Sign In
0 Items (
Search
Comments (20)
Long ago, when the bloom of youth was yet upon my cheeks and adventure in my heart, I carried aboard a jet bound for San Francisco a letter from Mum to be opened once the flight was airborne. It was all good advice … don’t drink too much … behave yourself … don’t drink too much … be polite to police officers … don’t drink too much. Sound counsel in every respect, the note concluded with an admonition that today seems both quaintly dated and sadly so, ‘Be a good ambassador for your country.’ Alas that former SMH opinion-page editrix Lisa Pryor (left) was not similarly encouraged to avoid bringing Australia into disrepute. It might have stayed her hand from tapping out the embarrassing missive that appears in the New York Times international edition.
Doctor Pryor’s topic (for a genuine, pill-prescribing doctor she has made of herself since leaving Fairfax) is Donald Trump’s presidential victory or, to be more accurate, the utter catastrophe of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Times readers are alerted early to the newly minted medico’s fragile emotional condition, which has seen her dissolve in tears “many times, in the shower, in the car.” It would be presumptuous for one other than a physician to recommend an increased dose of the psyche-smoothing medications that she elsewhere notes have done her a world of good, but all that bawling really does suggest a suitable case for stepped-up treatment. Likewise a visit with her optometrist, as it seems she has quite some difficulty reading the charted results of survey questions. But more on that in a tick. First, the paragraph that says so much, not about how Americans “let us down” by rejecting a corruptocrat hypocrite in favour of a vulgarian tycoon, but about the author and the US publication whose front page is moist with its contributor’s latest weepings.
The election of Mr. Trump feels like a sudden plunge after a gradual decline. Already he is goading China, befriending President Vladimir V. Putin, disregarding climate change and refusing daily intelligence briefings because he’s “a smart person.” None of this, we fear, will end well for any of us.
What you mean “we”, white girl? Moving in the circles she does and re-tweeting with approval the asininities of Crikey!’s Bernard Keane and others, it might well be that she has never met anyone other than the sort of people who still regard the SMH as a serious publication, a very small congregation indeed. Were she to get out more it would come as a surprise to learn that some of her compatriots are actually quite pleased to see a bull at the door of the Washington china shop, as the American enterprise has been running in the red for far too long and could do with a top-to-bottom renovation and re-staffing. The paragraph above, representing as it does the cognitive dissonance of the New Establishment, makes the case.
“…a sudden plunge after a gradual decline”
So Obama’s eight years of profligate spending, of fecklessness and impotence, haven’t lifted anyone’s boat, yet US voters must be held to account for electing the man who noted as much and tapped his nation’s dyspepsia.
“…he is goading China…”
Much as Churchill goaded Germany, perhaps, by noting that it was intimidating its neighbours and laying claim to their territories?
“…befriending President Vladimir V. Putin…”
As opposed to Mrs Clinton’s quite explicit promise that, were Moscow to be even suspected of cyber hacking, she might feel inclined to respond militarily. Now what was that about “goading” again?
“…disregarding climate change…”
Hypocrisy is the oil that keeps both the Left in general and mainstream media in particular running smooth, but even by that oleaginous standard this tossed-off critique is a gusher, appearing as it does in the Times. The ailing US publisher’s largest shareholder (17%) is a Mexican gentleman by name of Carlos Slim. Along with telecommunications and retailing interests, one of the mainsprings of Slim’s fortune is the cement business. What a pity that, when Pryor was featuring Tim Flannery’s hopeless prophecies on her SMH pages, he didn’t tell her that cement production is responsible for 5% of the greenhouse emissions that keep him awake at night.
