View From The Couch - 16/Feb/2016

It's Only Breakfast Television

One of the more bizarre spectacles this week is the saga of Sam Armytage of Sunrise who is beset by some serious sledging from a serious TV journalist (which of course might be an oxymoron but we'll fly by that for now) Virginia Haussegger. It started when Kristin Davis of 'Sex and the City' fame came to speak on behalf of the UNHCR (noble cause that it is ) and somehow ended up in a frivolous skit with Armytage. Which, of crows was so awful it turned into a media thing, and Armytage was canned from her hosting job for the actual lunch where Davis was going to say her serious piece. And out of nowhere came a stinging critique of Armytage's skit, courtesy of Virginia Haussegger whereby she dressed down the breakfast morning host for not being a serious enough human being.

Since then it's been twitter barbs at six paces. I don't get the media fascination with this thing.
The only reason I know it happened is because I read the Haussegger column, which did seem like a reasonable protestation. from the headlines, I've also noted that Armytage thought it was bullying. I wouldn't have put it that way - it is more hectoring than bullying. But then I do wonder just how much you can expect out of a show like Sunrise?

The most depressing thing of all might just be how obsessed the media is about itself. There's a whole world of stuff going out there and we count on the media to be covering it, and what we get instead is this really quite trivial brouhaha that won't come anywhere near solving anything to do with refugees or protecting human rights. It's just this morass of dross, the Sargasso Sea of Stupid.

A Bush In The Hand Is Worse Than Two Stones

Just ask the Iraqis. They just don't want another Bush in the White House.

Hashim al-Bayati, a 62-year-old civil engineer who frequents the cafe most weeks, is relieved it looks unlikely to be another Bush, with Jeb Bush finishing fourth in New Hampshire.

"We are fed up with the Bush family, come on. No more Bushes, please," he said. He recalled George H.W. Bush's "betrayal" when he urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War in 1991 but then did not support them. The death toll reached the tens of thousands. 

"Unfortunately they cheated us," Mr Bayati said, adding George W. Bush was even more damaging in his handling of the fallout from the 2003 invasion. He says he has little faith that any president will improve things for Iraq.

They're probably right. Iraq remains the one big goat that is not going to get un-fucked. What's curious are the voices that do want another Bush:

Mr Ashir feels the biggest mistake of US policy was not the 2003 invasion, but what came after, including the 2011 withdrawal of troops. 

"Obama left Iraq to destruction under the pretext that he doesn't want to be involved in wars, but it's a mission that should be finished," he said. "The Democratic Party didn't do anything for Iraq, at least the Republicans have an obvious policy." 

Hillary Clinton, given her tenure as secretary of state, would be "disastrous" for Iraq, Mr Ashir said. 

But Saad Mohammed Ikabi, 43, sitting a few feet away, disagrees. "She has the experience, she was a minister," he said. "We need someone with experience, and she also has a husband who is an expert." 

In a corner near the windows Mohamed Jobouri Mahdi, with cropped grey hair, wearing a faded brown leather jacket, described her as a "classy lady". 

"But most Iraqis prefer the Republicans rather than the Democrats," said the 51-year-old policeman. "We like the powerful, not the smooth."

I think that's called incorrigible.

View From The Couch - 16/Nov/2015

The Aporia Visited Sam Harris As Well

The recent attacks in Paris had a certain depressing quality that comes with repetition. My own sense of expended aporia has not left me, and yet here I am writing about it because ultimately the more I work towards articulating the problem, then maybe the problem will show itself in at least an outline. Notable today was Sam Harris who had a podcast up, and perhaps unsurprisingly he was making the point that the philosophical points to be made had already been made in response to acts of terror. Indeed, as Harris points out, if people are calling this attack a wake-up call, then they've been missing a lot of things along the way.

While I am not of the atheist persuasion to bang on about the the problem of Islamism and Wahibbism that is is funding the Sunni extremists, I do relate to Sam Harris' position that the Western small-'l' liberal mindset is so effete and navel-gazing, it can't dare name an enemy when it is there; it cannot bring itself to properly brand the enemy for exactly what it is, lest it offend people. I'm not one to be so vocal about this, but if religion is what drives you to do some of this stuff, then there's a problem with your religion.

