Paul Barry vs Andrew Bolt; socialism vs capitalism

This morning on The Bolt Report, Bolta gave ABC identity Paul Barry a whack. In last week's episode of Media Watch the cadaverous finger-wagger had disclosed his own outrageously excessive salary, paid for by the long suffering Aussie taxpayer, daring the conservative to do the same. Today Bolt gladly revealed the amount he received from the same source: a big fat zero. This eloquently showed those lefty accusations of Bolta's "hypocrisy" for what they were: a beat-up based on a false premise. There's no value in comparing apples with oranges, after all.

Bolta pointed out that Barry didn't include the amount of money he'd earned from book sales, etc. If he had, the comparison might have had some validity. It would have been apples vs apples, then.

I thought this was an important point. Barry does make money from the free market. He is a best selling author after all, a fact he proudly states in his Twitter profile.

And there's absolutely no doubt that the extra exposure the ABC show affords him bolsters his market value greatly. Being so well known and, ahem, respected, he can sell more books and charge higher fees for subsequent media projects than if he operated solely in the private sphere.

And that is very unfair in my opinion. Barry, along with so many other posturing pinko parasites at their ABC, gets the best of both worlds. He is outrageously over-rewarded using money taken from those who have no say in the matter. In effect he promotes himself at our expense, not his own. That's one thing. But the very fact that he uses the very bully pulpit we are made to fund to sulk about the size of the pay packets of his ideological enemies is too galling for words.

Bolt, along with Akerman, Devine, Kenny and others, have earned their place in the market. Sure, they are extremely well compensated for their work. But if they don't keep producing content that engages and sells, their fees drop commensurately. And they may even wind up losing their jobs completely. That's capitalism.

Sure, it's brutal. And you can sneer that this process rewards the "lowest common denominator". But you can't deny that it has a certain justice to it. 

Bolt is paid well because he's worth it. Paul Barry, a journalist so sloppy in his approach that he can't even accurately type in a person's Twitter handle, has piles of other people's cash thrown at him because he dutifully parrots the PC party line. Not only that, Bolt is undeniably prolific. He produces more quality content in a week than Barry and his team of sneering hipsters can create in several months.

Time to privatize the ABC. Then Barry and his fellow travellers will have to learn to make it in a free market in which merit and hard work are rewarded, rather than slavish adherence to outmoded ideology.

Julia Gillard gets no respect! Sheesh, I wonder why ...

Lefties are squawking up a storm about how badly Gillard's been treated. They're forever bleating about how she doesn't get the "respect the office deserves".

Well, that's got a lot to do with the fact that she herself has disrespected the office. She didn't actually win the position honourably (you know, by being elected) in the first place. She took the easy, dodgy route by slyly knifing the bloke who had won it fairly. And she's abused her position repeatedly from day one with her constant, shameless lying. 

The sisterhood is particularly put out by the sexist abuse of Gillard. And yes, there's been a lot of hatred towards her -- some of which is misogynous. 

But again, she's brought much of this on herself by zealously playing the gender card -- particularly in the last year or so. Her false accusations of sexism are in themselves sexist, since they're aimed almost exclusively at men. So she shouldn't be surprised when she does cop some anti-female snark coming back at her.

Lots of conservative women in politics get sexist abuse hurled at them (and quite often it's from the same people squealing about misogyny in relation to Gillard!) but they don't wallow in their victimhood. They just shrug it off and get on with the gig. That earns them respect.

Gillard, on the other hand, has courted this reaction, stoked it, and wallowed in it big time. It's gotten to the point where her victim status is now offered as the main reason we should vote for her! It's truly pathetic.

The other annoying claim from Gillard's sob sisters is that as well as all the public loathing, she's been unfairly treated by the media. What a crock that is! On the contrary, they've made a point of protecting her from criticism -- particularly about her dodgy past as a lawyer. The vast majority of Aussie journos avoided that as a subject for ages until finally they could remain in denial no longer.

And ultimately two of them lost their jobs for investigating that, remember. Add Howard Sattler to this list of professional road kill, albeit for simply being a meathead, and the body count stands at three. Now, I know of no reporter who was actually sacked because of his treatment of a sitting PM in the past. (If anyone does, please enlighten me.) Clearly, rather than being beaten up by meeja heavies, she's been consistently treated with kid gloves.

