Courtesy, Michael Leunig

It's hard to see how the John Howard Party will ever get Kevin Rudd's measure. Rudd is too quick and incisive to come up stuttering when attacked by pompous, sycophantic fop, Little Lord Downer, or Peter "The Jerk" Costello, or Tony "I'm God and you're not" Abbott. As for Howard, his repertoire of passive-aggressive gobbledygook is already starting to wear thin. Increasingly, his rejoinders will sound like a talking robot suffering from part failure.

Here are a couple of encounters from this week's question time. First, ABC's PM Howard holds firm on Iraq:

KEVIN RUDD: "I refer to the report of the Iraq Study Group, headed by former US secretary of state, James Baker, which concludes that: 'current US policy is not working. Making no changes in policy would simply delay the day of reckoning at a high cost'. Does the Prime Minister agree that current Coalition strategy in Iraq has failed?"

JOHN HOWARD: "A premature American departure from Iraq would almost certainly produce greater sectarian violence and further deterioration of conditions, leading to a number of the adverse consequences outlined [in the report]. The near term results would be a significant power vacuum, greater human suffering, regional destabilisation and a threat to the global economy. Al-Qaeda would depict our withdrawal as historic victory. If we leave and Iraq descends into chaos, the long-range consequences could eventually require the United States to return. Now, they're not my words or Alexander Downer's words, they are the words of James Baker and Lee Hamilton, a bipartisan commission of inquiry."

[Garkle note: Not only did he fail to answer the question, but he fails to see that Al-Qaeda has already won the war, and that the present chaos is a direct result of the invasion.]

KEVIN RUDD: "Further to my … previous questions to the Prime Minister, why is the Prime Minister the only world leader who refuses to accept that current Coalition policy in Iraq is not working?"

JOHN HOWARD: "Mr Speaker, I've indicated on numerous occasion that I wish the operations ... were going differently. And I have said repeatedly that there is a case for reworking some of the tactics, Mr Speaker. But the fundamental, the fundamental position ... is that the Government is starkly different. What the Opposition wants is a course of action in Iraq which would produce the very bloodbath and descent into further disaster ..."

And then … From Michelle Grattan: Rampant Rudd

KEVIN RUDD: "How can the Government claim to be a supporter of family values when Australian detention centres have been used to lock up Australian kids?"

JOHN HOWARD: "That is the equivalent of saying that anybody who suffers any kind of injury while in a state prison, incarcerated under the laws of the state, means that the state government is insensitive to the family values of the prisoner who has been injured."

KEVIN RUDD: "Prime Minister, why do you take responsibility for any positive news that happens in this country? ... why do you fail to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong and always blame someone else?"

JOHN HOWARD: "I don't."

Oh, but you do, little man. And you're time is nearly up. The "flour overboard" scandal is just another in a long line of your nasty abuse of power for political ends. But even those of us who have, from the beginning, correctly judged you as the evil homunculus who became Australia's worst ever prime minister, even we will be gobsmacked beyond belief when the sum total of your heinous crimes against Australia and humanity are finally revealed.

-- Olney Garkle