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 the ‘lying rodent’ with
war crimes in Iraq!

Howard, who suffers from Acute Attention Deficit Syndrome, was on the media circuit this week trying to explain away his decision to join US President George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, killing and wounding an estimated one million civilians and turning two million more into refugees.
He wilfully accepted the WMD lies fabricated by the Pentagon and the CIA and nothing can hide that truth.
Tasmanian Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, an intelligence officer who resigned over Howard’s gung-ho march to war, said that Howard should have to face war crimes charges at the International Court in The Hague.
In the dock with him should be Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and Alexander Downer.
Legal theorists argue that the court’s statute of limitations precludes their trial but surely there should no time limit in bringing to justice politicians charged with mass murder?

Lambie’s army training

Senator Jacqui Lambie from Clive Palmer’s private zoo expressed her core beliefs when she ignorantly equated Sharia Law with terrorism.
Where did she acquire her moronic views? Lambie served in the Australia army from 1989 to 2000 rising to the rank of corporal.
Since then she has consorted with the ex-service community where good and decent citizens are obliged to put up with a minority of pro-monarchist bores soaked in xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Contrary to its multi-million-dollar PR advertising budget, the army is not a glorified peace corps of blond boy scouts and happy girl guides dedicated to world peace.
They are trained on army bases which are hotbeds of racism, sexism, misogyny and homophobia. By going public, Lambie has provided a rare insight into the prejudices prevalent in the army’s culture.
Earlier this week Defence Minister David Johnston was despatched to Baghdad on an unspecified mission. The non-inquisitive media claimed he was “holding talks with Iraqi government leaders about Australia’s commitment to the fight against ISIS”.

Abbott’s plea to Iraq

In fact, Johnston was attempting to extract an official letter from Iraq’s new Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi officially requesting Australian military support. Without a signed request, the Abbott Government could be accused – legitimately – of barging into Iraq without permission or UN support. Another illegal invasion?
This is not the first time a Liberal Government has become embroiled in a controversy about sending troops to a foreign country without a written invitation.
Announcing the despatch of an Australian battalion to Vietnam on April 29, 1965, Prime Minister Robert Menzies claimed Australia was in “receipt of a request” for further military assistance from the embattled government of South Vietnam which had “turned to Australia for help”.
In fact, the “request” was organised by dodgy means. English-born Air Minister Peter Howson, an ardent supporter of the war, was returning from an overseas trip when he was diverted to Saigon. He met Prime Minister Phan Huy Quat to seek an official letter asking for an increase from “advisers” to battalion-strength “boots on the ground”.
With the letter tucked in his briefcase, Howson flew back to Canberra and gave it to Menzies who rushed into the House of Representatives to announce the escalation of Australia’s war effort.
Menzies’ deception was exposed by Gough Whitlam, the deputy leader of the Opposition. During question time Whitlam asked Howson whether the request had been made in Vietnamese or French – the two languages spoken in Saigon but not by Howson who was a mono-lingual Cambridge man. Howson’s response in the House was a pathetic mumble. But in the next instant, the Saigon regime’s letter was produced and much of the media swallowed the story that Australian troops were in fact going to South Vietnam at the invitation of the corrupt, CIA-financed regime.
Years later it emerged that the Menzies Government was falling over itself to send troops to the Vietnam battlefields and all of its negotiations were with Washington and not Saigon.

Mission to Baghdad

Senator Johnston’s failure to extract an official letter during his Baghdad visit probably means the end of his term in the defence portfolio. Scott Morrison is in the wings just waiting to leave immigration and become the next defence minister.
Tony Abbott has now despatched Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to Iraq to see if she can secure a Status of Forces Agreement to cover warplane and SAS operations by the Australian war party. Such an agreement would be critical for the Australian defence forces to give them legal immunity from any crimes – inadvertent or otherwise – that they may commit against the Iraqi people.
Why would al-Abadi meet Abbott’s request? He is a Shiite Moslem who was one of the early leaders of the Dawa Party, financed by Iran’s revolutionary regime.
The Shiites in Tehran, Baghdad and Beirut (Hezbollah is an offshoot of Dawa in Lebanon) loathe Abbott and his pro-Zionist stance. But they have a special dislike of Ms Bishop who claimed recently that East Jerusalem was not “occupied” but “disputed”, thereby breaching UN policy and international legal opinion since the Israeli Army’s seizure and occupation in 1967.
Why would Iraqi leaders want Australian warplanes and the SAS on their soil again and why would they accede to requests from the feverishly pro-Zionist Ms Bishop?
Don’t Abbott and Bishop realise that Baghdad is fully aware of the hundreds of millions of dollars corruptly paid to the late Saddam Hussein in exchange for Australian wheat?
The trouble with Abbott, Bishop, Morrison, Brandis and Pyne is that they think Iraqis and Iranians (do they recognise the difference?) are a bunch of “ragheads” of little or no intelligence.
They are plunging Australia into a military confrontation on the other side of the world, in the treacherous sands of the Middle East, without a strategy or a plan.
We are at the mercy of a political class that is inept, incompetent, bullheaded, arrogant and quite possibly in need of clinical treatment.