Yes, it's not exactly a popular thing to say. Neither does it mean we go around pinning the blame on any and every muslim for the events in Paris. Yet it does seem pertinent for the small 'l' liberal people to get up and take notice of the fact that the events in Paris this week, and Charlie Hebdo earlier this year, tells us there are people who would piss upon the values we hold dear, and shit upon our niceties and politesse. These cunts want to kill us all if they could, and maybe, just maybe, we ought to take philosophical note of that.
Just writing that is going to put me at odds with my friends.

A Year On From The Man Monis Thing

Back last year when I was still working with the Events Lighting company, we got this job from the City of Sydney whereby we would install colourful "disco lights" to be shone upon silver sequin fabric flags. The flags would flutter in the wind as they reflected lights like a mirror ball. It was a fabulous idea. Not content with that, there were colourful lights installed everywhere along Martin Place. Then of course on the first week it was up, the Man Monis Lindt Cafe siege happened.

If you go back and look at the news footage of the Monis siege, you can see in the background of the shots where people were running out of the cafe, the changing lights. Early on in the evening, it occurred to the City of Sydney that the disco banner lights were somewhat inappropriate to the unfolding situation. They rang up our office and asked to have it turned off. The Little Tyrant replied,

"I tell you what, if you can find a bullet proof vest, I'll tell you how to turn it off from a phone, far away."

Needless to say, the lights stayed on. The incongruity of the disco banner lights grew as the evening wore on. Eventually the siege was broken that night, but the disco banner lights were there, all night long, adding colour so to speak. Man Monis turned out to be a lone nutter more than a proper jihadist, and we all chalked that one up to the terror threat being over-stated.

Still, a year on, I can't but help think what a fiasco the whole thing was.

The Enemy Isn't Like What You Think

Here's a must read article about the kind of person who ends up in ISIL. It makes for sobering reading because it illuminates the depth of the problem.

For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

So there you have it; the perils of buying into identity politics. Not only that, we can see full well what the dividends are for America's misadventure in Iraq. In a bid to - allegedly - strike at the heart of terror by bringing down Saddam Hussein, thus ending the terror threat of things like 9/11, they turned a whole generation of men in Iraq into exactly the sort of people who become terrorists. Talk about snatching a bomb from the jaws of defeat. There's been nothing more self-defeating than American imperialism in the Middle East.

The Crappiness Of This New War

Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition

The old war of the 21st century, as in 'the Bush-Blair-Howard Misadventures In Iraq', (a.k.a. the Coalition Of The Unwitting Go To A Quagmire For A Bath) was characterised by a one-sided whup-ass of the industrially and technologically inferior Iraqi forces followed by years of door-to-door combat culminating in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. If it was meant to be morally edifying - and war rarely is such a thing - then the 'BBHMII' was a thoroughly miserable travesty in the morality stakes. Then they pinned it on a woman with low IQ and whistled by in their black limos. All  of which reminds us of the tremendous Monty Python sketch. Just as the Inquisitors start with fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, devotion to the Pope and red uniforms and then their claims degenerate in meaning, the 'BBHMII' started with Shock and Awe and eventually ended up with a brawling kind of war, the sort of which nobody could make any sense.

Then there is Guantanamo Bay prison where people are still kept without trial or warrants as somewhere between insane asylum of the 19th century and a torture chamber. Barack Obama came to power in 2008 promising to close the prison but of course it still exists today. One would think that Obama could easily and readily close that damnable institution by releasing all the prisoners with microchips in their skulls. At least the torture ought to end. The fact that it doesn't end is rather emblematic, and we come to realise Frank Zappa wasn't exactly kidding when he sang that Torture Never Stops. Yes, it's all been one long night of the iron sausage for all of us. It's hard to claim any moral ascendancy when what our side is offering is victimhood in a military prison in Cuba.

Now we're about to go back in and do it all over again, mostly because we can find even more moral revulsion in ISIL/ISOR than we could in Saddam Hussein. Not many people in parliament are expressing objections to the deep hypocrisy and great folly in going back to war in Iraq.

