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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 10, 2013 0:00:53 GMT 10
Yesterday's dickhead.
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Post by pim on Apr 10, 2013 0:34:48 GMT 10
Tomorrow's Governor-General.
The current G-G's 5 year term is up in September this year. I'll lay odds that John Howard will be Governor-General by Christmas.
Have a nice day!
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Post by geopol on Apr 10, 2013 6:30:07 GMT 10
He is still little nasty load of shit. He was all over the tv last night banging on about Mrs Thatcher with all the mealy mouthed bullshit that he intoned, interminably, drearily, at us for all those years. Mrs thatcher may have been a ferociously terrible woman or maybe she was not so at all, but the poms did not have to suffer the awful hypocritical mind debilitating crap that we had for so long from this negative self righteous individual....But gentle readers, the next chapter will be even worse!
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2013 7:01:28 GMT 10
John Howard was interviewed on Radio New Zealand National a few weeks ago while he was on this side of The Ditch.
The slippery, slimmey honey couldn't give a straight answer to anything he was asked.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2013 7:02:10 GMT 10
Howard and his government turning a blind eye on the AWB was crime, and the answer why a blind eye was turned on the biggest corrupt deal of all times, the explanation given...Oh the UN should have picked that one up.
Howard waving on the steps of parliament the intelligence documents pronouncing this is the evidence for Iraq's WMD ...when in truth he knew that it was Israel's falsely constructed propaganda.
People make a big deal out of Gillards broken promise of a No Carbon Tax which in the end is essentially a good thing for Australia and its economy, yet with the biggest lies that was detrimental to Australia's economy and detrimental to the people of Iraq....well its who cares...so what...bloke should be charged for war crimes....and anyone In his ministry shunned and removed from office for complicity.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2013 8:25:51 GMT 10
Best PM we ever had! And he wiped the floor with Keating so had the support of the vast majority of Australians!
As to the Iraq war being a rightwing conspiracy, just remember that Blair was right in the middle of it up to his eyebrows, the US's strongest ally.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2013 9:49:29 GMT 10
Has been stated many times Stellar ....Bush, Blair, and Johnnie should all be indicted at the Hague for war crimes. Blair thought he was talking to God, when lying to the British people, he was a fool ....Howard had no such delusions when lying and deceiving the public . You jump up down over the carbon tax yet the greatest crime in modern history ...who cares Johnnie was top bloke....crikey...  |
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Post by sonex on Apr 10, 2013 9:55:57 GMT 10
Brendan Nelson told us why we invaded Iraq. "Australian Defence Minister Brendan Nelson has admitted that securing oil supplies is a key factor behind the presence of Australian troops in Iraq. He said maintaining "resource security" in the Middle East was a priority." news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6272168.stm |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 10, 2013 10:16:02 GMT 10
Its certain when Saddam called the US dollar the enemy of the state and turned his back on the greenback and started trading oil in Euro's is when the vindictive US contrived with Isareli intelligence to commit war on Iraq.
In no doubt its a war crime.
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Post by pim on Apr 10, 2013 13:04:34 GMT 10
Hmmm, yairs I've noticed that seems to be an article of faith with people who share your world view. I'm not trying to be disrespectful, Stellar, you're entitled to that particular view and there are people who share it. For me I'm always uncomfortable with hero worship and actually, to do John Howard justice, I think he probably is too. A feature of his style was his ordinariness and in that sense he completely outclasses Julia Gillard whose "ordinariness" makes her look like a plodding mediocrity whereas for Howard, for quite a few years at least, it made him somehow more accessible and reassuring. More like a suburban solicitor you'd trust with a property conveyance. I don't think Howard would view himself as the "best PM we've ever had". I think he personally would defer to Menzies. But I don't want to get into these league tables of "best PM". There's a few I admire and there were a lot of drones. I admire Deakin and Fisher. I think Scullin might have made a very good PM but for the fact that he was overwhelmed by the Depression. But we're not talking about who was "potentially" good. I think Menzies deserved to get trashed in his first term and he was much better in his second term because - and this is important - of the way he did a complete makeover of the non-Labor forces in this country during the war years and a complete rethink of conservative philosophy. If his 16 year postwar term as PM was a success, and I believe it was, it was because of the foundations he laid as Opposition Leader during WW2. Both