Month: September 2014

Australia, Federal, Middle East, South America, World

/ /2 Comments

The legendary Canberra political correspondent Alan Ramsay was asked why he referred to Prime Minister John Howard as “toad” in his sulphurous columns. “Because the Herald won’t let me use turd,” he replied. Fair enough. However, I prefer “lying rodent”, the description given to him by a Liberal colleague, Senator George Brandis, in 2004. Charge…

Australia, Federal, Media, Middle East, World

/ /5 Comments

Australia is at war again in the Middle East. This time in Iraq and Syria, two leading Arab nations with a century-long history of struggle for national independence. Both were ruled for almost half a century by rival branches of the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party, a bourgeois nationalist party which talked “socialism” but sponsored native…