Tim Blair

SLOW LANE

According to The Age’s Terry Lane, George W. Bush said this during a meeting last year with Abu Mazen:

"God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."

Lazy Lane should’ve checked that quote, as the Washington Post did ten months ago:

Two calls to the White House for clarification went unreturned, but colleague Glenn Kessler did some digging. The Haaretz reporter, Arnon Regular, read what the paper said were minutes of the Palestinians' meeting to Kessler and another colleague, who is an Arabic speaker.

The Arabic-speaking colleague's translation, was this: "God inspired me to hit al Qaeda, and so I hit it. And I had the inspiration to hit Saddam, and so I hit him. Now I am determined to solve the Middle East problem if you help. Otherwise the elections will come and I will be wrapped up with them."

Even then, there's uncertainty. After all, this is Abu Mazen's account in Arabic of what Bush said in English, written down by a note-taker in Arabic, then back into English.

And now repeated by a gullible columnist in Melbourne.

END BULLYING! NATIONALISE EVERYTHING!

Fourteen years after losing power, evil Margaret Thatcher is still destroying Britain somehow:

The legacy of Thatcherism has led to a rise in aggression and bullying in schools, a teachers' leader said yesterday.

Pat Lerew, president of the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers, said that, nearly 20 years after Margaret Thatcher declared that there was no such thing as society, parents who grew up in the 1980s had produced a generation of youngsters brought up to be selfish and to think the only thing that mattered was money.

These Thatcher brats are England's crack babies! Stop them before they form gangs and privatise the public service! (For more on that celebrated "no society" quote, click here.)

MURDEROUS MINORITY

Broadcaster Aminul Hoque is alarmed by the attitudes of some British Muslims:

As I walked the streets talking to hundreds of 15- to 30-year-old Muslims for a BBC radio documentary, it became all too apparent that there is a tiny - and I must reiterate, tiny - minority who are taking the religion of Islam to a sinister new level. And this small fringe element, which includes the radical al-Muhajiroun organisation, is making its presence felt more strongly than ever. They openly advocate terror, regard Osama Bin Laden as a "scholar of Islam" and their radical and militant views strike a chord with the impressionable, angry and frustrated youth of East London and other urban centres.

Hoque, himself a Muslim, discovered that members of his own family are among the extreme:

Most worryingly, my research opened up my eyes to the fact that people whom I know very well - friends, family, colleagues - possess opinions that are enough to send shivers down the spines of most people. These are ordinary people who have well-paid jobs, are educated and seem very pleasant in conversation.

During a secret al-Muhajiroun conference in Euston that attracted more than 600 men and women, I was greeted with a friendly tap on my shoulder by a close cousin of mine. To see him at this conference, organised by a group who openly support terrorist acts outside of the United Kingdom, was shocking to say the least. He is family-orientated, has a very good job and travels around the world.

But ... but ... how can this be? Surely terrorism is only caused by poverty?

QUADRUPLE CENTURY

Brian Lara: 400 not out.

LATHAM ATTACKS UNSAID REMARK

Mark Latham keeps getting it wrong, and serious adults are telling him so:

Opposition Leader Mark Latham was unmoved after the United States government took the unusual step of formally rejecting his claims about the state of the US-Australia alliance.

The US State Department said Mr Latham's promise to restore Australia to an equal partner in the alliance was neither well informed nor well based.

Mr Latham last week said that under a Labor government, Australia would be an equal partner in the alliance, not a deputy sheriff.

But a US State Department spokesman, Kurtis Cooper, said that equality was the bedrock of the alliance.

"The alliance between Australia and the United States is a partnership of equals in principle and in reality," Mr Cooper told AAP by telephone from Washington.

"Characterisations to the contrary are neither well informed nor well based."

Cooper is correct. Latham’s we ain’t nobody’s deputy! stance is based on myth. Here’s a summary of Latham’s speech:

Australia should be an equal partner, not a deputy sheriff, to the United States and should concentrate on protecting itself, not following the US into conflict, he said.

"We have never seen our future as someone else's deputy," Mr Latham told the Lowy Institute in Sydney in a speech outlining Labor's foreign policy.

Who ever said it was? Well, apart from the likes of CNN:

Asked whether he saw Australia as Washington's "deputy sheriff" in Southeast Asia -- a description once used by Howard -- Bush replied: "No. We don't see it as a deputy sheriff. We see it as a sheriff."

Bush called the two countries "equal partners, friends and allies. There's nothing deputy about this relationship."

CNN is wrong. Howard never used that description. The “deputy sheriff” line being thrown around by Latham evolved from an interview with The Bulletin’s Fred Brenchley in 1999, as Gerard Henderson explained last year:

It is surprising that, nearly four years after the event, some diplomats and foreign commentators still believe that Howard announced, in September 1999, that Australia would be "deputy sheriff" to the United States in the Asian region. It is true Brenchley interpreted the Prime Minister's view as necessitating that Australia would be a deputy to the US. It's just that Howard never used this term. Nor did he utter the word "sheriff" - this was dropped into the story by a subeditor in search of a memorable subheading.