Curtin and Chifley are high in my list of great Labor PMs, and I won't go further because that takes us into the realm of living memory and I'm not trying to start any arguments. Which of them was the "greatest"? That's a sterile non-debate. I can't deny the scale and scope of the anti-Keating landslide of 1996 but I'd dispute that Howard achieved that by actively debating with Keating. In fact he did it by refusing to debate. He adopted a small target strategy and allowed the Keating Government to do its own work of self-destruction. It was a correct strategy and one that politicians have tried to emulate ever since. More's the pity! No-one wants to stick their neck out anymore. The electoral reality today is the massive paradox of contemporary Australian (and probably Western) politics: the electorate despises politicians who don't appear to believe in anything, and poll after poll shows that the electorate wants "conviction" politicians who are prepared to be fearless advocates, but at the same time punishes them when they get out there and have a go. The last truly "conviction" political leader in this country was probably John Hewson. Whatever you might think of his Fightback! policies, they were out there, fully developed and costed. The guy really stuck his neck out and told the electorate what he was offering - in great detail! And he was crucified on the detail. No other politician since then has had the courage to go into detail. And politics has suffered as a result. I really don't know what your point is, with that last bit, Stellar. Blair was the most Thatcherite "Labor" PM that Britain has ever had. Let's face it, Iraq was a dog's breakfast and opposition to it is only portrayed as a "left/right" thing here on boards like NTB where members don't "discuss" but adopt a warlike posture to each other and throw verbal hand grenades. Howard was a successful Prime Minister who completely outclassed the Labor Opposition and enjoyed a lengthy term of office. He did have a go at the "conviction politician" stuff with the GST election of 1998 which was coupled with his guns buyback stuff. The result was that he almost used up all of his political capital and he never stuck his neck out so far again. But I give him credit for his political courage in his first term. Going out on a limb and putting his huge majority on the line just to give thec country a new tax is one thing. Ramping up a campaign on terrorism and xenophobia and wedging your opponents is quite something else. But nobody gets convinced by "arguments" like this. Everyone jumps into their trenches marked "Howard luvvies" or "Howard haters" and starts lobbing mortars. And I have "stuff" to do. |
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 10, 2013 20:27:15 GMT 10
Name the achievements that he will be remembered for. |
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Post by Salem on Apr 11, 2013 16:42:45 GMT 10
Name the achievements that he will be remembered for. Read Pim's post. |
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Post by Salem on Apr 11, 2013 16:45:01 GMT 10
As to the war, he obviously still feels very strongly it was the right thing to do.
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Post by geopol on Apr 11, 2013 17:00:31 GMT 10
He's still a pumped up little load of shit.
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 11, 2013 19:54:18 GMT 10
Name the achievements that he will be remembered for. Read Pim's post. I don't see any achievements there. |
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Post by Salem on Apr 11, 2013 20:08:11 GMT 10
Read it again.
Guns
GST
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 11, 2013 20:52:46 GMT 10
A tax is not an achievement. The gun laws were forced due to one lunatic. They were not policy before elected. Where is the nation building? What legacy has he left?
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Post by fat on Apr 11, 2013 20:59:06 GMT 10
"A tax is not an achievement. The gun laws were forced due to one lunatic." YUP - Sums up Mr Howard rather well.  There are some other unacheivers who like to add new taxes too - we may be able to vote them out as well. YAY! We need an alternative worth voting in instead of out. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 11, 2013 21:05:18 GMT 10
& We need an alternative worth voting in instead of out. Yeah, good luck with that one, the present alternative seems intent to sell out and hamstring the national interest so as to protect the bottom line of Rupert Murdochs interests. |
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Post by geopol on Apr 12, 2013 8:03:49 GMT 10
The curtain of doom will probably fall in September.....It may all be part of Abbott's plot for years in purgatory, not for him but for us to ponder the sinfulness of our ways......Pain and flagellation may prove uplifting?  |
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Post by caskur on Apr 12, 2013 9:24:51 GMT 10
1. there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
2. there wasn't the "stockpiles" of WMD they were expecting...
that is what Colin Powel said on Meet the Press in the USA... because I watched it.
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Post by caskur on Apr 12, 2013 9:25:59 GMT 10
Anyone who thinks we are not all doomed... isn't reading the sign of the times correctly.
