scenes for an exclusive look at the inside of the Liberal Party election war room. The first in a four part series.

We thought this video exaggerated the bastardry – and stupidity – until we saw some snippets in todays news which show just how utterly desperate the Coalition is. All they have left in their arsenal is outright lies. So situation normal. They’ve done that every single election for the last nearly twelve years.

Dennis Shanahan claims in The Australian ["Car firms plead for PM's help"] that all three of Australia‘s leading car manufacturers have told the Prime Minister they fear that Labor‘s IR policy will ruin them if Rudd becomes PM. Shanahan says the information comes from Prime Minister and Cabinet.

Unfortunately, the car firms utterly reject Shanahan’s story:

“Car industry pulls rug from under report”

Of course they do. The election war room made it up and sold it to a Howard-infatuated sucker like Shanahan. The question is, how stupid can Shanahan be made to look? Does he believe the Liberal campaign machine because he wants to, or does he help them to fabricate their bullshit?

Good solid Australian values, eh? Lie through your teeth and deny it till you’re blue in the face in order to convince Australians to trust you.

Today’s Daily Telegraph [hat-tip to "the Orstahyun“] had the most scurrilous piece of attempted smearing we have seen in a mainstream paper. This was prominent in Friday’s online version of the Telegraph:

There was nothing in the accompanying story that related to this headline.

There was a separate story which referred to independent candidate for Wentworth, Dani Ecuyer‘s planned appearance with some young gay men but it was not related to this headline. It did suggest that Ms Ecuyer was “coming out” today. The suggestion, of course, being that she, a single mother is….gay! Could that be it? No, that wouldn’t be a smear. Gorgeous “gay” women…well, it’s a dead-cert ratings grabber. They were probably just after the male readership.

It was the headline which was intended to “do the damage”, sitting there on its own, all innocent-like. As if it would! The Telegraph’s own “self-selecting” online poll shows that the majority of it’s readers are rusted on Howard conservatives anyway. According to them Howard is set to win in a devastating landslide. The DT was never going to change anyone’s mind with such an inept trick. But they tried anyway. They have as little integrity as Shanahan and their stablemate generally. (We were bemused to hear News chief, Hartigan, rabbit on about integrity and journalistic ethics and standards at the Andrew Olle lecture a week or two ago. What a transparent hypocrite! Why do they invite such people to speak at a gathering in honour of someone who actually had journalistic ethics?)

On the other hand, there was a picture in the Telegraph of Peter Costello looking what could be described as “lovingly” at John Howard. He has been an election rival of Howard’s. Perhaps that is what “election rival is ‘gay’ meant.

A quick look at previous versions of Costello‘s entry in Wikipedia, using wikiscanner, turns up a number of scurrilous and unfounded claims about the outgoing Treasurer including, but not limited to: ”Peter Howard Costello is gay”, and the 17 June 2007 revision even names names, claiming “He is now a happy gay man with Mr D[...] S[...] as his boyfriend“. The Telegraph story has about the same credibility and less decency.

 

All these desperate News Limited lies are supposed to damage Rudd, and Piers Akerman, one of Australia’s most reviled ‘journalists’ [calling him a journalist is another lie] accuses Rudd of “abusing truth“. Oh, dear, what are they all going to do when they realise they have lost the game and no-one likes them or wants to play with them any more?

Meanwhile, News Limited is all hot and bothered about Freedom of Information and “our free speech” and “Australia’s Right To Know“. Why the worry? It seems to us that News Limited isn’t interested in telling the truth. And if they’re not, judging by today’s headlines, why start now?

“Figures often beguile me,” Mark Twain wrote, “particularly when I have the arranging of them myself.”

Speaking of “arranging the figures himself”, John Howard is notorious for his use of statistics to lie. He will out and out claim that a negative is a positive. The high rate of refusals of WorkChoices arrangements for failing the Fairness Test means that WorkChoices is…er…working. And fair. He claims that rising interest rates is a good reason to vote for the party that has been at the helm as they have risen. Howard is now in the interesting position of claiming to be totally responsible for low interest rates (if you can remember back that far) but somehow not being responsible for their recent increases. Labor, on the other hand, says Howard, is always and only responsible for high interest rates.

The lovely graph that Howard uses to illustrate Labor’s high interest rates strangely omits the huge spike when Howard was Treasurer. And by showing only the figures and not the sizes of the columns, it fails to show interest rates increasing when Howard was Treasurer and decreasing afterwards.

Howard presided over rates of more than 20%, with housing rates capped at 13.5%. Homeowners still suffered despite the cap because this simply meant that homeowners would not be offered loans by the banks.

Annabel Crabb has a nice take in the SMHon Howard’s interest rate responsibility-juggling, complete with a formula – “(x/y)/r = n”.

UPDATE – Slimpickens explains it really clearly in today’s post:

We can’t control inflation, but we do take credit for our booming economy, and we can control inflation better than Labor. Work Choices has resulted in workers earning more while it has also lowered wages. You need to earn less under Howard so that you will be able to pay your mortgage. Meanwhile the RBA and Labor are speaking somewhat more coherently about capacity constraints in the economy resulting from systemic neglect of education, health, transport. Bit of a no brainer really.

And just by the way, what the hell is going on at the ABC? Even at Radio National, for goodness’ sake? On Friday morning, Fran Kelly had a political panel consisting of: famous Walkleys disgrace, Glenn Milne, a right-wing hack from the above-mentioned News Limited stable; Michael Kroger, Liberal Party hack; and Michelle Grattan from The Age. Earlier Fran interviewed the stupefyingly fatuous Gerard Henderson for his take on the politics of the day. Why? Why all these people? Three far right wingers and one person who is claimed to be the most balanced political analyst in the MSM. I mean, Fran, balance is balance, mate. It means a blance of “left” and “right”, not a balance between extreme right and ultra right. Let’s put it this way – Malcolm Fraser used to be reviled for being so far to the right of politics. He is now seen as being on the left. That’s not because he has changed at all. It’s because the right has become so extreme that the middle has moved so far further to the right that Fraser is stranded on the left. Why can’t we have someone with intelligence analysing politics on Radio National instead of these clones of Genghis Khan? If RN doesn’t get someone from the “left” on soon, Fran Kelly will be left floundering, without explanation, wondering what happened when it didn’t go the way her panels have predicted.

 

 

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