What we can deduce from all of this is that there are certain cultural tropes in our leadership and military that go right back to the Dark Ages, and despite our iPhones and internet connectivity and social media and Lady Gaga and Katy Perry freedoms, our leadership in war is ethically no better than the kind of medieval kings. It is no wonder that something claiming to be an Islamic State and a Caliphate becomes our opposite number and promptly started beheading people like this is the Fall of Constantinople, where the Ottomans fired chopped heads out of bronze canons. We are in essence replaying the nightmares of the past because it amuses us as entertainment in the news cycle.

They Think It's A Real Crusade, Not A Metaphorical One

Some weeks go I noticed ion Facebook that a couple of people with whom I went to school had served in Afghanistan (a.k.a 'The Other Crappy War of the 21st Century'). Couple of good old boys from Sydneys North Shore, 'Phil' and 'Potty' doing their bit for the cause of enduring freedom... I mean 'Operation Enduring Freedom'. There they were, one in the ADF as a soldier and the other as a chaplain. They were smiling like they were having a good time, and maybe they were on their boys' own adventure.

The bit that caught my eye was the big crucifix on the collar of the chaplain 'Potty', which got me thinking, was he walking around Kandahar or Kabul or wherever they were stationed in that uniform? Doubtless he was; and it struck me that he was the living walking talking crusader in a nation of Muslims, wearing that dirty big crucifix on his uniform - losing over the hearts that might have just been won over by our good efforts. It's like spending all the good will you're earning on the slot machine of faith.

How could the ADF not looked like a bunch of Crusaders come to the land of the muslims. It got me depressed. I understand that there are many religious people amongst our services and that they would require spiritual guidance in the business of shooting and killing people and still wanting to go to a Christian heaven (and I do mean that with the utmost ironic contempt). I pity the soldiers who would be getting this spiritual guidance from 'Potty' who in his days as a high school kid was about as emotionally evolved as a raging haemorrhoid; but be that as it may, it made me sick to the pit of my stomach that the ADF thought this was worth the effort.

So you can see I am really thrilled and excited about the prospect of sending 'boots on the ground'; and 'Potty' with them, to offer spiritual guidance to our Rampaging Crusading Christian Solders so they can still go through the eye of the needle into a Christian heaven having dispatched a bunch of Islamist Beheading Bastards to Allah. It's a great concept isn't it? When do they get to sack Jerusalem and fill the streets ankle deep in heathen blood? Looking forward to that in the news cycle!

No, really it's appropriate to say Jesus wept.

(Yep,) It's War

As We Go To War Again...

What sucks more? That we're going to send troops back to Iraq again, or that we think it's going to be a long engagement? I'm sick of war, frankly. It's just been this horrible on-going aggravation for well over a decade, we just barely got out of the last fracas - knowing we'd be leaving behind a snake pit in Iraq, and hey presto, that's where we're going back to fight the next one which is a continuation of the last one.

One of the more pernicious things about this Forever War - and yes, it's turning in to exactly that - is that we're not even certain as to why we're fighting it and what we hope to achieve through fighting it. And war is like a corrupting influence on our society that erodes away our freedoms while claiming to protect them; erodes away our compassion when we most need to exercise it; erodes away hope in exchange for an imagined security; and erodes away aesthetics in favour of crude jingoistic symbolisms. And it seeps all over the place like some wretched ill-contained sticky oily fluid. It infects us, it coats us, it taints us.

I'm sick of the khaki and olive green and the grey marl and the bogus epaulettes on clothing. I'm sick of the movies that have good guys sporting military credentials and ranks and insignias. I'm sick of this statist claptrap that masquerades itself as 'security'. The rhetoric of war, the praise of the war dead, the erecting and commemorating of battles and things, are all killing us bit by bit. I'm not some peacenik either. I believe in the proper application of force where necessary but in this instance, I'm failing to see it. ISIL/ISOR are halfway across the planet and are yet to affect Australian interests. Yes, they've called for acts of terror on our soil but seriously, would that necessitate the expenditure we are about to make?

Even allowing for the possibility of it being a 'just war', there's the issue of us having spent the last decade fighting a war that was hardly just or called-for in Iraq. If this war is just now, it's only so because we screwed up Iraq so badly. This is going to be punishing exactly because it is punishment for our previous misdeeds.

