crazybrave

From Opposition Leader Tony Abbott:

“Obviously, if you are going to win the election you have got to secure the people who regard themselves as rusted on Coalition voters and then you have got to reach out to the middle ground,” Mr Abbott told Fairfax Radio today.

“And ‘Howard’s Battlers’, to use that phrase, were basically working people who respected John Howard because he thought that, in his own way, he was one of them.

“We can reach out and claim those same people … maybe this could become Abbott’s Army.”

I think I know what Abbott’s Army looks like already:

Peter Garrett has said something gauche and flip to an radio journalist Steve Price. Price says “Hobyahs!, No I Am Not Joking,This Is Deadly Serious Stuff and I Am A Serious Journalist Not Some Desperate Hack Looking To Raise My Profile By Savaging An Inexperienced Media Performer*”. Peter Garrett’s flipancy is defended another media “identity”, Richard Wilkins. Ahem. This is the first item on the ABC news.

When it all gets a bit much around here, I quietly think about being Tony Abbott, scheduled to debate Nicola Roxon in another city in a couple of hours, listening to both Howard and Costello address some dumb launch before being able to speak himself and getting to the airport to make the freaking debate. That thought – to see the day Tony Abbott’s charmless bullying and incompetence saw him become a public has-been – warms me up sometimes when I’m in need of encouragement.

* Author’s own heh. Should’ve gone for Ed Keupper, he never would have fucked up like that. And I can’t imagine Nick Cave running for Parliament. Seat in the House of Lords, maybe.

Pardon me while I go get a bex.

… from this morning’s rally in Canberra.

Important for all the family.

Update: lots more photos in the Your Rights at Work flickr group.

“It’s not plausible, it’s not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey,” Mr Howard said.

From the front page of today’s Canberra Times, “Iraq toll study ‘exaggerated’ ” which (really unbelievably this time) is not online.