These twin evils of sore losing and sore winning can even tell us something about democracy. To make a democracy work, you need to be able to throw those in power out peacefully, whatever sort of job they’ve been doing. And you need them to leave without being sore losers.

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With the next federal election almost certainly less than 18 months away, the Coalition parties face a difficult task. One of the big questions will be, as the economy declines, whether or not today’s more media savvy electorate will see through what will be, most certainly, a very dense fog of Labor and media spin.

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For Obama, Brown and Rudd, I can see there has been no pain in choosing the big spending, high deficit options they have chosen. It’s no doubt lovely when the actions they are compelled to take by the prevailing theory happen to coincide with the very things they would like to do as political leaders.

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There was Elmer Fudd, in the bath, pulling out the plug. The bath water (the nation’s treasure), was gurgling down the plug-hole, and all Elmer could say was that it was “only temporary” and the bath would be full again by 2015.

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On Rudd’s cash handouts: “It is a budgetary matter. Some people, including many recipients of today’s handouts, will pay a little more tax in later years, or suffer a little from the RBA allowing government a little more inflation to make discharge of debt easier.”

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It is the timeworn role of governments to pick losers. It is what governments can be expected to do for which they have had much practice. I cannot think why they should be encouraged further along this road than they have already gone.

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Hal Colebatch shows how a superannuated defender of mass murder has been wheeled out to applaud - Kevin Rudd.

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As I walked in, I was greeted with the sight of a rubber model of 15 kilos of fat and two pleasant ladies who appeared to be in charge. I was handed over to a man who was going to be my personal weight-loss consultant. He was a cheerful man.

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John Howard, who out rates Rudd with the number of YouTube sites, by 16 to 1, does so by the sheer number of nasty clips produced prior to the last election. For the rabid anti-Howard clique, he must be sorely missed.

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The Prime Minister has no skills as an entrepreneur. None. He has no personal judgement about what will create value and what will not. He may be able to lead a government, he may be able to hobnob with the great and the good, but what he cannot do is work out what sorts of things will add to economic growth and what will not.

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