Sunday, February 26, 2017

Auntie Poppy Syndrome

If you were an aging baby boomer and, while still young and tender, had the misfortune to have in the family a dotty old aunt who had one too many bees in her bonnet for her own or your good, and who repeated, mantra-fashion, in year ear, the injunction to never forget that the Jews are God's chosen people, you may - perish the thought - contingent on the onset of some kind of developmental delay, have ended up as the foreign editor of Murdoch's Australian, projectile-vomiting such dark green prose as the following:

"What a caterwauling coven of craven zeitgeist whisperers they are - Bob Hawke, Kevin Rudd and Gareth Evans - calling for Australia to formally recognise a Palestinian state, the three of them like the witches of Macbeth intoning sterile incantations; in this case not with the purpose of affecting reality but rather to signal once again their sublime and ineffable virtue." (ALP's three amigos only invite ridicule by maligning Israel, Greg Sheridan, 25/2/17)

I, therefore, nominate what I call 'Auntie Poppy Syndrome' (after Sheridan's Auntie Poppy, as described on page 22 of his 2015 memoir When We Were Young & Foolish: A Memoir of My Misguided Youth with Tony Abbott, Bob Carr, Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd & Other Reprobates) for inclusion in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

3 comments:

Grappler said...

Off-topic, MERC, if only because I can't bear to think about the nauseating love-fest between Netanyahu and our political so-called "leaders".

This seems to have broken in the last few days:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australia-wanted-bigger-united-nations-role-in-postsaddam-iraq-declassified-report-reveals-20170224-gukyes.html

Here is another version:

http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2017/iraq-dossier/

It is getting some attention in the media (rt.com for instance). Nothing surprising in it but this highlighted comment in the second version is scary:

"No one in the Coalition realised the war with Saddam was nothing more than a prequel."

apparently on page 262 of the report. Can anyone find the source online?

MERC said...

Thanks for that, G, it's definitely on my reading list, but The Australian in particular has devoted so much coverage to the Trumble-Netanyahu lovefest, and it is so revealing of Australia's 'deep state' and our complete isolation from the rest of planet Earth - that quote of Leibler's says it all - that it'll have to wait. Politically, with Yahoo's visit, we have plumbed the kind of depths Jules Verne could never have imagined.

Ashley said...

Grappler, the dossier is available at the bottom of your second link, or here directly:

http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2017/pdfview/ViewerJS/#../The_Australian_Army_in_Iraq.pdf