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Post by bender on Apr 12, 2013 14:57:30 GMT 10
Howard is delusional if he really believes that there was a near universal belief that Saddam had WMD's when we invaded Iraq. They keep on trotting out the Kevin Rudd line "that it is empirical fact that Saddam possessed WMD's." All that meant was yes, Saddam at one point in Iraq's history did have WMD's, (although when he actually used them he was able to rely on the USA protecting Iraq from the wrath of the UN Security Council by first claiming that they had evidence that it was Iran, not Iraq who had used WMD's, and then when that lie was disproved by blocking the UN Security Council resolution against Iraq's use of Chemical Weapons until the reference to Iraq being the guilty party was removed and replaced with a call to both Iraq and Iran to show restraint
Doesn't he remember that the UN refused to give the US a mandate to lead a military intervention? Why? Because they did not believe that the US's claims were correct/
Doesn't he remember that traditional US Allies like France, Germany and Canada refused to participate because they didn't believe that there were the WMD's that America claimed Iraq possessed?
Does he not recall that one Andrew Wilkie of the Office of National Assessment (the organisation that collates the material the spies gather and then organises and presents it to stakeholders) was prepared to stand up (and in the process shitcan his career) and state that Australia had been shown no evidence that WMD's existed at that time in Iraq.
Does he not recall that prior to hostilities kicking off a majority of Australians were opposed to an invasion of Iraq.
Does he not recall his own speech to the National Press Club on the day the invasion was launched where the reasons for invading Iraq suddenly changed from WMD's to Saddam's record as Leader and the oppression of his own people including regailing the audience with tales of people who criticised Saddam having their tongues amputated (a claim that like the WMD's had no basis in fact) whilst ignoring the fact that for the majority of Saddam's reign he was both a close ally of the USA and a major trading partner to Australia and disregarding the fact that the Australian Wheat Board (a quasi government organisation) had delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to Saddam in bribes and kickbacks, something that obviously had a result of making the UN sanctions against Iraq ineffective which then led to his next point which was we had to go to war because the UN Sanctions weren't working.
For Howard there is only one goal here and that is to protect his entries in the history books. His problem in regards to Iraq and our involvement is that the history books don't rely on Howards beliefs at the time. They rely on the factual record of what happened.
And the facts don't treat Howard kindly in this event.
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Post by caskur on Apr 12, 2013 18:04:03 GMT 10
1. there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq 2. there wasn't the "stockpiles" of WMD they were expecting... that is what Colin Powel said on Meet the Press in the USA... because I watched it. 1. The WMD - which were US supplied earlier - were no longer active (since 1991) There were 700 WMD searches / investigations done by the UN team prior to the invasion - ZERO evidence of any WMD found. 2. There were no stockpiles found, because there were none to find. Richard Butler said there was.... And they had time to move them to Syria... and look at Syria now.. |
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Post by bender on Apr 13, 2013 1:15:42 GMT 10
Caskur, most Chemical Weapons and nearly all Biological Weapons have a fairly short shelf life, measured in the months from their time of production to the point at which they've degraded. That's a deliberate aim of their design for a few very good reasons. Firstly to limit the duration of their effectiveness if they are used. Most of the common nerve agents like VX start to break down within about 10 minutes of being released, and within a short time the area in which they've been used can be entered by troops wearing basic level protection. In order for that to occur it means that even put on the shelf and not used, they tend to break down quickly. Secondly it's a valuable safety feature. If a weapon is stolen or lost it means that after a certain period of time the authorities can be confident that it is no longer a valid threat and similarly if there are any problems with the munitions canister (the bomb in which the WMD is contained) limiting the duration of the effectiveness of the agent mitigates the potential risk.
Biological Weapons are generally built to order (ie you grow your disease load it into the munitions canister and use it within a very short period of time).
Given the fact that the last time Chemical or Biological Weapons were known to have been produced in Iraq was sometime in the 1980's you can then rest easy in the knowledge that their use by date would have been at latest 1995.
There would have been no point in moving them to Syria, Iran or any other place you might like to believe because all they would have been moving would have been empty bomb cases.
Anyway, as the Iraqi Survey Group eventually discovered, Iraq had gotten rid of their WMD's (just as they'd claimed they had), the discrepency was in the claims that the US made about the size of the stockpiles which they'd arrived at by simply calculating the maximum capacity of the production facilities that Iraq did maintain in the 1980's without taking into account the loss through natural degredation of the agents.
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