Latham’s foreign policy appears to be driven by something the Prime Minister didn’t say. Well done, Mark. And in other unchecked-fact news, Phillip Adams writes about a former Prime Minister:

Keating, as far as I know, has never attended a football match in his life.

Someone, please, teach Phil how to use the Internet. Or even to examine News Ltd photo archives, which contain numerous images of Keating at AFL games. Has Adams forgotten Keating’s farcical Collingwood membership?

"GROTESQUE" MORFORD SUSPENDED

Mark Morford -- one of this site’s favourite lunatics -- has been suspended after a San Francisco Chronicle exec finally noticed the crazed jabbering Morford was spilling all over the Chron’s website:

SFGate.com, the Web site of The San Francisco Chronicle, suspended three staffers for a column that the site's boss said was "grotesquely outside the standards that we have."

Robert Cauthorn, vice president of digital media for The Chronicle, suspended writer Mark Morford, news editor Vlae Kershner and features editor Amy Moon for a week for their role in the incident.

The contentious column actually seems tamer than some previous Morford pieces. In any case, this now leaves Robert Bosler as the undisputed champion of International Political Wankwriting.

(Via Amos in comments.)

UPDATE. Gotta check those dates; this piece is years old. My mistake. Morford is, however, currently absent from the Chron’s website.

CLOWNS IN THE NEWS

Remember: rape is no laughing matter. Unless you’re raping a clown.

And especially if you’re raping a clown for peace.

HOSTAGES UNBURNED

Those Japanese hostages have been, or are about to be, released:

Japan obtained information its three citizens abducted by armed militants in Iraq last week are safe and will be released today, said Shinzo Abe, secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

The three captives are Noriaki Imai, 18, Soichiro Koriyama, 32, and Nahoko Takato, 34, according to the government, which learned Thursday they had been kidnapped by an insurgent group calling itself the Mujahedeen Brigades.

The kidnappers threatened to kill the three unless Japan withdrew its troops from Iraq by 9 p.m. Tokyo time Sunday, Al- Jazeera satellite television reported. On Friday, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Japan wouldn't withdraw its troops in the face of terrorist threats.

More here. Next: to find out if this whole deal was a hoax. I'm doubtful, but questions should be asked.

UPDATE. The Japanese hostages are most likely still hostages:

Confusion surrounded efforts to free three Japanese hostages under threat of imminent execution in Iraq Monday as the ranks of captive foreigners grew with the abduction of seven Chinese.

As the reported deadline deadline of 5:00 pm (1300 GMT) for the first of the captives to be burned alive, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi admitted Tokyo had no clear information about the hostages.

ERREY ERRORS

An important piece of information is missing from this story about brave, uncompromising, I-cannot-tell-a-lie former defence advisor Jane Errey:

A senior Defence adviser has been sacked after refusing to write media briefings that supported claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Engineer and analyst Jane Errey was an adviser to former Chief Defence Scientist Dr Ian Chessell and wrote briefings for Defence Minister Robert Hill. Her job at Defence gave her access to secret intelligence on Iraq's weaponry from the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Office of National Assessments.

Ms Errey claims that on the day before the Iraq war started, she was asked to write what she believed was "sexed-up" propaganda about Iraq's capabilities.

The next day - March 20 last year - she went on holiday rather than write what she claimed would have been a misleading briefing.

But she was sacked last Monday, after more than nine years at Defence, on "performance grounds".

In the piece, Errey is described as “a public servant”, “a highly regarded official within the Defence Science and Technology Organisation”, a “disillusioned official”, and “an electrical engineer”. Nowhere is it mentioned that Errey is a senior member of the Australian Democrats who stood for election as recently as three years ago.

Little surprise, then, that Errey took this position:

"Anything that I was doing with respect to the war was making me uncomfortable," Ms Errey said. "Then to have to brief the minister and fundamentally give him - even though I didn't write it - lines of propaganda that I didn't believe with respect to the war was beyond what I was prepared to do. I wouldn't lie or mislead the public."

Is it not misleading the public to conceal her allegiance to a political party that opposed the war? And why didn’t any of the journalists covering this story bother to reveal said allegiance?

(Via reader Alfred B. and the Gnu Hunter, whose doubts over Errey’s identity should be put to rest by this profile, which describes Democrat candidate Errey as an engineer and electrician. And here are pics of the candidate and the uncompromising former defence advisor.)

UPDATE. Geoff Honnor has more.

