from Crikey ….. 

Mr Howard goes to Wasington

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes: 

Having been abandoned by the Australian electorate, his own constituents and, finally, by his own party, John Howard has had to retreat to the United States to find a sanctuary from where he can defend his record.  

For his Irving Kristol Award, Mr Howard received an elegant glass salad bowl. Given the way Kristol bounced around the ideological spectrum over the decades, one would expect it to toss the salad by itself.

Whatever, it should look lovely on the sideboard at Wollstonecraft, or perhaps among the lunch things on the table outside when he and Janette next holiday at Hawks Nest.  

But one suspects that the American Enterprise Institute – think of the Institute of Public Affairs, though bigger and minus the milk of human kindness that flows like a river through the IPA – has been duped in thinking Howard merited an award for "exceptional intellectual or practical contributions to improved government policy, social welfare, or political understanding."  

Even in the rambling lecture Howard gave to his hosts – amongst whom numbered a rogues’ gallery of neo-con duds like convicted perjurer Scooter Libby, disgraced World Banker Paul Wolfowitz and failed UN ambassador John Bolton – he couldn’t avoid dealing with a number of areas where his record isn’t quite what the rugged individualists at the AEI would like to believe.  

Howard professed to be "disappointed that Australia's battle group will be withdrawing from southern Iraq in June..."  This presumably will come as a surprise to Andrew Robb, who supported the withdrawal when it was announced in February and said that Howard himself had been planning it for 2008 and had told his American friends about it.  

He also spoke about cutting taxes and running surpluses. Doubtless he was hoping his hosts weren’t aware that his was the biggest taxing, biggest spending government in Australian history, which died vomiting cash to every interest group it thought could be bribed for support.  

His comments about avoiding regulation were probably best not considered in the light of his efforts in broadcasting, pharmacy, newsagents or anywhere else where competition threatened his Government’s mates.  

And global warming is apparently "a new battleground" with "bullying and moralising." It’s only a few months since Howard assured us during his election debate with Rudd that he accepted the human role in climate change and that he was bent on doing something about it.  

Defeat doesn’t appear to have agreed with Howard.

Perhaps, deep in the bowels of Parliament House, there’s a Dorian Gray-style portrait of him. Now that the spell has been broken, the picture has reverted to the Howard with hair, black-rimmed specs and bad teeth, and the man himself has started decaying before our very eyes. 

There’s something pathetic about his preaching to his last remaining mates. It must infuriate him that Australia has so quickly moved on from him, and taken most of his former colleagues with it, leaving him to look like a relic from another age.

But as Paul Keating would tell him, there’s nothing so ex as an ex-Prime Minister.  

from elsewhere ….. 

Rundle: John Howard no zipless f-ck 

In Houston, Guy Rundle writes: 

Social psychologists have long noted that a rise in fear of flying – a paradoxical result as flying has become more of a routine event in everyday life and many people become accustomed to it.

Subsequent investigation found that frequent flying was the reason, as sudden panic attacks had a significant correlation to the nature of the trip.

As half the office-serf class flies around the country doing powerpoint presentations of the new wet wipes campaign ads to bored execs in Tucson, the thought that there is an infinitesimal chance that one might die screaming doing this, plunging to earth in a silver tube of death, tends to play on the mind a whole lot more than it does if you're flying to your sick mother's bedside. It's not the risk of death, it's the risk of futile, meaningless death that looses people's screws.  

All of which is an explanation of why I did not go to John Howard's speech in Washington DC on Wednesday. It would have been a longshot anyway, but even had there been time it seemed to me that to go plunging earthwards somewhere over Kansas, on the way to voluntarily listen to an entire John Howard speech would have been just too much.

That final descent would have been longer than my whole life to date, and unraveled it entirely, the sole consolation of dying en route to hear John Howard speak being that you would not actually have to hear John Howard speak.  

In the end as the slavering record in The Oz demonstrated, it was the man at his best – laying the boredom like shagpile carpet, reporting back to head office.

The speech was for winning the Irving Kristol Award, named after the co-called intellectual godfather of the neocons, partly responsible for taking an isolationist American right off on the frolicsome and disastrous adventures of military intervention and the idea that the world could be turned into a giant shopping-mall.

Personal reflections on 10 years in power? Some reflection on changing conservative beliefs, etc etc?

No it was boilerplate. 

But the most interesting – the interesting - thing was that his take on the culture wars, noting that: 

• Those who hold to conservative values continue to face a major ideological battle.
• The left liberal grip on educational institutions and large, though not all, sections of the media remains intense.

What? So did they win the culture wars or didn't they? This is bad news. Janet Albrechtsen will be crying over one of those strange amateur-theatre-productions-of-Cabaret outfits she favours. 

It's entirely appropriate that Howard should be speaking to American Enterprise Institute as his first outing because much of his premiership involved a projection onto Australia of a quite different "culture wars" that occupied America through the 1990s.

