Oh God, it’s time for flame wars with Andrew Bolt again.
Readers will remember how I noted that Bolt’s purported mea culpa column on global warming — “it’s happening, but it doesn’t matter, and it’s gonna be great!” — was really a repositioning, to separate himself from the out-and-out craz… erm, enthusiasts such as Craig Kelly, who continue to insist that there’s no warming at all.
The Bolter — he has earned the nickname after bolting from full denialism — now insists that he fooled us all because the “I was wrong” at the start of the column was the head-fake we said it was.
Sigh. This is Bolt at his Boltest.
The misfit Dutch boy in Australia, who didn’t fit in when he returned to the Netherlands, trailing a broken engagement with a belly dancer, is a graduate of Hawke Labor’s National Media Liaison Service — Barry Cassidy’s Flying Circus, spinning the news for Labor in the ’80s.
After that, his most prominent story was 100 words of text accompanying the famous photo of a soldier’s kilt flying up in the wind at the Hong Kong handover in 1999.
He invented the character “Andrew Bolt” for the Hun after that, and hasn’t looked back since.
He is both zealot and apparatchik, evincing both a desperate need for simple certainties and a keen eye for shifts in News Corp positioning.
He says he’s always said that global warming was happening. But then again he’s said pretty much everything on global warming, except for the truth: that its occurrence is virtually certain and either catastrophic or an extinction event, which makes reversing it a survival imperative.
But outright denialism is now on the out at News Corp, and so waving around those “pause” graphs from East Bumcrack University (h/t Annabel Crabb) has to be abandoned.
The man who purports to be an independent thinker is a News Corp lifer, the Good Soldier Schlock. Whatever his thoughts on warming, he knows when the climate has changed in the office. We will watch this big do-over with his addled blog audience with great interest.
One can only hope for the quick demise by any means of a filthy ex-European fascist fraud, double crosser, liar and political pervert, the Bolt of his own corrupt self fabrication.
Just to be picky – HK handover was in 1997 on July 1.
Pssst: The space above is intentional.
Told you this would happen last week. Bolt is the Joseph Goebbels of News Corp. At least Goebbels left his shelter and helped out when Berlin was being blitzed; I suspect that during the bushfires and heatwaves Bolt sat in front of the air conditioner and ‘helped’ humanity by vigorous and unrelenting blogging.
In this context is blogging a euphemism for some other activity – or are those activities synonymous in your view.
The Murdochs are Goebbels. Bolt would be Lord Haw Haw. Melbourne is hardly the centre stage of their Reich.
Thanks for reading this News Corp dreck so that we don’t need to bother, Guy. We occasionally mention this, it’s worth acknowledging the regular sacrifice made.