But wait, as they say in those late-night TV ads for miraculous kitchen doo-dads, there’s more! And just like those same ads, Dr Pryor’s column offers a two-for-one bonus. Not only do we see a luvvie appalled that common folk don’t think and vote the way their betters would wish, in Pryor’s quoting of a Lowy Institute survey we have a classic example of the selective eye. Here’s the mood she assures Times readers prevails in Australia:
When the Lowy Institute for International Policy surveyed Australians two years ago about whether the United States or China was the more important partner for our country, the United States led by 11 percentage points. This year there was a tie. The drift was more marked among Australians under 45, most of whom named China. Nearly half of the Australians surveyed said we should distance ourselves from a United States led by a president like Mr. Trump.
Strictly speaking there is not much wrong with that paragraph. The survey does indeed present all but one of those figures. There are, however, a number of other findings in Lowy’s latest charting of public attitudes which Dr Pryor would have been well advised to mention, for example:
- Asked “are you personally in favour or against Australia conducting similar [naval] operations in an effort to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea?”, 71% of respondents answered in the affirmative.
Australians, or so one gathers (but not from Dr Pryor’s essay), are sympatico with Trump’s view that China could do with a little push-back. And then there is this:
- Asked how they feel about China, 59% of those Australians polled opposed Chinese investment; 67% bemoaned the Middle Kingdom’s environmental policies; 73% lamented the negative influence of Beijing’s rulers, and 86% disdained China’s abuse of human rights.
Perhaps because she neglected to notice that section of the Lowy report, Pryor is able to suggest without blushing that “no longer can it be assumed that Australia will always pick the United States over China, if forced to choose.”
Assumed by who? Assumed by people who omit relevant details, apparently.
Now that Dr Pryor has traded her career at a dying newspaper for the company of patients whose prospects, one can only hope, are somewhat brighter, she is undoubtedly paying greater attention to the dosages she specifies in her prescriptions than to the numbers she opts to brandish in support of her punditry and salt-cheeked misery.
Asked “two years ago about whether the United States or China was the more important partner for our country,” she writes, “the United States led by 11 percentage points. This year there was a tie.” Well, yes, the two nations are neck-and-neck in Australians’ esteem, but the US has declined only five points, not eleven – from 48% to 43% — since the 2014 Lowy survey. As the Times is very good at running corrections — it gets a lot of practice — someone should alert the newspaper’s public editor to that howler.
No doubt, the Times newsroom being inhabited by the trans-Pacific counterparts of the insular, arrogant wretches who wrecked Fairfax’s profits and reputation by ignoring and excluding the views and perspectives of all but those like themselves, Dr Pryor can expect the Grey Lady’s further invitations to overlook pertinent facts and get her numbers wrong.
How other Americans might react to her insights – Americans of the sort who voted for Trump — well let’s just say it’s a pity my Mum didn’t share that long-ago advice about not making a goose of yourself on foreign shores.
Roger Franklin is the editor of Quadrant Online
Roger,
Trump just keeps on getting better and better at using the right language (such as calling muslim psychopaths ‘radical ISLAMIST terrorists’).
I sincerely hope that when he is inaugurated that he turns the snowflake abuse on its head by taking a leaf from the “Rats of Tobruk” playbook and announces his Cabinet of “The greatest collection of deplorables I could find to be my MAGA team.”
Lisa Pryor’s opinion is of no account, she’s just as big sook and a sulk, heavily into her own emotions; a caricature of feminism. Her worst crime is that she appears to be unhistorical and has not a clue as to the massive challenges and changes now confronting the USA. One of the greatest thrills of Trump winning is that the Three Ugly Sisters (Samantha Power, Victoria Nuland and the Great Beast Herself, Hilary Clinton), are politically no more. Those three alone with their nastiness and lies could (and have), caused war.
What sort of person Donald Trump actually is, matters tremendously! I would liken Donald Trump to one of the Fallen Angels, not welcome in Paradise, kicked out of Heaven by the Oligarchic elites of Wall Street, and now capable of great mischief on Earth.
BUT,
DJT’s Achilles heel (for his constituency), is that to get back into Paradise his will ‘do-an-Obama’, betray them and sell them out. On the other hand, I would back DJT’s massive ego and competitive edge, one on one, with any of the Big Boy Oligarchs.