FORGET HE EVER SAID IT

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Alan Ramsey on December 6:

Latham will not easily escape his too-obvious eagerness to make public obeisance to Washington ... I mean, what a grovel? What a truly snivelling statement three days into the "new dawn" of Labor's "new beginning"? And all because Mark Latham called George Bush a dangerous incompetent and now wants us to forget he ever said it.

And Alan Ramsey today:

Latham has retreated from nothing. Not withdrawal from Iraq. Not rejection of the madness of George Bush. Not a less fawning attitude to Washington. Not a more independent stance under ANZUS. Latham spoke like an Australian leader rather than an American president's duplicitous toady. His critics will not forgive his refusal to bend.

Unlike Ramsey, who’ll forgive and forget as he sees fit.

UN'S PRE-EMPTIVE WITHDRAWAL

The dizzy female host on Channel Seven’s Sunrise program just announced: “The situation in Iraq is getting worse -- so is it time to send in the UN?”

Considering the UN’s earlier reaction to things getting worse, probably not. Recent developments are terrifying:

Iraqi insurgents kidnapped three Japanese and two Arabs from Jerusalem, and in a video released Thursday captors armed with automatic rifles threatened to burn the Japanese alive if Tokyo does not withdraw its troops from Iraq within three days.

UN booster Keith Suter, interviewed on Sunrise, seemed to think it likely all these hostages will be released unharmed. Let's hope so. Meanwhile, somewhere on the internet a new link has been posted to last month’s Cawley children appeal, leading to a bunch of new contributions. As earlier, these will be forwarded to Chief Wiggles. Much thanks again to everybody who donated.

UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg:

Lots of folks are raising the possibility that the Japanese hostages are faking it. One of them is an anti-war activist, another is an NGO type and the third is a reporter. I really hope that this is a hoax because, duh, I don't want to see innocent folks get burned alive. It would also highlight what tools Al Jazeera are of terrorists and what tools some anti-war activists are in general. If this is a hoax these guys should obviously go to jail for a very long time. But I tend to doubt it is a fabrication. The joke will certainly be on these guys at the end of three days if it is, because there will be a lot of terrorist types who will realize they have a lot to lose if they don't go through with it, which is all the more reason to salute the resolve of the Japanese government.

LIVER FLUKES! TRAVEL ADVICE! CAR TALK!

I’m in southern NSW, where out-of-towners are reminded that they’ve left Sydney by television commercials like this:

It’s liver fluke treatment time again!

Actually, Albury isn’t all that rural, although the liver fluke commercial seemed genuine (it had cows). May I recommend the Albury Town House Motel to all interstate travellers? I stay here often. If you’re nice to the hosts, they’ll allow you free access to their excellent collection of British comedy tapes. Right now I’m watching Have I Got News For You -- never shown in Australia, and lamely replicated by Good News Week. Last time I was here: an entire series of The Office. This place is terrific. Plus, hosts Mike and Jackie are Welsh, so if you want to talk rugby union ...

A Ford Escape brought me here. The Escape is part of Ford’s penitentiary-themed SUV range, along with the Ford Cellmate, the Ford Bilal, the Ford Awkward Shower Incident, the ultra-compact Ford Solitary Confinement and the maxi-sized Ford Conjugal Visit. Alas, the Escape isn’t an altogether fascinating vehicle. Rowan Atkison, the comedian and car nut, wrote in a recent magazine column (not avaliable online) about an car show he’d attended at Earls Court:

This was a very unusual kind of motor show from which, basically, all boring cars had been excluded. The Daihatsu Charade, the Ford Mondeo and the Renault Megane were all conspicuous by their absence. As were the Daewoo Leganza, the Hyundai Sonata and the Perodua Kelisa. (Aren’t these names fantastic? It seems that the less strong your brand name, the more you have to invest your model name with poetry and significance. BMW seems to need nothing more poetic than ‘525i’).

Atkinson would’ve also missed the Escape, which suffers also for its age (I think the platform is getting on for five years or so; must check. May be more.) Look, it’s a perfectly competent, reliable, roomy device, but way bland. And with annoying Added Irritation Extras, like:

• Drum rear brakes. In 2004. On a car costing above $30,000.

• Hard seats, with leather surfaces that gradually, imperceptibly, send you sliding towards the pedals. Drive a couple of hours and you’re staring at the bottom of the dash.

• Column shift auto, largely missing from Australian-market cars for a couple of decades. Nothing against column shifts, but when combined with modern airbag-dominated steering wheels, your dashboard-displayed gear selection is often obscured. The Escape’s light shifter becomes a liability during three-point turns; you can’t easily judge, without seeing the display, how many clicks you’ve made between, say, ‘R’ and ‘D’.

• It isn’t a four-wheel-drive. It’s a front-driver with four-wheel-drive sometimes, when things get slippy, or when you lock the system. So enjoy all that torque steer. Or, in layman’s terms, steering that steers you.

I’m only a few hundred kilometres into a 2,000km test. Let’s see if things improve.