BoltWatch

Dedicated to those who can tell the difference between A. Bolt and a nut.

Where Andrew Bolt's Deranged Polemic ... Gets What's Coming To It

Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Bolt 25/10: "Vengeful hypocrisy"
In which Andrew Bolt goes to town on "the Left" because Chris Masters' book on Jones turns out to have some homophobic elements.

I'm not comfortable with the extracts thus far reprinted from Chris Masters' book on Alan Jones, Jonestown. I made my objections plain in the last post.

However, I also have two problems with Bolt's newspaper column today.

1. The strawman. Cries Bolt:
No, the crime of this influential Sydney broadcaster and former Liberal candidate is that he’s a conservative.

And that means game on. Open season. No rules...

So where are the storms of protest? Hello?

...So where are those defenders of gays now that Jones is the target? Why the silence? What’s the difference?

I’ll tell you: Kirby is of the Left, and Jones is not. Which makes him fair game for a sliming.

First of all, plenty of left-wing commentators, including me, have been critical of the extracts from Masters' book. And have said so. So his "they're all hypocrites" line is simply false.

Secondly, if one side of politics is to be condemned for failing to condemn homophobic attacks against its enemies, then it should be noted that Andrew did not apply this same test to the conservative side during the Heffernan/Kirby stoush he cites now for comparison. HE may have been critical of Heffernan; but many of his conservative colleagues weren't. The Prime Minister certainly wasn't.

So Bolt's attempt to run away with this "poor oppressed conservatives" line is ridiculous. This is a hateful tactic often abused by his own side, and if those using it now can be said to be part of "the left", then their conduct is all the more notable for it being a complete anathema to everything the progressive side of politics actually advocates.

2. Bolt is starting to get mixed up on just which part of Masters' book is objectionable. It is NOT objectionable for Masters' book - a biography - to report that Jones is gay. Announcing, accurately, that someone is gay is not an attack. It's not defamatory, because there is nothing wrong with someone being gay in the first place.

There IS something terribly wrong with the insinuations that Jones is a paedophile, even if Masters has kept them just on the right side of the line which separates his publishers from the courtroom.

But Bolt should be careful not to conflate the two, lest he reaffirm in the minds of certain of his readers that being gay is some kind of a character flaw.

Finally, a note. Bolt concedes that:
Of course, there is much to criticise about Alan Jones.

The former Wallabies coach has at times been brutal in using his power as Sydney’s top-rating talk-show host, and has a squalid record of selling his opinions to corporate bidders.

Attack all that if you like, and his politics, too.

But you can bet Andrew Bolt is not going to address any of THOSE issues raised in Masters' book!

- posted by Jeremy @ 12:27 PM |
Monday, October 23, 2006

Bolt 23/10 "Masters's excuse: Alan Jones is too powerful if he hides his homosexuality"
Bolt is scathing regarding Chris Masters' defence for his new book blasting Alan Jones' homosexuality and insinuating some sort of paedophilia link.
Masters says Jones, 65, hides his homosexuality in order to retain his much-feared audience power base, which he uses in secrecy to influence ministers, including the Prime Minister.

Sorry Chris, that's complete crap.

If Jones used his platform to attack gay people, to attack their rights, to accuse them of being somehow sick or perverted or deserving of lesser rights than straight people - then his own homosexuality would be relevant. He'd deserve to have his attack on other gay people turned back on himself.

However, I haven't seen anywhere where Jones has done anything of the sort.* So his being gay doesn't make him a hypocrite, and it doesn't make his homosexuality worthy of or deserving of comment. However powerful and connected to powerful people he may be.

Now, that doesn't mean his sexuality shouldn't be mentioned in a biography - it's part of who he is, and of course it shouldn't be covered up as if he should be ashamed of it. And it doesn't mean that his corrupting influence on politics in NSW shouldn't be exposed in revealing detail.

But I agree with Bolt that the way his sexuality is covered in the extracts from Masters' book is simply wrong, and something we on the Left would be outraged by were it to be directed against someone we didn't detest quite so much.
This disgraceful invasion of a man’s private sex life and baseless smearing of him as a couldabeen pedophile is justified as a way to destroy him in the eyes of his audience, which is presumed to be homophobic.

This is vomitous, and those who excuse what Masters has done (with ABC money) are endorsing the most homophobic public lynching I have seen in my life.

On what I've seen so far, Bolt is right.

Hypocrisy is worthy of criticism. People's consensual sex lives aren't.