Plato can helpus work it out.
America is now balanced between old aristocratic forms of government (philosopher kings – Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, John Adams et. al.) and Oligarchy.
The USA, I am certain Plato would judge as a TIMOCRACY, and Trump a TIMOCRAT (part Aristocratic, part Oligarch). Timocratic leaders (according to Plato) with their voluptuous nature are, not too bad (iron/copper souls not golden souls), but:
• are a more high-spirited and simple-minded type, better suited for war;
• value power through military conquest and honors, rather than intellectual means;
• yearn for material wealth and will not trust thinkers to be placed in positions of power;
• fight to accumulate wealth in pernicious ways, and hide their possessions from public view;
• are spendthrift and hedonistic.
Sorry Lisa, but Plato is closer to the truth. Trump does have something we can all work with.
Bravo!!!
One of the wonderful things about recent times is the number of interesting expressions that have either being newly coined or brought into prominence. So, in reading this article Roger refers to Hillary as a ‘corruptocrat hypocite’ and the alliterative effect, the onomatopoeia has this corrosively cacophonous feel to it, not unlike Hillary’s amped up, utterly excoriating speeches, and I’m talking about that shredding machine sound, not the muddle-headed content. I used to instantly mute the TV whenever Julia Gillard spoke; but with Hillary, I’d literally fling myself across the room to delete her entirely, despite the lack of youthful vigor in my limbs.
But then there are a host of new expressions, like ‘alt-Right’, which was supposedly coined by some neo-Nazi bloke called Spenser. It is meant to refer to ‘fringe’ groups of particularly bigoted people, well that’s what the MSM would have you think, but it is really meant to single out those who read alternative publications to Fairfax, and their equivalents overseas.
And how about ‘snowflakes’? We already had ‘you haven’t a snowflake’s chance in hell’ idiom, but this is a new application to the host of ‘luvvies’ who have been weeping their eyes out over the election of Trump. The problem, I gather, is that they have no gonads, or the female equivalents. But I ‘ve slipped up here: the new pronoun for both he and she is apparently ‘ze’, so I suppose one would say ze’s gonads, except zes don’t have any to begin with.
Then there are ‘cucks’ and ‘neocons’, both of which refer to conservatives, the former being tied to Malcolm’s apron strings, the latter clinging desperately to Tony’s (and for those likely to be offended, stop reading right now) clinging to his budgie snugglers, never that the twain should mix.
I could chuck in a few acronyms like ISIS or ISIL, but I’d be writing an article rather than a simple response, and nobody has asked for that.
How about this!! The witch-hunts to rival Salem are back and here is compelling evidence: I think I’ve even made comments about it there somewhere myself!
http://slippedisc.com/2016/12/breaking-andrea-bocelli-pulls-out-of-trump-inauguration/
Warty,
I believe the common expression is “budgie SMUGGLERS”: as in “have you anything to declare, Sir?” from an airport customs official. Though it is always possible for a pair of amorous budgerigars to find cosiness and true love while bedded down in someone’s discarded underpants, the likelihood of the same while said underpants are being worn would have to be impossible. As a former budgie fancier, I can testify through bitter experience the ability of these birds to scratch and bite and draw blood from a finger of whatever dimension: even from one inside a thin glove.
While smuggling one live bird, amorous or otherwise, inside one’s underpants would be a bit of a challenge, two or more snuggling there would be totally impossible. They would squawk, squabble, screech and likely take to fighting: not on the fly so much as within it. This would alert Security, set off alarms galore, and bring sniffer dogs and guards running in from everywhere, with God knows what consequences.
The budgie-snuggling budgie smuggler would probably finish up in need of an ambulance.
Though one does like the idea of Speedos keeping the budgies snug. Eminently more comfortable.
Jody,
Did you accept my bet?
Who voted for Bocelli?
