Lame ducks larking in the Oval Office can't fool all the people all of the time
The Daily Telegraph
March 11, 2011
RARELY has a state visit to the US by an Australian prime minister achieved as little as has been delivered by Julia Gillard after her meeting with President Barack Obama.
Lame ducks larking in the Oval Office can't fool all the people all of the time.
A football lesson in the Oval Office, a lecture on Vegemite, and a saccharine speech to a joint sitting of Congress that only served to underscore her own monumental history of political backflips.
It didn't help, either, that her arrival in Washington coincided with the release of a Newspoll showing she had scored the greatest rise in personal dissatisfaction (12 points) of any prime minister in the polling organisation's history.
But it might have given her something to talk about with Obama as he pulled off his own greatest backflip, a reversal of his plans to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
This was at the absolute core of Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, much the same as Gillard's "There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead" promise was front-and-centre in her bid for election.
Gillard has not seen the folly of her ways. Obama may be a hopeless president but he learnt a lesson in this instance. Gillard shows absolutely no sign that she has learnt anything.
She was cheered when she addressed a joint sitting of Congress but it may have helped that her audience knew little about her.
Gillard was in full gush mode by the time she wound up her address, telling her listeners that on the centenary of President Ronald Reagan's birth, "he remains a great symbol of American optimism. The only greater symbol of American optimism is America itself".
Had her audience only known that when Reagan was president, Gillard was a leading member of the management committee of the Socialist Forum, a radical group of activists including many former members of the Communist Party, who were largely united in their hatred of the US.
There could hardly be a greater contrast between Gillard and Reagan. He stood for lower taxes and stronger defence, she stands for higher taxes and presides over a defence force that is unable to put a ship or submarine to sea and has lost its fighter-bomber air capacity.
Reagan took on the union movement, defeating striking air traffic controllers and presiding over employment growth and rebuilding America after President Jimmy Carter's failed experiments.
Gillard has given the union movement a free hand to once again rebuild and destroy Australian small businesses and stifle individual enterprise.
Gillard and Obama are in many ways kindred spirits, disastrously reliving their days as student politicians as their policies wreak havoc upon their nations.
Fortunately, in both cases, the people - even those who were among their staunchest supporters - are starting to wake up.
The polls tell the story for Gillard; a more subtle message was delivered to Obama at the White House this week when it was revealed that there had been almost no entries for a high school competition to win the President as the commencement day speaker.
He is apparently so unpopular that just 14 schools initially entered the competition compared with 1000 applicants last year.
Gillard and Obama, birds of a feather - lame ducks (and there's no threat implied and no animals have been harmed in the creation of this column).
Obama is great at presentation and oratory, Gillard fails on both scores - and both are dead in the water when it comes to policy delivery.
Duds.
One could only feel sympathy for former Opposition leader Kim Beazley - an honest, scholarly and thoughtful person, now Australian ambassador to Washington - as Gillard paraded through town, and conclude that her cheering audience must have been drinking Charlie Sheen's tiger blood cocktails.
I agree with most of what Julia Gillard said in her address to the joint sitting of Congress,the content of her address indicated a complete reversal of the Australian Labor Party’s, and indeed her own long stated dislike of all things American.
It was possibly the first time that she has enunciated the views and sentiments of the vast majority of the Australian people, she appears to have turned her back on her past twenty plus years of Anti American ,anti Judeo Christian Democracy and anti Capitalism activism.
I would not be the only Australian who remembers clearly her days as the “angry young rabid Marxist student organizer”frothing at the mouth denouncing all that is American and Australian,demanding the end of the ANZUS Treaty the removal of American bases etc etc etc.
She has not explained why she was engaging in photo ops in front of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington our own Australian Vietnam vets were been told her government could not afford to present their medals personally so they would be posted to them. (Battle of Long Than veterans)
It would not be unreasonable to ask Madame Gillard has she been lieing these past twenty years or was her address to the joint sitting of Congress a lie ?
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