On Iowa
Jock Webb writes: Re. “What Iowa will tell us” (yesterday). We may not know what Iowa means for a while, but the crowing and ghastly speech by Ted Cruz, who unlike Obama really wasn’t born in the USA shows him as an absolute fruit loop in the worst Tea Party fashion. Should he be elected, one of his policies would see drastic effects on internet rights. A man who hates migrants (except wealthy ones) but whose father was an asylum seeker. Sound like anyone we know? A man also dedicated to maintaining the working poor as poor as possible. His mother would have benefited form the Canadian healthcare system at his birth, but he will overturn general health insurance.
On leaks and secrets
Jack Robertson writes: Re. “Tips and rumours: David Petraeus and the oaths that matter” (yesterday). Let’s never forgot our own abysmally ignored flagrant breach of Top Secret security. In the lead up to Iraq invasion someone in Alexander Downer’s office leaked a Top Secret ONA report by Andrew Wilkie to Andrew Bolt, who then selectively distorted its content to discredit Wilkie’s opposition to the war. Bolt quoted it directly, boasted about having been given access to it, admitted on the ABC to having seen it. All crimes in themselves.
The Federal Police, led by Mick Keelty, tyre-kicked a risible investigation into it. They won’t even release details of who in Downer’s office refused to be interviews. Meanwhile the press applauded Bolt’s gift-cum-propaganda act as a journalistic ‘good get’.
Why hasn’t Crikey taken up the truly incredible claim by Jock Webb above that Ted Cruz wasn’t born in the U.S.A? It would be a far more relevant than most of your diet of ‘news’.
If of course it’s NOT true, then you should consider hiring more competent sub editors.
JackR – Blot boasted about having that ONA report again, late last year when beating the War drums with the Hobbsean (nasty brutish & short) Steve Price on 2GB.
Still not sorry!
I know it’s asking a lot of you anonymous AR, but please at least attempt to present more coherent ‘arguments’.
Yeah, AR. The reality is there’s a tacit bipartisan approach to classified leaks in Canberra – actually, tri-partisan, because the press is equally complicit in this, too. None of them want this stuff to be investigated; they’re all up to their armpits in the business of using sensitive information as leverage/political tool. Skeletons in everyone’s closet.
When this one first occurred, as it happened I interviewed Wilkie in person, and also managed to get Bolt on the phone for a direct chat. (I’m ex army, and my brother was heading off to Iraq in the SAS at the time…we kind of take classified stuff seriously in my family, fools we are). A conversation with Blotty was the least well-spent fifteen mins of my life (except for that time I accepted some iffy hydroponic mull from a Dutch prat in Donegal and came ’round in the nick of time, trying to eat my own poo), but with that, a bit of cack-handed reverse engineering and some rudimentary checking of public information (staff lists and AFP basic reports), I reckon I managed to narrow down the probable leaker pretty accurately. Really, even Sergeant Stupid McThicko of the AFP’s Congenital Idiot Squad could solve the case in half a day – even a decade on, if they wanted to. (As they should, and would…if it were you or me or Snowden or Assange under the pump).
Yet another reason to be a libertarian, AR: the State-Corporate-Press conspiracy-by-default is impermeable, frighteningly advanced, and devilishly benign-looking. Behold, it is become fascist; destroyer of (non-State) worlds.
Jack Robertson, although you “interviewed Wilkie in person”, apparently you hadn’t recovered sufficiently from your acknowledged chemical dalliances to notice that Wilkie was making allegations about areas in which he had no actual expertise; but you’re far from alone in that.
I’m sure you attempt to “take classified stuff seriously” but although (as you should realise on reflection) while necessary it’s not sufficient. The beauty of your conspiracy theory is that it’s so vague it’s difficult to refute; but Mel Gibson pointed this out in his excellent movie titled “Conspiracy Theory”, didn’t he. Gibson’s character in that movie suffered from the after-effects of hallucinogenic experimentation also; but of course unlike some he didn’t take them for recreational purposes.
Over to you Crikey Censor.