AWB Fiasco III

Greg Sheridan in the Australian.
I THINK it’s time we all took a cold shower on AWB (formerly the Australian Wheat Board) and its participation in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. According to the Volcker inquiry, about 2253 companies from 66 countries were involved in paying kickbacks to the Saddam Hussein regime as part of their trade under oil-for-food.
My thoughts exactly. If you do business in this part of the world you pay bakshees. If you don’t pay you don’t sell. Would ‘Tricky’ Rudd or Beasley have compensated the thousands of Australian wheat growers for loss of sales if the crop stayed in the bins? No way. Australians see that it’s all about the ALP trying to score a strike against the government; that the government most probably didn’t know about the details of the case and that after all, the AWB did what it was chartered to do – sell the wheat crop in extremely difficult circumstances. As well as getting money to the wheat growers for their efforts they most probably saved lives in Iraq. Kids had food for a change. I guess that in the total absence of any coherent policies the ALP can not hope to win power; they can only hope to bring the government down by a technicality.
The broader question of corruption is very slippery. When people are accused of corruption, this normally means acting dishonestly, stealing money for themselves. Many people connected to the UN, such as Kofi Annan’s son Koji, made a lot of money personally through oil-for-food. No one is alleging that folks at AWB were improperly pocketing money themselves.
It’s not about the AWB, they are just the catalyst for the ALP to attack. There will be any amount of Australian companys who will have paid ‘fees’ to get goods over the wharves in Indonesia, through customs in some South African excuse for a country or even into a European market. It just happens and the only difference is the actual word used to describe the ‘fees’. In fact, if any company tells you they don’t pay ‘fees’ to get goods into Indonesia I would say they are telling porkies. The ABC, SBS and ALP should get over it and start acting as a constructive opposition. There are plenty of bills to debate and the AWB will not cost Howard any votes.

Bush bugging beatup

Mark Steyn hits the nail on the head.
….unmoored from reality, wafting happily into fantasy land safe in the hermetically sealed Democrat-media bubble, Sen. Barbara Boxer and her colleagues are apparently considering impeaching the president for eavesdropping on al Qaida calls made to U.S. phone numbers.
It’s the same as taking Churchill or Roosevelt to court over their complicity in breaking Enigma and the Japanese codes and then conducting the mortal sin of listening in to the enemies communications. More from Steyn.
Consider Iyman Faris, a naturalized American citizen also known as Mohammad Rauf and nailed by U.S. intelligence through the interception of foreign-U.S. communications. He was convicted in 2003 for doing the legwork on an al Qaida scheme to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge Do you want Iyman Faris in jail? Or do you think he should have the run of the planet until he’s actually destroyed the bridge and killed hundreds of people? Say, the Golden Gate Bridge just as you’re driving across after voting for Barbara Boxer and congratulating yourself on your moral superiority.
If you do want him, and others like him off the streets then you need to accept that one of the quickest avenues of doing so is communications interception. You can’t have it both ways. I recommend you read the full article. The link is in the RH bar

Bush and God

A letter in todays Australian
If Bush was on a mission from God to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, does that follow that he evolved from Intelligent Design? H.Casson Foster, Vic
Not at all, H.Casson but it does follow that you didn’t. Some people will believe anything so long as it is based on the premise that Bush is stupid. If you don’t question the motives of the BBC in posting such a story then you can hardly claim your brain is designed, let alone intelligently. A translation of a translation quoted from Palestinian sources….yeah I can believe that. Like hell.

Honour and Honesty ‘Deep Throated”

The daughter of the former FBI agent who was revealed this week as Deep Throat has acknowledged that money played a role in the family’s decision to go public. Grandson Nick, heads for similar career based on honour and honesty.
“My son, Nick, is in law school and he’ll owe $US100,000 ($A132,500) by the time he graduates,” she said. “I am still a single mum, still supporting them to one degree or another, and I am not ashamed of this.”
Dad’s weak at the moment, let’s go talk to him.
Joan Felt said her father suffered a stroke in 2001 and has undergone surgery for heart problems and a broken hip but is still lucid.
Daughter gets him in a weak moment and now he believes that he was a hero.
“We had to help him see that most of the world now considers what he did heroic,” she said. “At the time it was happening, he wouldn’t have gotten that percentage of support, but history has shown it was so important what he did.”
I’m no fan of Tricky Dicky but I am of institutions, Official Secrets Acts and outwardly (at least) apolitical Public Servants and holders of high office. Doubtful motivation to the end.

