You’ve got to hand it to our Prime Monitor.

He is the absolute guru of blameshifting and that’s something to be proud of.

You know, he has a position to maintain, an aura to protect, an air of infallibility to project. We can’t have him looking weak and fallible. 

He has masterfully avoided saying “Sorry” for Australian authorities stealing generations of Aboriginal children from their families. They had only themselves to blame, for being black.

He has cleverly avoided any responsibility for the AWB Wheat for Weapons scandal and ensured that the blame falls on a few unfortunate individuals and certainly not on him or his ministers or their sirhumphreys.

He did it – it was a joy to watch – he did it by saying that in the terms of reference of the inquiry (which he set up) the Commissioner couldn’t make any findings about him, the government, or government departments.

Brilliant!

And now as the dark days in Iraq seem to slide into an apocalypse, a hell on exploding wheels – which we all thought at the time he had abetted and co-invented with George and Tony – with almost surreal prestidigitation he has ensured that he cannot be held responsible for the (no longer “impending”) disaster:

Howard ‘horrified’ by Iraq car bomb killings: Prime Minister John Howard says he is disturbed by the latest mass killings in Iraq.…

“It’s certainly going through ‘a very bad phase’, I acknowledge that,” Mr Howard said, “and nobody is other than horrified at the continued loss of life. The question arises, what to do? I do think the path ahead lies in a greater assumption of responsibility by the Iraqi military forces themselves.”

Not only is it not total carnage, a completely fucked over disaster but just a “phase” it’s going through (and as you know, phases are predictable and you always recover from them).

And there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are not being sucked into the quicksand of a civil war, stuck in a quagmire of blood, guts and a destroyed culture. No! There is a “path”! And for sure it is pretty as a picture with grass and daisies on either side, a warm sun shining, fluffy little white clouds in the sky and a cooling zephyr wafting!

My god, Howard is the wonderful Wizard of the south if ever there was!

But the Grand Masterstroke is that it’s the Iraqis who must be held responsible for the bloody chaos they are in! No blood on John’s hands! No splattered bits of human offal or brain on his starched, white, stuffed shirt.

Watch as it becomes the ungrateful, incompetent Iraqis’ fault (between now and the next Federal Election).

We are in awe. Absolutely in wide-eyed, jaw-on-the-floor awe at his brilliance.

Watch and weep. True Australian political values. Howard-style.