Quote of the day:
“Wayne Swan is to surpluses what Paris Hilton is to celibacy. They remember it once existed, but they’ll never see it again.”
— Shadow treasurer Joe Hockey during a press conference yesterday, earning the wrath of at least one female journalist in the room.
Tony Abbott said his minister was simply employing a “colourful turn of phrase”; The Age‘s Katharine Murphy said it made the Abbott/Hockey/Andrew Robb presser “look like Harpo, Chico and Groucho lined up for a casting call”. We’ll leave you to decide who’s who.
Tony Abbott has a shadow cabinet full of throw backs to another age, debasing women with idiotic throw away lines is to be expected I guess but certainly not tolerated. Even in the throws of stupidity Hockey could not even get his analogy correct, assuming that he was referring to a woman’s virginity. Certainly both he and Abbott have lost that and the latter has toyed with celibacy for some time until he too ‘lost’ that. I would like to to Abbot and Hockey pillared and held accountable for being the basest of low grubby men that they are.
Joe’s jolly quip doesn’t actually make much sense with the word ‘celibacy’ (Hilton may or may not be celibate in the future) – it would with ‘virginity’. But I guess that because of Abbott’s run-in with that word he probably wan’t allowed to use it.
Katherine Murphy is wrong, wrong, wrong. They are nowhere near as amusing as the Marx Brothers.
Does that make Bronwyn Bishop or Helen Coonan Margaret Dumont?
It seems celibacy is something hockey would have no control over, a bit like his mouth, diarrhea at a gay mardi-gras. He’d make a great Catholic priest thou.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Controversy and etymology aside, this analogy doesn’t even hold water. Paris Hilton is infamous as a rich party girl with a bit of a wild streak not for the reason implied by Hockey with his rather nasty sexual innuendo.
Perhaps
“Wayne Swan is to fiscal rectitude what John Holmes is to monogamy. No-one would watch them if they both practiced it.”