Talkin’ ’bout boys
What are they doing to poor Greg Sheridan over at The Australian? He’s presupposed to be the paper’s overseas editor. Presumably he simply desires to put in writing about Indonesia’s home politics, or be worryingly indulgent in direction of far-right governments in Europe. So why do they preserve asking him to weigh in on different issues? Final week he needed to resort to 4 goddamn paragraphs of reminiscences about Billy Joel to hit the sprawling phrase depend in his piece about how Taylor Swift “confounds the progressive left”.
Now he has to speak concerning the “woke insanity” of the “marketing campaign” to abolish boys colleges (by which he means there was a column about it within the Australian Monetary Evaluation). It’s one other scenic stroll of a bit recalling his time at an all boys Christian brothers college, the place he learnt the sort of timeless instruction that the left doesn’t need boys to listen to, and that couldn’t presumably have been imparted had there been any women round:
The brothers taught that when strolling down the road with a woman the bloke ought to attempt to stroll between the woman and the highway. That’s so any hazard coming from the highway, akin to a automotive crashing off the road, hits the bloke first.
All the time Pyne time
Right here’s our impression of former senior authorities determine Christopher Pyne answering a telephone: “Hi there, I’ll do it.” The good fixer has by no means encountered a digicam he wouldn’t handle with a number of witty anecdotes. Now he’s swung by pulse-of-the-nation comedy panel present The Hundred with Andy Lee to debate his one-time record-setting variety of evictions from Parliament, one thing that panellist Mike Goldstein factors out makes him formally extra annoying than Pauline Hanson.
Politics: it’s principally all a little bit of a lark, isn’t it? In case it comes up, Pyne has since misplaced his crown to Nick Champion — the one MP, as Bernard Keane as soon as identified, who Bronwyn Bishop may expel with none accusation of bias — who managed a exceptional 105 ejections in his time in federal Parliament.
Reply all
Image the scene: you’re minding your individual enterprise, checking your emails one morning, solely to seek out the previous prime minister has despatched you a message concerning the present overseas minister, asking you to “Give me some subjects, some background on this motherfucker”. That’s what Czech environmentalist Jan Rovenský woke as much as this week. Former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš emailed him (considering he was emailing an aide of the identical identify) asking, in a lower than solely coherent trend, for dust on Czech International Minister Jan Lipavský:
Write me the Israel story, how he turned his again on our folks, how he went to Doha, how he goes all over the place, campaigning, mail-in voting.
He additionally requested for information on Lipavský’s kids. Anybody who has adopted Babiš’ time in public life will know him as a “vibrant determine”. An agribusiness billionaire turned politician, he was the richest and oldest individual to change into prime minister in Czech historical past, in 2017, in addition to the primary to be charged with a criminal offense whereas in workplace when he was charged with fraud that very same yr — although he’s all the time insisted the fees have been politically motivated; he has been acquitted twice since. Nonetheless, it feels on model that this apparently isn’t even the primary time it’s occurred.
“It’s not the primary time that Andrej Babiš has by accident despatched me an e mail, apparently addressed to my namesake, who’s his spin physician,” Rovenský wrote (in Czech, clearly…) on Fb. “I by no means revealed any of them. I often both politely ignored them or identified the sender’s mistake … However to pull your opponents’ kids and wives into that is completely over the road.”
Trump Watch
Among the many many issues that may occur because the world’s least anticipated rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden pulls nearer, our favorite to keep watch over is the resumption of books by or about individuals who used to work with Trump — kicked off by Jim Sciutto’s The Return of the Nice Powers — telling us issues that veer from surprising to thoroughly plausible in about half a second.
It’s going to shock no-one who watched Trump on the world stage to listen to that he lavished as a lot reward on dictators off digicam as he did in public. Apparently a number of of Trump’s former advisers advised Sciutto that Trump referred to as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “implausible”, Chinese language President Xi Jinping “good”, and even North Korean chief Kim Jong-un an “okay man”.
To prime all of it off, the previous and potential future president of the world’s strongest nation favored to drag the go-to transfer for a contrarian 16-year-old midway by his second beer: “Properly, however Hitler did some good issues,” Trump reportedly stated to John Kelly, his chief of workers from 2017 to 2019. Now brace your self, however based on Kelly this admiration was not backed up by a rock-solid understanding of Third Reich inner politics:
[Trump] would ask concerning the loyalty points … once I identified to him the German generals as a gaggle weren’t loyal to [Hitler], and actually tried to assassinate him a number of instances, he didn’t know that.