With respect to all previous commenters, they seemed to have failed to recognise the gist of Roger’s article, which is to demonstrate how the MSM continues to report not the way things are but the way they believe things ought to be. It will take some time, perhaps for ever, before the establishment’s mouthpieces realise that they are preaching to one another while hardly anyone takes any notice of their machinations. The detailing of Pryor’s inane ramblings vividly illustrates the phenomenon.
Prior will find herself and her progressive buddies identified right here:
https://slowpolitics.co.uk/2016/11/16/the-virus-of-virtue-signalling/
Thank you for this link Jody, which I instantly added to my favourite portals.
Fabulous stuff. Virtue Signalling pretty much sums up my life in the Inner West. At dinner parties I’ve found myself joking about Trump and Alan Jones, just so I’m not ostracized.
Appalling comments in yesterday’s SMH from a Prior-type acolyte so-called feminist. This from Polly Dunning (reported in today’s Cut & Paste in “The Australian) – she’s the daughter of ‘Frightbat’ Jane Caro: please read these appalling words from a woman whose just found out he’s carrying a son:
“There were two parts to the feeling: I had to mourn the life I thought I was supposed to have….and I had to come to terms with having a relationship with a son that I had never really considered. There were dark moments in the middle of the night (when all those dark moments come), when I felt SICK at the thought of SOMETHING MALE GROWING INSIDE ME”.
Not like the parents whose twins are on life-support after near-drowning in Sydney yesterday: I guess they’d be feeling “sick”.
Tell me please, dear readers of ‘Quadrant’, where you think this perversion, hatred and narcissism comes from?
Jody, I think you know as well as we all do, where this comes from. As the Neo-Marxists tended to day, the revolution that was supposed to happen did not happen, so they had to create a new proletariat, the white male workers being all too happy to buy all the consumer goods, full employment in the 60s enabled them to buy. The new proletariat became those who were the focus of the civil rights movement, and the alleged date was 1968.
So blacks became the new revolutionaries, but not satisfied with that, the cultural Marxists identified yet another oppressed group, i.e. those who were the target of all the washing machine ads, the lovely Kelvinator fridge ads, the sowing machine ads: you know the ones with the skirts and blouses. These ones, ironically, were oppressed by the former oppressed, the white male workers who let the Marxists down so badly.
Then someone invented the pill, and so with the deadly cocktail of feminism (courtesy of Eva Cox, Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir) the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, Joan Biaz, Bob Dylan, Beatles and other stoned rebels, people stopped getting married, rejected the establishment, denied their parents legitimate babies and focused on the ‘me’ cult.
Those working at the SMH are second, third generation ‘me’ generation descendants.
Now, I thought you were going to give up politics over Christmas Jody, and here you are in the thick of it again. You can’t help yourself can you?
All I did was pick up my usual copy of “the Australian” to help my husband with the crossword; no more Greg Sheridan or Paul Kelly. Just “Cut and Paste” and Letters and, lo and behold, these horror comments surfaced. I’ve emailed Paul Murray for PM Live tonight on Skynews, but I suspect he’ll have more on his plate with Cory Bernardi threatening to leave the Coalition. Sigh.
Frightbat. I love that!
And what makes her that much more repulsive is that she has very tiny hands which she waves about in her moral certainty and which are out of proportion to her overweight self. Caro really is a repugnant human being. Fancy her raising a daughter who feels sick about having a boy child!!!
I’m yet to figure out why she has a voice on TV
Because she’s big in the teaching profession as some kind of advocate. A good reason NEVER to put your children through the public system; I taught in it and wouldn’t have my own children there!! Many other teachers were of the same disposition.
Caro thinks she’s funny but she’s a shrill ‘frightbat’ who just frightens horses with her bogan-isms and shrill faux enlightened utterances. This is one and the same woman who thought there was nothing wrong with boys using girls toilets at school and vice versa.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again; when the working class educates its children they often become the most shrill, demanding, resentful and entitled people on this planet. It’s like they’re over-compensating because their parents never got the “oppa-choonity”.
Typo first line: ‘As the Neo-Marxists tended to say’ not ‘day’.