Wartime Prime Minister? The Gods Laugh At Thee Abbott

If you asked any voter back in September 2013 as to whether anybody thought the last federal election was going to be about war, I doubt anybody sensible would have said 'yes'. I know Tony Abbott and his government have banged on about a mandate since that election, but I don't really recall the election being such a resounding win for Tony Abbott and the Coalition they could claim a mandate on anything, let alone going to war.

The turn of events that has led to this moment in history is deplorable, and by that I'm not talking about beheadings in the Levant, I'm talking about our idiotic polity. It's not just Tony Abbott or the Coalition, it's the ALP also and the previous governments of all Howard, Rudd, Gillard to boot. While we've been busy navel gazing, we've lost the ability to make mature nuanced decisions. Instead we've allowed ourselves to be led by stupid, simplistic slogans shouted by an eminently stupid sloganeer, and now we're about to send troops all over again to one of the shittiest places on the rump of the Earth.

Doubtless Tony Abbott thinks he's making history but I can assure you that he is more making-it-up-as-he-goes-along. What is going on is a travesty. That's right. Our government has gone from tragedy to comedy to farce, all the way down to unintelligible nonsense. Somewhere along the way, we have allowed people with the worst judgment to lead us into figurative political minefields, and there's no easy crawling out. This is a terrible war to be fighting and by the time when all is said and done, I'm pretty sure Tony Abbott's name will be mud in the history books. If he thinks this war is going to make him as a Prime Minister, I think he's going to be very surprised.

The Glorification Game

Pleiades sent in this article. It's about how militarisation has been creeping into our social fabric for some time. There is this paragraph that I think bears repeating:

Perhaps the most concerning feature of the spreading militarisation is the deliberate targeting of children. Schools across the nation are bombarded with free, professionally developed curriculum material including films, books, CDs and posters. Subsidies are provided for trips to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Essay competitions award winners with fully funded tours of European and Middle Eastern battlefields. There seems to be no reticence among the promoters of war as the defining national experience. They openly canvass the importance of reaching out to children from the earliest years of primary school and seem never to consider that their crusade is closer to propaganda than to pedagogy. And the sanctimony that pervades all treatment of the “fallen” stands in the way of healthy scepticism or dissident interpretations.

It makes you wonder about what we have in Canberra. There are two cultural museums in Canberra - the War Memorial and the Australia Museum. The latter is like the product of political correctness gone wrong. It celebrates things like the Hills Hoist and refrigeration, together with commemorating unknown indigenous people. It's boring and tedious, forced and guilt-trip-enforcing. It's like the creation of leftist academia with an axe to grind about Australia's incontrovertible colonial (and colonial-ist) past. Trust me, I'm a regular pinko, and I found it boring as hell and borderline idiotic.

The War Memorial stands in stark contrast where everything in it is the glorification of war. The entire Australian self-image is constructed around the great conflicts in which Australia was a participant. It's macho, geeky, nerdy, un-apolgetically colonialist, backward-looking, and dripping with repressed homoeroticism. It is in short, just as disturbing as the Australia Museum, except it seems to have become the favourite toy of the sort of conservative you laugh at for wanting to talk about the war all the time. It's a place that shows you how disturbing human affairs are, when you look at it just through the prism of war.

Together they compete to paint a picture of our national identity, coming out of different corners of ideology, talking at cross-purposes and largely astigmatic about the way they come across. Combined, it gives us a fractured view of our polity. One side loves to hate on the white mainstream. The white mainstream just likes war for its own sake because that's the only thing that is given any historic meaning. It explains at once the ineptness of the ALP opposition at stopping us sliding into this war as well as the eagerness and ease with which the Coalition has shoved us back into a war.

On this issue of going to war with ISIL/ISOR, Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek have been utterly useless, with terrible judgment.

It's War (Again)

I'm Away From Blogging For A Week And You Start A War?

Most of the wars since 1901 have been declared one way or another. The ones that weren't tended to be way too short or way too locking in legitimacy to gain popular support. At least this is what history books told you.

This week I found myself asking myself "hang on, did we just go to war? With the Islamic State?" I don't know about you, but it seemed that was exactly what has happened. It was odd that one minute Tony Abbott was going on about raising the terror alert to 'high' and the next thing you know we're sending planes and pilots and military advisers to Iraq, in order to fight the IS.

