The Wizard of Woz
Yes I know that the election result is said to have been about domestic issues rather than foreign policy. Yes I know that Kevin Rudd is much more of a centrist than the Labour party he leads. Yes I know that the Liberal party got up to some truly despicable tricks (see the excellent Andrew Bolt) and seems to be well past its sell-by date. But the gloating by the left tells you all you need to know about the way in which the defeat of Australia’s epic Prime Minister John Howard will weaken the free world in its war to defend civilisation.
It was Howard who was the staunchest Prime Minister in the world against the jihad and who alone seemed to grasp its full dimensions. It was Howard who understood the way in which the anti-western intelligentsia was fatally weakening Australia from within, and how it needed to be fought to defend Australian values. It was Howard who stood alone among western leaders in defending his country's national identity against mass immigration, earning the inevitable label of racism and the undying enmity of bienmal-pensants everywhere. It was Howard who defended reason against irrationality, sentimentality and bigotry — and was branded a bigot for his pains.
Now he is gone, knocked out by a man who copied to the letter the trick pulled by Tony Blair in persuading blue-collar workers who had previously abandoned Labour for the Liberals (the equivalent of the British Conservative party) that it was safe to return to Labour because he was a Howard wannabe in contrast to his rabble of a party. But just as with Blair, no-one really knows what Kevin Rudd actually stands for — and whether he will now move back towards the left. Whatever now happens, the fact that he ran on a platform of pulling troops out of Iraq and endorsing the ludicrous scam of man-made global warming are enough in themselves to tell the jihadis that Australia has now lost its (one-man) nerve. Australia just made itself (and the rest of us) a whole lot less safe.