A Sad, Cruel Waste of Trees

Come November 5, if past president Donald Trump gains the 270 Electoral College votes required to become the next one, consumers of Australian media coverage will have every right to be baffled. This will apply in particular to the few readers who still turn for enlightenment to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. As for those who persist in placing their faith in the ABC, no need to concern ourselves with them. They have long been beyond hope.

Let’s start with five-figure Democratic Party donor Bruce Wolpe, Julia Gillard’s former chief of staff, who now hangs a faded shingle at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre and moonlights as a Nine columnist. Yesterday in the former Fairfax rags, he shared his thoughts, such as they are, on the Vance/Walz vice-presidential debate.

Unfortunately for Trump, Vance parked his inner-mongrel

Ah, the folly and consequence of swallowing your fellow leftoids’ talking points for later regurgitation. Vance has been characterised by the sources Wolpe evidently favours as the Ogre from Ohio. If you’re a hack reporter and forced by an interview subject to confront your own sins of omission and commission, this is an understandable reaction. It must come as a shock to encounter that rare Republican who gives as good as he gets.

In Vance’s case, calm and unflappable, he gives more than he gets, as in the unfortunately titled video below. It’s a long clip but worth watching in full for its master-class lesson in how conservatives should deal with hostile reporters, which is pretty much all of them.

The Coalition would benefit by studying Vance’s technique, especially when dealing with Their ABC.

Just getting started, Wolpe continues that

Trump will not be happy that Vance said Walz “even sounds pretty good” on the structure of the tax system.

Here’s the debate transcript and below the following sentences which Wolpe somehow neglected to mention (emphasis added):

She’s been the Vice President for three and a half years, she had the opportunity to enact all of these great policies. And what she’s actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%, open the American southern border and make middle class life unaffordable for a large number of Americans.

Wolpe then goes on to assert

 “Coach Walz won the round on abortion rights.”

Won or lost, that perception will depend on whether you are pro-abortion or pro-life, but what can’t be denied is that Walz, a serial and shameless liar, lied yet again about the Minnesota law he signed that removed the obligation for abortionists who inadvertently deliver a live, breathing, near-full-term baby to provide the infant with medical care intended to save life.

The Minnesota legislature helpfully publishes repealed and amended legislation, complete with strike-throughs, to indicate what is no longer the law. Here are the Minnesota abortionists’ scratched reporting obligations, repealed in 2023.

If at this point readers are nearing the conclusion that a salt cellar be kept handy when reading Wolpe’s columns, what he says of Sarah Palin will suggest a large bucket as the better choice.

In 2008, the Republican VP pick, Alaska’s Sarah (“I can see Russia from my house”) Palin was a drag on John McCain…

Palin never said that or anything like it. Here, as even the port-canted Snopes.com concedes, is the actual quote:

“They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”

The majority of the Nine comics’ readers now ingest its offerings online rather than via old-fashion ink and paper, so that’s something for which green-minded SMH and Age types should be grateful. The fewer trees pulped for the printing of twaddle the better.