The ALP took a bipartisan stand against IS, but I don't think they really debated any point before the troops were dispatched. It was almost as if the flurry of activity to send troops and planes and bombs overwhelmed our poor little Prime Minister's head he forgot to actually declare war. Or perhaps it was simply that they do not wish to confer upon ISIS/ISIL/ /Islamic State/The Caliphate (and whatever else it wants to call itself) a proper stately status. And so it is off to war we go.

I don't want to say this too loudly but the whole blogging thing for me started about the time the West decided to go to Iraq in the first place so coming back here to blogger and seeing a war kicking off in Iraq again makes it all 'Deja Vu All Over Again'.

A lot of theories are going around about just what is going on with IS. All the beheadings and mass murder of prisoners hasn't exactly endeared themselves to the world, and the whole propaganda they are running to recruit Islamists to fight with them, is entirely hostile to just about everybody except other violent Islamists. Rumour has it that IS were the Islamists that even Al-Qaeda thought were too hard core. Now they have oil and they're selling the stuff on the black market to the tune of US$2m a day. Statehood can be lucrative if you can get yourself an Iraqi oil well.

Beheadings and mass killings in this day and age really is over the top and harks back to medieval horrors. The fact that they do this on video and post it on YouTube makes you appreciate just how far we haven't come from the year 1014AD. Hence, I understand the urge to go and blast the living daylights out of these savages - using the full savagery of modern weaponry. It just strikes me that this is one of those wars with no proper exit scenario. The other side is wanting a full apocalypse. Go Figure. Indeed, you could easily argue this is Gulf War Phase III and nothing is going to change. We're just up for more expenditure and caskets.

The most irritating thing about all this might be that Tony Abbott is banking on being a war time statesman with all of this stuff, which sits in line with the thought that patriotism is the first refuge of the scoundrel. We can begin to understand the recent budget as a 'pre-emptive' war time budget.

Aftermath Of Abu Ghraib Awfulness

Still Can't Get A Date She Says

If there was one aspect of the Iraq War that stood out as awful, it had to be those photos of Lynndie England holding the leash of Iraqi prisoners who were being humiliated and tortured. The subsequent outcry and trial basically worked out as pinning all the blame on Lynndie England, and in a totally predictable way the US Army tried to make out Lynndie England was the lone-nut/bad-apple of that unit.

It's hard to believe 8years have passed since then, so it took me by surprise that somebody went and found her and interviewed her. Just as predictably with the Army, her responses are mind-numbingly ornery.

"I think about it all the time—indirect deaths that were my fault," England told the Daily's M.L. Nestel in an interview Monday from her hometown of Fort Ashby, West Virginia. "Losing people on our side because of me coming out on a picture."
England makes no apologies, however, to the Iraqis she and ten other U.S. soldiers were accused of abusing at the prison.

Photographs of England smiling with a "thumbs up" gesture in front of a pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees and pulling an Iraqi man by a leash caused international outrage and came to symbolize the ill-fated 2003 U.S. invasion as Iraq plunged into bloody insurgency in 2004. "They weren't innocent," England told Nestel of the Iraqi prisoners. "They're trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them? It's like saying sorry to the enemy."
"They got the better end of the deal," she said.

She also, unsurprisingly, is finding it hard to date, telling Nestel: "It's gone on eight years now since I left Iraq, since I've really been out with a guy."

Not that we expect a great deal from this woman who was once described as being borderline retarded by her former teachers; and yet she sort of shows she's stayed the same simple, village idiot of the US reserves. Somehow it seems to make the issue worse by pinning it all on to this silly woman; but with 8years gone and a prison sentence served and a dishonorable discharge later, who's really asking? None of this was edifying when it was going on, but the more time goes on, the more it seems like the real culprits got away and are laughing at us all from wherever they are.

As stupid as she is, we're the bigger idiots for accepting the verdict that says this woman was responsible for all of it.

Q And A Excerpt

I'm Shocked, Shocked I Tell You

Got a heads up about this today. Check out this transcript for a moment:

TONY JONES: No, I want to see if there’s someone on the panel who might defend Sarah Palin, and let’s go to Malcolm Fraser, first of all.