To the degree that the American culture wars weren't themselves over-rated, they arose from the sharply different directions that two parts of America took – the coasts into sectoral prosperity based on the information society and the new economy, with a social liberalism and identity politics arising from it, the middle of the country into slow decline, and a resort to traditional values of increasing literalness. 

Nothing in Australia has compared to the two decades long fight in the US over abortion, or the belief by a good 30% of the population that they effectively been subject to a judicial coup in the matter of Roe vs Wade. In Australia, the abortion question has been settled in favour of pro-choice for decades, and won't budge.

If there was a cultural war on that, then liberals won it a long time ago.

Ditto on a whole lot of issues, from no-fault divorce, censorship, sexual liberation, prison sentences, etc etc. In many of the areas where the US cultural wars have been most furiously fought over – gay marriage for example – have never really raised themselves to the issue of cause celebres over here.

To the frustration of some gay activists, the Australian gay community has never really elevated same-sex marriage to the status of the on-the-streets campaign, full test of liberty, as occurred in the US.

The roots of the American culture wars go all the way back to the country's founding by a movement that was half-Puritan fervour and half-Enlightenment liberalism – nothing like that ever happened in Australia.

We are founded on improvisation and ideas of practicality. And that really goes to the heart of John Howard's reputation as the "greatest prime minister/worst prime minister" debate – prior to any question of that, what has to be asked is – what did the man fundamentally change, or put beyond change?

His IR stuff is gone, the apology has been made, Iraq withdrawal has been announced, the new history syllabus is a dead-letter – and if Rudd keeps his word, the republic question will return again in his virtually certain second-term (made that much easier by the fact that no-one actually seems to want to be the Liberal party at the moment).

Howard will surely go down in history not as a Thatcher-style conservative agenda setter, but simply as a delayer, a ten-year obstruction.

He never managed to convince the majority that the republic was a bad idea – he simply split the vote with a slick trick, putting it off for a few years.

Armed with a chorus of conservatives calling for a different approach to aboriginal social problems, he pretty much left the existing system in place for 10 years, starved it of funding, and then used radical change as an election wedge at five minutes to midnight. 

But that shouldn't be a surprise – for a movement that comes down relentlessly on identity politics, Howard style conservatism was all that - obsessed with questions of blame, guilt, the verdict of history, the frikkin Don, etc etc etc.  

The left loses when it overreaches itself, when it forgets that it is in fact forcing the march of history. Conservatism – American and Australian – stuffs up when it starts to believe its own line that it actually and perfectly represents the silent majority.

American conservatism is in such a dire way it could have used a wake-up call from a friendly stranger. Instead it got another cup of Horlicks. Normal service resumes next week. Nothing happened, except some dude set off a bomb outside a military recruiting centre in Times Square.

For a primaries debate update read any previous column. 

with the coupe-de-gras …..   

The Libs' albatross goes to Washington to roost 

Jeff Sparrow writes: 

That flapping, squawking noise coming out of Washington is the sound of an enormous albatross tying himself around the neck of the Liberal Party. 

When John Howard chose to break his post-election silence, he did so, bizarrely enough, at the American Enterprise Institute, the Taj Mahal of neo-con wingnuttery.  

As Glenn Greenwald explained in 2006: ... the American Enterprise Institute sits in the innermost belly of the neoconservative beast, boasting a list of resident "Scholars and Fellows" that includes Richard Perle, David Frum, Michael Ledeen, John Yoo, and Laurie Mylorie (who "has theorized that al Qaeda is an agency of Iraqi intelligence, that Saddam Hussein was behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center, and that Iraqi intelligence was linked to Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols").

Paul Wolfowitz and Irving Kristol, among many other similar Middle East warmongering types, are former AEI "resident scholars," and Lynne Cheney is still an active "Fellow" … 

The AEI's current wish list features, at the very top, a military attack on Iran, followed by such subsidiary enabling measures as prosecuting journalists, strengthening domestic surveillance programs still further, and a reflexive defense of Israel as the highest imperative. 

Not surprisingly, the Institute has long been in the vanguard of climate change denialism.  

In 2007, it attracted a certain notoriety after attempting to distribute some of the funds it receives from ExxonMobil among scientists and economists, offering them $10,000 a pop to write articles undermining the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

John Howard, though, gives his services for free. 

“Global warming has become a new battleground,” he explained in Wednesday’s speech. “The same intellectual bullying and moralising, used in other debates, now dominates what passes for serious dialogue on this issue.” 

In his final years in office, John Howard understood that mainstream attitudes had shifted on global warming, and grudgingly portrayed himself as a practical environmentalist. Now, amongst his wacko American admirers, he talks of a battle taking place between environmentalists and denialists – and associates himself openly with the latter.  

Where does that leave poor Brendan Nelson, a man who explained in November that that Kyoto Protocol was “symbolically important” to Australians? 

Very nervous, one imagines.

No longer tethered to political power, John Howard seems to be flying off to the furthest reaches of the neo-con Right, espousing positions that are both unpopular and unelectable.

Most voters still have no idea who Brendan ("seven percent") Nelson is or what he represents. But they all identify John Howard with the Liberal Party.