Today's odd little furore is this thing here where one Michael Lawler used the term 'cunt-struck', on Four Corners.
The offending phrase occurred towards the end of a bizarre and damning program examining the relationship between former Health Services Union boss Kathy Jackson and Lawler.
"I'll be characterised as that scumbag, crook, fraudster, and, at the very best, somebody who's been bewitched by an evil harridan, namely Kathy [Jackson]," Lawler told Caro Meldrum-Hanna.
"That I'm cunt-struck and that I have been utterly taken in by somebody who's a serious crook," he said.
One person who has been intimately involved in the case from the start reportedly turned to his partner in disbelief and said, 'Tell me he just said 'dumbstruck'."
Ha. No, he did not say dumbstruck at all; and so the wowsers went into top gear and you could hear the whine from where I was down in Kingsgrove. The Macquarie definition for cunt-struck seems to miss the mark as well. It's not that the person who is cunt-struck is "infatuated with a woman", it is the fact that the act of sexual congress with a specific woman has altered their perceptions of reality around them in such a way as to benefit that woman's perspective completely.
Amazingly there's somebody there who claims to not have heard the term before. I remember when I first heard it - it wasn't long after the film 'Starstruck' came out in the 1980s. Yes, that's right, I heard it way back then, so some of these people really are sheltered. It is a mental state that I have catalogued as one to avoid, but it does make you less pliable in a relationship, and people start referring to you as an evil cynic.
Just as an aside, I heard a term with which I wasn't familiar, just this last weekend when people were discussing the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' auto-generator. The term was 'Cock Snot'. I'd never heard that term before so I guess I'm pretty sheltered too.
The Perils Of Student Politicians
While we're on the topic of Kathy Jackson, Pleiades sent in an article from Crikey penned by Guy Rundle. It appears Mr. Rundle is very familiar with the student politician career of Kathy Jackson.
I'm going to be a little naughty and quote a big chunk:
That’s the real story behind the Jackson disaster, and the Craig Thomson affair that preceded it: the utter decadence, the real moral squalor that has infected sections of the Labor Party Right, and that other sections of the Right have failed to address with any seriousness. This moral decline has deep roots and complex causes, but part of it comes down to the collapse of a genuine Right/Left conflict within the party in the 1980s. The factions remained, but the real differences that had made them a rational form of political organisation had vanished. So the Right, always bound up with capital to a greater degree, simply became a machine without content. The unions that formed its base had been steadily amalgamated into super-unions with a dissolved relation to the particular occupations and workers they represented. In the years of full arbitration and centralised wages fixing, they had relatively little scope to make their own deals. When enterprise bargaining took over from awards-and-demarcation system, workers got the worst of both worlds from such unions: they were quasi state-apparatuses, laced into state power to administer labour, and they had a free hand to make deals with major employers. Their heads and officers came not from the floor, but overwhelmingly from student politics, as the first post-student step in a political career. The distance between leaders and led in right-wing Australian unions, always wide, became cavernous. There appears to have developed a real contempt and disdain for the people they represented.
In the case of the HSU, that disdain is sickening, utterly disgusting. All workers deserve to be properly represented, but there must be a special circle of hell for someone who whacks the plastic to the tune of $1 million-plus from the people who do the grunt work on basic wages, looking after those with chronic illnesses, cancers, and all that flesh is heir to -- work that often demands, even from those furthest from actual medical intervention, a bit or a lot more than many others are asked to give in their jobs. To represent such people should be a privilege and an honour, the cornerstone of a meaningful life. To turn it into a freeloaders’ picnic is not the only example of the decadent and diminished place the Labor Right has come to, but it’s one of the most visible. This is more than just taking a bit off the top. This is the betrayal of a membership -- and of a wider political movement. Labor is soft at the centre because the Right is soft at the centre, a quagmire made by two decades of the cynical politicking and character deformation of which Jackson is an example.
Goodness, look at the density of that text and deep conviction in denouncing Jackson. It sure saps credibility from the union movement, and by extension the ALP and Bill Shorten. It's not just a scandal, it's a fiasco and imbroglio, all rolled into one
Who The Hell Is Heffernan Talking About?
Mr. Fake Pipe Bomb himself, Bill Heffernan thinks that a former PM might be a pedophile. He's just not telling us which one. I know we've had 5 in 5 years, but the living PMs only go so far back to Bob Hawke. realistically, for what he's talking about to matter, he's talking about Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott and Turnbull.
A former Australian prime minister is on a list of "alleged paedophiles" that Liberal senator Bill Heffernan claims forms part of a police document.
Senator Heffernan used a Senate estimates committee hearing on Tuesday to discuss the list of 28 people, which he said formed part of police documents that had been "signed off" by Gary Crooke, QC, the former senior counsel assisting NSW's Wood royal commission into police corruption in the 1990s.
Many of the people on the list and otherwise named in the documents were "prominent", including a former prime minister, he said: "They were delivered to me by a police agency some time ago because no one seems to want to deal with them."
Every Commonwealth attorney-general since Philip Ruddock had seen the list, Senator Heffernan said.
You could rule out Abbott & Turnbull because they're too recent to fit the description. You can also rule out Howard because Heffernan is a partisan come hell or high water. That leaves the ALP Prime Ministers, of who, you could probably safely rule out Gillard on the grounds that she is a woman, she too is fairly recent, and she's not a NSW politician. That kind of puts the spotlight on Hawke, Keating and Rudd, and again maybe Rudd is too recent, and he too isn't from NSW.
It's some crazy shit we're even discussing it, and really you suspect Heffernan is flinging mud only because he's protected by parliamentary privilege. That being said, long time readers might recall that years ago, Bob Collins was revealed to have been a pedophile and rapist after he committed suicide. Since then I've taken the view that one shouldn't be surprised by anything that comes to light.
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