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, could she become president, yes.

TONY JONES: Well, she could run against Obama and she could theoretically win.

MALCOLM FRASER: Look, European economies fall over the edge. That drags American down again. American economy is going worse, in spite of Obama’s - you know, I’d go to America and vote for him 1000 times and risk prosecution for voting too often to try and keep him there. But if the world economies really go down the hill...

TONY JONES: You didn’t do that when you were in government, did you?

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, it depends who you ask about. But the - it’s not impossible that the Republicans could win next time around. I would have thought that there is a 50 per cent change it should be the Republican nominee and I’m absolutely terrified at the thought.

TONY JONES: Peter Carey...

MALCOLM FRASER: It would be a madness for everyone.

Wow. I know people who swear they thought Malcolm Fraser was the devil and a fascist way back when he was in power, all over that 1975 Dismissal thing, but the same people are now shocked to hear how attuned Malcolm Fraser is to their current points of view. I know he'd mellowed and found himself at odds with John Howard, but this is quite a shock.

Then, there's this bit, which really had tongues wagging today:

TONY JONES: All right, let’s hear from Peter.

PETER CAREY: I keep on thinking about the role of the medial generally in this and how the media is always so continually hysterical about people lying and not telling the truth. And if I really think there’s a big problem in our society today, it’s that the media is not telling the truth to people and they know what it is. If you really want to know what’s happening the world, you go out and get drunk with journalists and they will tell you what isn’t in the papers. So they’re living - these guys are living every day with the reality of a proprietor, say, or a corporation who owns them will not permit them to tell what they know to be true. So, okay, this guy lied. He’s not a good person because he did it but I think the hysteria is about a bigger, bigger issue, which is we are not being honestly reported to. And if there was, you know, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction but...

MALCOLM FRASER: But they knew he didn’t.

PETER CAREY: Yeah.

TONY JONES: They knew he didn’t, you say?

MALCOLM FRASER: Yes.

PETER CAREY: Yes.

TONY JONES: You mean the Howard Government knew he didn’t?

MALCOLM FRASER: It should have. I think the British Government did, the American Government did and the Australian Government should have.

TONY JONES: Okay. Well, I could pursue that for quite a while but we actually have a question in the audience. In fact, it’s directed specifically to Malcolm Turnbull(sic). It comes from Paul Sherrington. Malcolm Fraser, I beg your pardon. Did I say Malcolm Turnbull? I’m so sorry.

MALCOLM FRASER: You just took 30 years off my life.

You get the picture. Tony Jones was so flustered by the assertion by Malcolm Fraser that the Anglophone governments of USA, Britain and Australia knew there were no WMDs in Iraq prior to going in, that he called Fraser Turnbull - but think on that remark by Malcolm Fraser for  a moment. No WMDs. John Howard knew, and in Malcolm Fraser's opinion, he should have known better. No WMDs.

UPDATE: Malcolm Fraser Quits Liberal Party

Over night, we find that Malcolm Fraser in fact quit the Liberal Party.

Former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser has quit the party, allegedly over a belief it has tilted too far to the right.

Mr Fraser resigned in December, shortly after Malcolm Turnbull was turfed as opposition leader over his support for emissions trading, The Australian Financial Review reported.

He allegedly told friends his replacement, Tony Abbott, was "all over the place" on policy and disliked the racist overtones adopted by the party in the debate on immigration.

Mr Fraser, the prime minister from 1975 to 1983, confirmed his decision to quit yesterday, saying the party was no longer a liberal party but a conservative party.

Although he failed to elaborate, he has recently been critical of the coalition in the media, particularly over its stance on the Israeli passports affair.

He has previously criticised the Liberal party for becoming one of "fear and reaction" and says it is now unrecognisable as the party he joined more than 50 years ago.

The Australian Financial Review says his final decision to quit was made after he became increasingly concerned with the conservative direction of the party.

I'm still shocked, shocked I tell you! Isn't that like Ronald Reagan quitting the Republicans if only he were alive? Or Margaret Thatcher quitting the Conservatives if only she still had a mind? Jeebus Creepus. The Libs have tilted far to the right if Malcolm Fraser can't abide it any more.