Friday, July 11, 2008

Alexander, thanks for all the...fish...

Alexander Downer (referred to as 'Dolly', 'Lexi', 'Sir Lord' or 'that buffoon' by a fair few blogs; he prefers 'Alexander') has announced his retirement.
At Grods, it's mostly for his blog, which is always full of interesting bits (i.e. constant name-dropping). Despite having a section allowing comments, they don't actually get published. I did try, and my comments were always polite - if, perhaps, difficult to answer (which he's been noted to have problems with previously).

There were also some lovely tributes from writers with well-known predilictions and biases such as Janet Albrechtson and Greg Sheridan. They were more entertainment, though - and I doubt the authors meant them to be taken that way...

Downer himself also had to swing in and defend himself, in doing so claimed that Timor was "his" achievement (Howard didn't flick the leash? Really...) and Iraq was mere "trivia". Obviously not content to leave the mules to do his braying for him.

Anyway, this means that as I'm still on the roll for Mayo (despite being overseas) I should be voting. Fortunately, there's still a little time to go before the by-election is held, but I still need to print out and post off an 'Overseas Notification Form'. Which pisses me off.

Especially as Downer did say that he'd stay the full term even if the Coalition lost government in the last election (sadly, not in the Advertiser. Only in the Courier, the Adelaide Hills newspaper). It's also good to see that he hasn't lost that lack of sense of hypocrisy:
"If Mr Rudd doesn't run a candidate in Mayo, well then he's slinking away in a cowardly way and he should be prepared to face up to the judgement of the people of Australia whenever that judgement is called to be made.

"I think they're treating the people of Mayo with contempt if they're not prepared to run a candidate when they're the Government of Australia."

Oh, yeah? And, what, precisely, is cutting and running less than 12 months into a term when more than 40,000 people voted for you to represent them for 3 years?!

Note 1: no-one asked him his thoughts on Howard and the Liberals "strategically" not offering a candidate in the various by-elections while the Coalition was in power. It'd be interesting to see him squirm out of that successfully without placing the blame squarely on Howard's door.

Note 2: funny how there haven't been any big business job offers that Lexi or Peter Costello said they'd be receiving...

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