By George That’s Some Very Sad and Silly Stuff

Some disappointments fade from memory as the years proceed — many if we are lucky — while others sink only to rise as unwanted reminders of hopes dashed or fallen short. They can come at random, little belches of swamp gas from the rot of failure, and one such sour emanation is today wafting across the Nine rags’ opinion pages.

First, though, be aware that authors seldom supply their own headlines, so there is no reason to blame George Brandis for ‘The alternative is awful, but not even conservatives should back Trump‘. Did you catch the “not even”? Now picture some comma-crunching SMH subeditor, perhaps blue-haired, pondering how to phrase the headline while musing ‘What’s lower than a conservative? Nothing!’ All that follows, though, must be assumed Brandis’ own work. It is not pleasant to be reminded that this a former attorney-general holding forth, although the secondhand-sourced silliness of what he has to say about Trump does shed some light on why Australia’s docile centre-right has ceded 20 or more years of lost ground. The spectacle of a man who was the nation’s lawyer-in-chief failing to notice the difference between prosecution and persecution, as in the many trials of Donald Trump, it’s as telling as it is sad.

Brandis begins with what must have struck him as both piercing insight and damning analogy, likening those who will hold the nose to vote for Trump as somehow akin to the Moscow-line bolshies of old, those red-ragging wharfies and ‘no enemies on the left’ sorts who applauded from afar as tanks rolled into Budapest and Prague. “We have seen a strikingly similar phenomenon emerge among elements of the right”, he would have you believe, proceeding to frame Trump’s more enthusiastic voters as supporters of

A failed candidate who stubbornly refused to accept the outcome of an election, encouraged his supporters to disrupt the proceedings of Congress to prevent the result being declared, and propagated without a shred of evidence the fantasy that the election had been stolen…

Oh dear, where to begin?

If refusing to accept the 2020 result makes Trump a crackpot conspiracist then he has plenty of company. As the lockstep left Washington Post‘s poll revealed in December, less than two-thirds of Americans overall now view the election as fair and square. Significantly, and no doubt as a result of noticing the flamboyantly imaginatively prosecutions being pursued against the GOP’s candidate-to-be, faith in the electoral system has declined across the board over the past three years, even among Democrats. Faith in the judicial system has likewise slipped, and worryingly that decline reflects a nonpartisan sentiment. Americans are divided on the merits of prosecuting Trump, but they accept their courts no longer dispense justice fairly or efficiently. As for the Justice Department and its FBI, only 17 per cent retain a “high confidence” in those in charge.

“Encouraged his supporters” did he? Given that one-third of the voting public believed then and believes now that Democrat states and cities play fast and loose in their tallyrooms, the call to just wait a minute seems a reasonable request if not, as unfolded on January 6, a decorous one. That Trump urged the faithful to maintain the peace and respect police apparently counts for nothing, so too his ignored request of 24 hours earlier to House Chairwoman Nancy Pelosi that she add 1000 additional police to Capitol Hill’s inauguration day security deployment. Does one need to be off the meds to believe the Biden administration hasn’t been delighted to brand critics one and all as “MAGA extremists”, wild radicals whose place in the democratic process is behind bars. Did you see the State of the Union? Iran, China, Russia, even Yemen’s rocketeers, it was none of those enemies which drew an old man to screeching threats and fighting words. It was fellow Americans in his crosshairs, the ones who disagree with him, dispute the Left’s goals generally and reject its passing fancies, from unreliable energy to male women.

One doesn’t like to think less of others, so the pity is that Brandis has popped up from earned obscurity to remind us of the need to do so. A political career responsible for what achievements exactly?  Supporting Malcolm Turnbull in the 2015 spill? A bit of a swipe at the arts luvvies that came to nought? And, oh yes, his 2017 Senate defence of keeping women in black sacks, prompted by Pauline Hanson’s appearance in a burqa. Her stunt was “an appalling thing to mock a religious garment” and he sought to assure Australia’s Muslims that this one of their creed’s quaint little ways was but another colourful tile in Australia’s gloriously wonderful multicultural mosaic. Sam Dastyari was such a fan of the performance (below) he tweeted about it (above).

Brandis concludes his piece with a clotted lump of half-digested January 6 Committee talking points. It seems Trump is forcing all those prosecutions in order to bring the justice system into disrepute, though the trusting Brandis generously concedes “perhaps the motivation of some of the prosecuting authorities may be questionable. But all of them?”

Well, yes, George, all of them — from Fani Willis in Georgia, where the Justice Department sent a flying squad of lawyers to help her small-claims boyfriend prosecute a former president for fun, fame and profit, to New York, where Attorney-General Letitia James ran for and attained office on a specific promise that she was the gal who would “get Trump”. The washed-up advice columnist, E. Jean Carroll, who claims Trump had his way with her in a Bergie’s changing stall? Her legal costs are being covered by  seven-figure Democrat superdonor Reid Hoffman, the case made possible at all only because the Democrat-dominated state legislature opened a 12-month window in which cold-case civil actions could be brought. The span of years had to be mighty wide, mind you, because the wacky Ms Carroll, who has painted all the trees on her upstate property blue, couldn’t recall in which year the purported traumatic assault took place. All this and worse, by George’s reckoning, is Trump’s cunning doing. Should the former High Commissioner ever witness a crime of violence, the police can expect to be told that the assailant attacked the other’s fist with his nose.

Twisted misconceptions about the courtrooms in which the 2024 presidential race is playing, ill informed as they are, seem benign when Brandis turns his ex-diplomat’s eye to Trump’s foreign policy. Lifting his words almost straight from Biden’s SOTU tirade, he asserts with lordly authority that, well here let him say it

…Trump’s insouciant remarks about encouraging Russian aggression against NATO (of which America is the principal security guarantor); his refusal to criticise the killing of Alexei Navalny…

The last charge first. On Navalny, Trump had this to say:

Navalny is a very sad situation and he’s very brave, he was a very brave guy. He went back, he could have stayed away, and frankly probably would have been a lot better off staying away and talking from outside of the country as opposed to having to go back in, because people thought that could happen, and it did happen.

And it’s a horrible thing, but it’s happening in our country, too,” Trump continued, suggesting his criminal indictments — which include two cases stemming from his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat — are proof that the U.S. is “turning into a communist country in many ways.

So Elder Statesman George is wrong on the facts and therefore in his accusation. But what of the claim that Trump “is encouraging Russian aggression against NATO”. As an exercise, just imagine the quote below is a question — ‘What thought is the speaker attempting to convey?’ — on a Sixth Form (or whatever they call it these days) comprehension test:

TRUMP: One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’

“I said, ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’. He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’

No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay. You gotta pay your bills.”

If Brandis believes the message is that Russia should feel free to poke the Baltic States or snaffle a piece of Poland, your slower senior high school students need not abandon hope of front-bench careers and serving their nation’s diplomatic interests. Clearly, the point is that NATO members must not discount their obligations or shirk them lest the Russians really do come knocking.

Is it that Brandis can’t grasp the point or is it a more simple case of not bothering to check the wisdom handed down from his preferred sources? Either way it’s telling, and not simply for displaying a loathing so thorough as to distort both curiosity and comprehension. Brandis advises “conservatives” to stick with a snarling geriatric rather than the vulgarian fighter. Trumpists and those who believe in winning have just absolutely ruined CPAC conferences for “orthodox conservatives”, Brandis laments at one point.

It seems those firebrand upstarts have an awful lot of other orthodoxies to overturn, not least any credence accorded a previous generation that made failure to contain the left’s remorseless advance something of a vocation.