Lo! Rupert has spoken

THE Great Cham has spoken. Citizen Murdoch has announced it's OK by him for John Dubya Howard to make an elegant exit from the prime ministership any time soon. "He's probably planning to go out on the top," Rupert confided to an ABC reporter who fronted him at Wednesday's state dinner for Howard at the White House. "I'd like to see him stay, but he's had 10 years there and it's a record. He's on top of his form, and much better to go out that way than like Margaret Thatcher, or losing an election."

So that's that, then. All fixed, deal done. Chestnut hair bouffant and glowing in the TV lights, the raddled old mogul was doing something he greatly enjoys: instructing politicians on their exits and their entrances. He knew precisely what effect this prognostication would have in his former homeland. His obedient claque of News Ltd pundits will now turn as one, like a shoal of whitebait, to proceed in the direction indicated.


(snip)
The bands played, the flags flew, the guns went off and the mutual schmooze flowed like molten lava, but unless there was something interesting we haven't been told - a secret Oval Office pact to eventually bomb Iran, say - it was froth and tinsel. There was a surreal air to the carryings-on, as if Howard and Bush were travelling in some parallel universe. Here was this nincompoop President, his domestic popularity at a record low and his global credibility in shreds, pathetically, embarrassingly eager to wallow in the fulsome praise showered upon him by his dear friend.

The word "courage" was tossed around like confetti. "Firm leadership … the liberty agenda … sense of optimism" - you'd have thought the Iraq war had brought some tremendous Churchillian victory rather than the endless quagmire it has become. Perhaps the best appraisal of this circus came from the mainstream US media who, apart from a few gossip paragraphs, barely noticed a thing.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/lo-rupert-has-spoken/2006/05/19/1147545523222.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

How can people fail to notice how out of touch with reality these incompetent, vile policy clams are?