Day after day John Howard's ministers insult the intelligence of Australians with their boofheaded pronouncements.

Overboard again

Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews has stepped into Peter Reith's ugly shoes by claiming that the latest boatpeople (83 Sri Lankans and two Indonesians) deliberately "sabotaged the engine and hull of their boat" shortly after the vessel had been repaired by crew members from the Australian navy's HMAS Success.

Of course the repairs were done, not to save lives, but to get the boat back into international waters and away from God's Own Australia.

"They [HMAS Success] again approached the vessel and found more damage had been done to the engine or the engines of the vessel, and there was also further damage which had been made to the hull of the vessel," Mr Andrews said.

We'll just have to wait and see on this one, but like the claims of "children overboard" it defies common sense that these boatpeople would intentionally jeopardise their lives in this manner.

The point is: never trust the word of a Howard Government minister.

Meanwhile, the government has " struck a secret deal with Jakarta and Colombo to send the asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka via Indonesia. The policy would be an even more hardline approach than the Howard Government's Pacific solution."

Will the inhumanity of this treacherous government never end?

Brendan Nelson is the King of Fools

First, a couple of cartoons:

Courtesy Peter Nicholson and The Australian

Courtesy Bill Leak and The Australian

Not one person in this wide brown land would agree with Defence Minister Brendan Nelson's "Iraq is Kokoda" outburst. On the subject, Bruce H. Copping wrote to The Age:

[Nelson's] statement drawing a parallel between the courage of Australian defence forces on the bloody Kokoda Trail and his Government's involvement in the invasion of Iraq on the pretext of WMD is an insult to those men who fought and gave their lives in defence of this country. Nelson should resign."

But no one who works for John Howard ever resigns. They can say and do whatever they like and he'll stand by them. Why? Because he believes he lives in a big invisible castle high on big invisible mountain, where no one he doesn't like can ever touch him. And all his ministers believe they live there too because, after all these years, no one ever has touched him. Or them. Why? Because every once in a while they dump a bucketload of trinkets out the castle's towers for the subjects who live way down below. For John Howard and his ministers, the last eleven years must be like living in the storybooks they never grew out of.

For Australians, the subjects way down below, John Howard's reign is like living in a cashed up version of the Dark Ages. Lots of New! Improved! gruel in a moral wasteland.

-- Olney Garkle