Verge
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skippy. wrote on Dec 17 th, 2010 at 4:03pm: Quote:Are your hands clean of blood, Andrew? December 17, 2010 - 2:04PM Comments 113
I once called Andrew Bolt a worthless bloodclot, for which I must apologise. To bloodclots everywhere. For Bolt however, there is only scorn, slight regard and contempt. Here is a man possessed of such an ardent need to inject the poison of his enmities into the body politic that even as bodies are being dragged from the sea off Christmas Island he spits a rhetorical gob of the purest partisan venom in our eyes.
This is Bolt, a man so inflamed by John Howard’s assurances that the heavy hand of war must be laid upon Iraq that he harboured not the slightest doubt about the righteousness of raining down fire and death and sorrow, not just on Saddam but on those millions of captives with whom he had surrounded himself. A whole people as a shield, if you will. Confronted on Lateline, by David Marr, about Howard’s history of playing fast and loose with the truth during the 'Children Overboard' scandal, and whether it weakened his case for war, Bolt retorted, "What is possibly the advice that you think he has that you don't have access to that could change your mind on this? Because, really, I see no claim that he makes that cannot be utterly substantiated by material that's right on the public record, that you can see for yourself if you bother to check." And thus hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were utterly substantiated to death, their country laid to waste and condemned to a perdition of blood and savagery. Not to worry though. I am sure their deaths were liberating and any ruin and destruction was a merciful release from the tyrant Saddam’s bane. Of course, should any of them lack a taste for slaughter – perhaps because they stood so much closer to it than courageous Bolt – should they attempt to flee the carnage with their children in small, overcrowded boats, for instance… then damn their eyes! They are jumping the queue. They are assailing our precious sovereignty. They might very well be terrorists! Send the navy and turn them back. Turn them back. Turn them back and if they founder and are lost then who’s fault was that? Certainly not ours. This is Bolt who yesterday and today laid every torn and dripping corpse from that awful wreck at the feet of Julia Gillard. Bolt who roused himself in righteousness to defend the poor, poor pitiable seekers of asylum, for whom he has always had nought but the very purest compassion and the most generous and charitable heart.
This is Bolt, just so you know, in case you fail to recognise him from his sudden change of raiment, from stern, uncompromising defender of our borders, to Bolt who all but weeps and rends his vestments with grief and rage that Canberra’s failure should have come to this. To death and sadness and horror. Not the death and sadness and horror visited upon the Iraqi people in the course of a war for which no just cause existed. No. Not that. Because to trace that thin golden thread of causation to a war for which he bellowed his support might raise the prospect that perhaps his most beloved champion, the sainted former PM Howard, might somehow have had something to do creating the conditions that put at least some of those who died this week onto that boat in the first place. As did Bolt himself, I would argue, being one of the crudest advocates of that war and the aftermath from which so many have fled, or tried to flee, until they ran into the Ring of Iron with which he would protect us from the bloody anarchy his heroes loosed upon the world. If Julia Gillard has blood on her hands, Mister Bolt, might we look forward to the spectre of John Howard scraping at his palms one day and muttering, “Out, out damn’d spot”. Will you attend him then with the same loyalty and steadfastness that kept you at his side through the bloodswarm he helped unleash upon Iraq, from whence at least some of the dead hailed this week? Might you ponder you own hands then?
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/are-your-hands-cl... A fair retort, but I dont see how Bolt can have blood on his hands. He is not a decision maker, the stroke of his pen didnt condemn anyone to death. Supporting a party in good faith does not equal having blood on your hands as a civillian. Does Howard for what happened in Iraq, most certaintly, as does every other pollie in Federal parliment who backed it on the floor who knew the truth yet backed the lie. At the time I backed it on good faith. After learning the truth is was easy to vote Labor in 07.
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