The Adelaide Advertiser – I rag that I despise even more than the others – has recently reported:
Howard bowls a bitter pill for Aussie Trump-lovers
The man many call Australia’s greatest PM had some words last week that both right and left wingers should hear, writes David Penberthy.
Source: The Advertiser, 14 September 2024, paywalled.
Howard Australia’s greatest PM? Well, he is a candidate. Of course, Stephen Bradbury won gold in ice skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics, when all of his competitors fell over.
Howard has said that he would not vote for Trump. Which begs the questions – who would he vote for? And what will become of the USA if Trump’s opponent wins in November?
Howard’s latest contribution should come as no surprise. In 2023, he said that Trump wasn’t “fit” for the presidency.
Source: The Australian, 6 October 2023, paywalled.
I think John Howard is fighting the last war, literally. Howard has yet to apologise for Iraq and for being George W Bush’s deputy sheriff. It is only a couple of weeks since Dick Cheney lined up for Kamelot. Cheney is a neocon survivor of the never-ending wars of the 2000s and of the surveillance state that he and Donald Rumsfeld initiated, the very week after 9/11. Think the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. Not to mention the bioweapons industrial complex that delivered Covid. And the military industrial complex that delivered Ukraine. Every single time you are held up at security at any airport, think of Dick Cheney. John Howard is lucky. In Britain, Tony Blair is known as a war criminal.
(Then, come to think of it, it was the (still unapologetic) Liberal Party that directly caused the deaths of countless thousands of our own people during Covid).
Former Liberal and Covid hero Gerard Rennick has weighed in:
I’ve heard Howard criticize Trump a few times now. Makes you wonder whose side this guy is on. He sounds more and more like a globalist everyday.
Trump isn’t the first Presidential candidate to complain about losing an election.
Both Hillary Clinton and Al Gore complained about their losses as well.
Of course the media were on the side of Clinton and Gore so that was okay.
Howard misses a key point about the election result and that is whether or not the election was conducted fairly.
While it’s impossible to judge from the other side of the world, no one could argue the 2am spike in the Democrat vote was worthy of scrutiny.
As that scrutiny was about to take place the doors of Congress were opened to the Jan 6 protesters preventing such scrutiny from taking place.
We do know that the Trump-Russian collusion story was a hoax perpetrated by none other than the CIA themselves and Howard’s own Foreign Affairs Minster Alexander Downer.
Source: Gerard Rennick’s Telegram channel, 17 September 2024
All true enough.
Howard’s hovering over the 6 January fake imbroglio misses the point. The Wuhan Flu caused an already flawed US electoral system, riddled with opportunities for corruption before 2020, to be a steal via the agency of mail in ballots. Umpires’ decisions don’t really come into it. Like the late Darcy Lawler, the apparently crooked rugby league referee of the 1960s, who (arguably) caused Western Suburbs to lose a Sydney grand final, since he was alleged to have “backed St George”, the Umpire went missing in 2020 in America. What Umpire, in any case? US elections are referee-free events.
There is another sense in which Howard is fighting the last war. He perhaps hasn’t caught up with the fact that we are now in the era of post-modern politics, of legacy parties, of the UniParty, of the replacement of left versus right by elites versus outsider/insurgents. Or perhaps Howard knows all this but sticks to the establishment model of Australian liberalism – hardly conservatism – that (among other things) butchered his heir apparent, Tony Abbott.
Trump is part of a world that has delivered as his opponents Hillary Clinton, a crook, Joe Biden, another crook with dementia and with his hand hovering over the nuclear button, and Kamala, the wine mom of America. The progressivist robot. This is not Politics 1.0, John. Our era is one of great resets, of plandemics, of elite-led revolution, of corporatist rule, of stakeholder fascism, of almost monthly assassination attempts, probably orchestrated by the deep state, of fifth gen (hybrid) warfare waged by governments against their own people, of the tech-driven panopticon. A brave new world. 1984. The politics of the para-normal.
None of this is to give Trump a pass on his first term.
God, no. Perhaps Howard, he of the battlers, might have honed in on Trump’s massive Covid failures. But that would never occur. Given that Howard is the godfather of the Liberal Party, perhaps he might have, at some point, have done a Perrottet and admitted that “mistakes were made” in relation to the Covid tyranny, on his beloved Party’s watch. I am not aware of any such admission. John Howard has memory-holed it all.
The current Trump haters have honed in on his recent interactions with one Laura Loomer. She of the alt-right “conspiracy theorists”.
Those who maintain the faith in Trump will be reassured that he is listening to alternate voices, at last. The big problem with his first term as that he listened to the wrong people in the clinch moments. Like his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a Bilderberger and globalist. Not to mention Fauci and Deborah Birx.
https://expose-news.com/2024/09/18/the-faces-names-150-bilderbergers-who-controlled-covid-response/
Some have called Kushner the Anti-Christ, possibly overstating the problem. That is another story. Kushner was placed in charge of Operation Warp Speed. Trump’s big mistake. This time around, Trump’s key advisers seem to be much more attuned to the big challenge. Look at Tulsi Gabbard, J D Vance and RFK Jr. Last time, his advisers were often part of the problem. Scott Atlas has written a book on the whole mess.
https://stanfordreview.org/a-plague-upon-our-house-by-scott-atlas-book-review/
While Howard doesn’t go into these issues, I am guessing that he would be appalled at the Loomer connection. And that this would only confirm his views of Trump.
Howard is part of the brigade that always insists on scoring points with the left and the non-aligned every so often by (surprisingly) distancing himself from his peers on some policy issue or personality. The “conservative” journalist Greg Sheridan (of The Australian) is another exemplar of the type.
Howard operated in an entirely different political world. The rules then no longer obtain. His latest intervention is further evidence for the general rule that yesterday’s politicians, who delivered plenty of their own misery to our doorsteps when in office, should go far away upon retirement, and be neither seen nor heard further.
Trump alone among the candidates for the US Presidency this year – okay, let us add RFK Jr since he is still on the ballot in non-sing states – knows the war he is in, and is on the right side. John Winston Howard notwithstanding.
Oh, for the record, I wished that Ben Carson had been the Republican candidate in 2016, and Ron DeSantis in 2024, for a range of reasons. But I wouldn’t be voting for anyone but Trump now, absent RFK Jr.
Paul Collits
18 September 2024
Howard must take plenty of blame for the state of the country post 2006. If he'd handed over to Costello and hadn't been crazed for power like all of his ilk, I doubt silly Kevvy would ever have been elected or the clown world that followed, ensued.
He also had the chance to shut down the wicked "Family Courts" aka involuntary divorce regime but capitulated to the legal vultures, of which of course he was one. Child stealing is a massive industry and our learned friends weren't going to let that revenue stream slip away without a fight.
Brilliant - Howard just lapped up the neo Con nonsense- he's not even half way to the light side. The contrast with Blair is a good one- I think the difference is the left felt totally betrayed - but now the left stands right behind all the same neo con philosophy - how did that come about!
Not to forget Howard told everyone in the Liberal Party to support Turnball! He should be condemned on that count forever. That's more than being tone deaf.
And spot on re Sherridan. He's still banging on about the China threat and drumming for the war in the Ukraine
The whole Liberal Party needs to spend a weekend with Ron Paul! He might be able to knock some sense into them!