(I'm going to assume that the general silence on the issue from other lefties is a result of being confident that he's got more than enough supporters to decry these attacks than to require our assistance - rather than because Jones is such an objectionable twat that it feels horribly wrong to come to his defence on anything, no matter how repugnant. Nonetheless, we shouldn't acquiesce in anyone stooping so low, regardless of how much we may happen to loathe the target.)

*If Jones has used his pulpit to attack gay people for their sexual orientation, of course, then by all means, throw his hypocritical sex life right back at him.

- posted by Jeremy @ 4:46 PM |
Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Bolt 18/10: "The too dry state"
Melbourne's water supply is running low. There's a drought. Those stupid lefties want us to reduce our water usage, or install rainwater tanks, or recycle water.

NONE OF THEM ARE TALKING ABOUT DAMS!

Dams! I'm fixated on the things, because I know the Greens hate them. Dams! And, frankly, I'm not interested in a solution to this problem unless it really pisses off the Greens. Dams!

It's like John Howard's new nuclear power strategy. Those Greens want us to be more environmentally-friendly, eh, and stop belching carbon dioxide into the air? They've banged on about global warming so long that it's become too obvious for us to ignore? So obvious that even News Ltd has done a sudden u-turn and is backing the science?

Alright, Greenies, we'll do it - but our way. Which is nuclear power. And you know why? Because you hate it! And we hate you! So, what's it going to be - burning coal, which you keep complaining about, or nuclear power, which is almost as bad?

No, we're not going to consider any other options. It's coal or nuclear. Those are your choices. If you care about the environment, you have to let us dig out chunks of it to turn into radioactive waste. Carbon dioxide or carbon-14? Which do you hate more? 'Cos we're insisting on producing at least one of 'em.

Same with dams. No-one disagrees that the water problem is very serious indeed. But that doesn't help us conservatives politically... unless we can convince everyone that the one and only way to solve the problem is the one that the Greens hate. That will screw the bastards!

Yes. Dams. Shut up about everything else - the only way to save us all is to build a dam to capture all this extra water that isn't falling from the sky because we're in the middle of a drought. And I, Andrew Bolt, will bang on about dams regularly so that people forget that there are other options out there, and just concentrate on hating the Greens. Because they hate dams. Which means they want you to die of thirst. If the choice is between your dying of thirst and us whacking a great big dam somewhere (and it is, because we're not interested in any third options), then those bastards still won't let us build a dam. No dams? Damn them!

Punish THEM for your thirst. Despite warning about the problem for years, despite their not being in Government - it's all their fault!

God I hate the Greens. So very, very much. But it is so much fun making them choose between options they hate. Dams and nuclear power. Take that, you filthy hippies!

Now cross-posted at AnonymousLefty.

- posted by Jeremy @ 11:12 PM |
Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Bolt 6/10: "Kevin hasn't a prayer"
Kevin Rudd, a committed christian in the ALP, gets a bit annoyed at certain right-wing forces hi-jacking mainstream christianity:
My concern is that in recent years we've only been hearing one set of Christian views on politics - and that has been an overwhelmingly conservative one. The answer to this does not lie in a greater Christian voice in politics - it lies in a different Christian voice in politics.

As for the Labor Party itself, for 115 years we have been a broad church made up of Irish Catholics, English Methodists, the occasional Christian Socialist as well as the great tradition of non-religious secular humanists. Each has been of great value in shaping the overall voice of progressive politics in Australia. Where these traditions meet is in a secular consensus on the overriding importance of social justice.

Our common enemy is the political project of John Howard which seeks to reconstruct Australian society in the image of his particular set of neo-liberal values. Howard's vision for Australia is Frederich Hayek's rampant individualism where unfettered free markets determine the value of not only every commodity but of every person and institution. Remember Margaret Thatcher's chilling declaration: "There is no such thing as society." Within this world view, Christianity is an entirely privatised affair in which I have absolutely zero social responsibility for the material wellbeing of my neighbour.

Rubbish, says Andrew Bolt:
The fact is that despite the hysteria over the rise of Pentecostal churches and the election of one senator from the Christian-conservative Family First party, the church elites are as still as furiously of the Left as are the elites of all our cultural institutions. And just as out of touch...

So what in this tale of Left-spruiking preachers (and ticked-off parishioners) could possibly have caused Rudd—and others in Labor—to think the churches were shunning Labor?

The scary thing for him is that many more conservative Christians have decided to move their worshipful rear ends to the pews of new churches that have more to say on God than climate change, and rather like the idea of people being held responsible for their sins and their own salvation.