Bush goes to college

As reported in this post President Bush was scheduled to addresses the graduating class at Calvin College at Grand Rapids, Michegan. Yesterday he did the deed and in doing so, failed miserable in politicising the event as forecast be the MSM and certain left-wing pundits He urged the graduates to consider service to the community in their post-grad lives, saying;
This isn’t a Democratic idea. This isn’t a Republican idea. This is an American idea,”
and
“As your generation takes its place in the world, all of you must make this decision: Will you be a spectator or a citizen?”
He received warm applause but some Democrat voters protested;
Several dozen people (from a student body of over 4,000) protesting outside the event and a few graduates at the ceremony wore stickers that said: “God is not a Republican or Democrat.”
Meanwhile George shows he has a sense of humour with this closing line;
“Some day you will appreciate the grammar and verbal skills you learned here,” quipped the president who is not known for his eloquence. “If any of you wonder how far a mastery of the English language can take you, just look what it did for me.”
On the face of it, the speach sounded like any other graduating day speach. MSM and the left must be so dissappointed.

Bush beat-up

Along the lines of Ripley’s Believe it or Not Tim Dunlop has found a liberal arts educational institution with some staff and students who don’t like Bush!
George Bush, also known as the President, is giving a speech there soon, so you’d expect the usual sort of pro-God, pro-Republican tautological sucking up, right? Well, to the eternal (and I do mean eternal) credit of their faculty and students, not so much:
Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Missouri describes themselves as;
…distinctively Christian, academically excellent liberal arts college that shapes minds for intentional participation in the renewal of all things.
Running Scared posts that one third of the faculty members have signed a political add that will appear in the local rag on the day Bush visits at a cost of $2600 and more than 800 students, faculty and alumni have also placed a political add in the local rag on the same day to the tune of $9,600. Calvin College has 4,300 students so roughly a fifth have been convinced to back some of their teachers in this political exercise. The other 80% might like to ask where the $12,000 is coming from. In this startling, revelationary post Tim has so far established that a percentage of staff and students in a college in the US vote Democrat. As that would be the case on every campus in the country it’s hardly a scoop. I Googled Calvin College+Grand Rapids and studied the College’s website looking for Anti-Bush sentiment. Mmmm…a bit sparse. If Tim and Running Scared are to be believed you would think that if Students, faculty and alumni are forking out over $12,000 it would be all over the website. I did find some negative vibes but hardly a groundswell The front page of the students newsletter, the normal source of campus radical thought, offers little in the way of providing another source for the story. The College President says;
… that the response of alumni to news of the president’s coming has been overwhelmingly positive, although he has had a few alumni who object.
Provost Carpenter says;
In response to rumors of possible protests, [he]… responds that although the event will unavoidably have political dimensions to it, it is “important to be good hosts and to show the personal and institutional maturity of being able to extend hospitality and a civil audience to someone whom we may disagree with.?
No, I don’t know what the appointment ‘Provost’ is either but at least he hints at some political dimension to the visit. It all looks like a couple of bloggers have sat down and thought ‘ How can I put down on Bush today? They should have picked a better example, if there is one. 20% of the student body and one third of the staff disagreeing with Bush’s visit is hardly an election winner.

Bush home and hosed

Both Kerry and the Australian SBS refuse to admit defeat but it looks home and hosed to me. SBS report Ohio terribly close..closest poll in memory..country polarized. Why is a country polarized when conservative governments win and politically mature when Left wing governments win. Ohio is terribly close to the point where Bush is ahead by a statisticsally unsurmountable lead according to Ohio’s Secretary of State. All of SBS’s reporting was as at close of counting in the US whereas the bloggers of the world are still up and posting and subsequently more recent. The ABC are rerunning a Bush lied, Powel lied, WMD’s are still important to us and the Abu Graib saga doco. I guess the programmers run the show in anticipation of a Kerry win. Makes it all the more poignant to the luvvies viewing. However, there is some good news for Kerry. He won the ‘Straw Pole’ held at ‘Harry’s New York’ bar in Paris. Well he would. Wouldn’t he? A comment from Tim Blair’s site sums it up.
… a great night for conservatives around the world, and a bad night for Islamic fundamentalists, terrorists and Communists.

Stolen Valor: Wounds that Never Heal

Got this link from a Viet Vet in the US. Stolen Valor may have been pulled from the networks but Fahrenheit 911 has been screened most everywhere in the world. I think this is grossly unfair so click on the link below to view it See how Conservatives, the right wing and us Vets view Kerry. See Stolen Valor here Plays best on Real One but OK on others Put some time aside – it’s 40 odd minutes.

Bush lookin’ good

Norman McGreevy writes to the Australian and nails it. Landslide alert 19 October 2004
“PROGRESSIVE” pundits, journalists and most of academia long ago concluded that George W. Bush is the biggest liar ever to make president and should, without delay, be ejected from the White House. Hollywood’s left-leaning entertainers and assorted rock acts have screeched loud and long in their campaigns against the dumb “end of democracy as we know it” Bush presidency. John Kerry comprehensively wiped the floor with Bush in all three of their debates. Then a poll involving ten “quality newspapers” around the world, showed people would much prefer John Kerry to be the next US president. And now, not unexpectedly, The New York Times has delivered their own ringing endorsement of Senator John Kerry for president. All of this encouraging evidence appears to be pointing towards a Republican landslide. Norman McGreevy Malvern East, Vic
Couldn’t agree more.
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