Then there's the treatment she gets from her own party. Would any male politician have lasted so long in the top job if he were so catastrophically unpopular? No way!

Gillard has been our worst PM by a country mile. She's also our most mollycoddled. Roll on September 14 when we finally get to put an end to the whole nauseating bloody farce that this malignant mediocrity has inflicted upon us. 

Leigh Sales, Tony Jones now misogynist nut-jobs

It's really heartening to see the ABC finally start to investigate this AWU scandal. Better late than never, as they say ... 

With the likes of Leigh sales and Tony Jones asking some hard-ish questions regarding the scandal, Gillard's description of those curious about her involvement in it as "misogynists and nut-jobs" seems even more absurd than it did when she first used it at that press conference back in August. 

It's going to be very interesting to see what happens in the coming days. Will Gillard change course? She must be under huge pressure to do so and be more forthcoming.

Still, having denied any wrongdoing so unequivocally before, to admit any now will only make her look doubly dishonest. That's why I think she's probably going to keep toughing it out indefinitely.

Yet new information surfaces every couple of  days, it seems. And every time it does, Gillard has more questions to answer. This really must be getting to others in the party. Surely there will come a time when they feel they just have to act and get rid of her?

Misogynists and nut-jobs smear a Labor favourite

Julia Gillard really thinks she's on a winner with this tactic of smearing anyone who has questions about her role in the AWU scandal as a misogynist, nut-job, or idiot. It's a typically cheap, nasty tactic that her party has used earlier  -- for example when Tony Abbott was snapped with a placard behind him saying she was "Bob Brown's bitch". Her ministers all went into overdrive equating this one little incident with ugly "American style" lunacy and hatefulness.

Cynical ALP spin doctors were right in thinking that Oz hacks would run hard with this angle. After all, lazy, sneering Aussie journos have been milking the cow of anti-Americanism for decades now. There's a ready made smear machine all fired up and ready to go!

And it's a powerful machine, considering how many in the press gallery are tragic, jelly-backed Labor luvvies. But the tide is turning. Huge numbers of Aussies have had more than a gut-full of the way the MSM are acting like spin doctors for the Government on this.

So they're turning to social media and the blogosphere instead. Larry Pickering's websites and Facebook page are getting eye-boggling numbers. Have a squizz at the comment threads and you'll get some idea of just how many people are fired up about this. Then there's Michael Smith's blog. It's only been up for a coupla weeks but it has already garnered over 200 000 page views.

There's a big shift happening now. No wonder Gillard is packin' death. She won't sue, though, because that would risk the whole sleazy affair being opened up and investigated even more thoroughly in the long term. Hence she's employing what she thinks is a tried and true tactic with the "nutjobs and misogynists" smear. But it's another error of judgement from someone who's made many already. 

Of course no one will end up being shot in the streets as a result of this unrest. But I can't help thinking this is a little bit like the recent Twitter and Facebook revolutions in the Middle East. Autocratic rulers tried to perpetuate their narrative through official mainstream media channels that they controlled completely. But it didn't work because everyone just turned to the internet and Twittered and Facebooked their way to freedom instead!

Is Walkley winner Julian Assange a true journalist?

There has long been disagreement over whether Julian Assange is a dinkum journo. The Walkley judges certainly think he qualifies, having just awarded him a bloody great gong. And Margaret Simmons of Crikey certainly reckons he is.

But I suspect this is mainly because Assange has stuck it to the Yanks big time. I doubt very much he would have qualified in their eyes were he not such an anti-American leftie.

Call me old fashioned, but I thought journalists actually had to write stuff themselves. The Wikileaks founder has done very little of that. But he's certainly published mountains of correspondence that others have written (and not for publication). So he's not really a journo; he's more of an online press baron, really. Yep, he's kind of a hip young leftie Rupert Murdoch who doesn't pay his, er, employees (just nicks their work outright, actually).

And it's interesting that all the leftie hacks are arcing up about Rupert's tolerance of phone hacking at one of his papers, making all these insinuations that it's going on throughout the rest of his empire as well. Being such noble defenders of the right to privacy, you'd think they might be a tad annoyed about Assange leaking all that secret information, particularly when doing so could easily have put innocent lives at risk.

But nup. All transgressions are forgiven as long as you hate what they hate. Hell, they'll even laud (and award) you for 'em!