I’m referring especially to Pentecostal churches such as the giant Hillsong mega-worship complex, which are blossoming in our outer suburbs.

These are ones that praise hard work as much as they do charity, with the Assemblies of God declaring: “We believe that God wants to heal and transform us so that we can live healthy and prosperous lives in order to help others more effectively.”

You can see how the folk of such churches might feel about socialism, say, and you might guess how fed up they were with the politics preached at them at the Anglican or Uniting Churches many long quit.

"Mega-worship complex" is right. Hillsong has portable ATM machines for its compulsory tithing. It spent millions on an expensive conference facility, and praises not "hard work" so much as "the acquisition of cold hard cash". However that cold hard cash is obtained. Money. Oh, they want your money.

(Because of course, Jesus was all about the acquisition of cold hard cash.)

Obviously Bolt has a point in that these fundamentalist right-wing churches are growing, whilst the more laid-back traditional churches - which combine their traditional determination to make as much money out of THEIR flocks as possible, so as to preserve THEIR expensive buildings (Jesus was all about the gothic buildings, too, apparently); with an occasional squeak in favour of the poor and marginalised in the community - are not. These churches are at least bothering with the hard, un-glamorous leg-work of actually ministering to the poor and miserable in the community. Hillsong? Ah, no thanks. We'll flashily send a small proportion of the cash we acquire to, say, some poor people overseas, but it'll be a fairly small part of our operation.

Okay, they're growing - but so what? So fundamentalist, self-serving, "I'm alright Jack, sod everyone else" religion is an easy sell. Of course it is! It's a version of christianity that requires nothing more than regular tithing and then the constant reassurance that so long as your bank balance is significant, you're a good, responsible, fine member of the community. And of course, with every dollar in the church coffers, its power to glorify itself grows. Who cares if the message has little to do with anything Jesus actually ever said or did in the Bible?

Of course those churches are growing!

But that doesn't mean they represent anything like a majority of actual christians in the country. They've just got enough money to successfully lobby and pretend they do.

So, no wonder the Pentecostal churches have grown so fast, with the Assemblies of God alone tripling its followers from 1977 to 1997, and now getting Steve Fielding elected to the Senate.

Well, actually, it was the ALP's self-defeating stupid decision to direct preferences to Fielding (sitting on 1.9% of the vote) ahead of the Greens (on 7 or 8%) that gave Fielding his seat. He was extraordinarily lucky: it's not like many ALP voters would have realised that their preferences would go to elect a fundamentalist religious party.

Andrew wants to pretend that the mainstream churches are constantly helping the Left. It's clearly not true. Sure, they occasionally raise a whisper about basic human rights issues like LOCKING PEOPLE UP IN THE DESERT or MAKING IT EASY FOR THE WORKING POOR TO BE SACKED - but they're hardly effective in that advocacy.

No, the things the churches - both the traditional and the new firebrands, from the Catholics to Hillsong - are effective in advocating are very conservative things. The things which they reckon really "energise their base", as the Americans would say. Gay marriage. Abortion. Premarital sex. Stuff they cover with that Orwellian euphemism "family values".

The things Jesus never actually said anything about.

The Gospels show a Jesus mainly concerned with people having compassion for their fellows, for people being aware of their own flaws, for people helping the poor and miserable in society. He never said anything about gays. He never said anything about abortion. He never said anything about premarital sex. In fact, the only thing he said on "family values" was that people should be prepared to leave their families and follow him (so that's where the Exclusive Brethren got it from!).

On pretty much everything that the Bible says Jesus was worried about, Christianity is far more in line with what we call "leftism" than anything on the right. You can't help, reading the Bible, coming to the conclusion that Jesus would have been far more at home amongst a "Christian Left" than anything like the "Religious Right".

You "cannot serve both God and Mammon", he might note, again. And, as for this fixation amongst "religious" right-wing figures about sexual "immorality", he even made his views on the subject so plain you'd think they'd get the point: "let he who is without sin cast the first stone".

Anyway, Rudd is right to make the point.

He's right to make the point that the religious right is having a political sway far beyond its actual merits in the argument.

And he's right to call on the ALP to wake up and start engaging with the christian left, which is not as non-existent and dormant as the religious right wishes it was.

- posted by Jeremy @ 2:54 PM |

Portions of any work of Andrew Bolt are taken from his webpage at http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/, are copyright Andrew Bolt, and are reproduced on the basis of the "fair dealing for purpose of criticism or review" section 41 of the Copyright Act 1968. Other material is copyright by its various authors, which sort of goes without saying really.