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Phillip Adams: keeping the red flag flying and other media delights
Charles Murton
The far left’s most embarrassing spruiker, Phillip Adams, is entering a twilight state of advanced, ossified senility. No longer the smooth-tongued, roguish, roly-poly radical of the 1960s, he is now sour, nasty, repetitive, and thoroughly unpleasant. Many gerontologists believe that when a person ages, the masks slip off and their true self comes to the fore.
I — or at least my parents — bought the very first copy of the Australian in 1964, and continued to buy it. I have been following Phil’s career, and Kenneth Davidson’s career, since their first smears in newsprint. And yes, I used to find Phillip Adams very funny. When I was a teenager he was something of a hero of mine — but then so was Dr Cairns.
Today, I would seriously like to know the reasons why Murdoch still bothers paying Adams. As a NewsCorp shareholder, I think it’s a fair question. How many articles does Phil really write nowadays? The wish-fulfilment fantasy had been done before. In its previous incarnation Janine Haynes was going to be the first Australian president (presumably that is no longer on the agenda).
Another recycled article was the one ‘proving’ that only George W. Bush could have been elected president. This painfully unfunny demonstration had been used before against Bush’s father. Doesn’t Rupert Murdoch realize that this bludger is just rechurning his old garbage? Apparently not.
Because Adams is so arrogant, his many errors give one an especially pleasurable frisson. My favourite was an article in which Phil, who prides himself on his knowledge of Labor history, referred to Arthur ‘Caldwell’ for the entire article.
And no, I do not think it was a sub-editor’s mistake. I do think that Adams had no idea how to spell the name of a man who had been a wartime federal minister, and who was federal Labor leader for some seven years.
Phillip Adams once persistently referred to the country residence of the British prime minister as Checkers – becoming hopelessly confused between the prime minister’s house, and Richard Nixon’s dog. Clearly this is not a man to be taken lightly.
I thought it might be fun to take a weekly look at Phil’s inane galumphings.
On Saturday Adams happily informed us that the United States and Australia are one-party states. Does he realise how profoundly offensive such a nonsense would be to the refugees from real one-party states around the world? Probably, he doesn’t.
“political leaders keep muttering pieties about the joys of democracy, and why it should be forced on people at gunpoint…”
If we take ‘democracy’ to mean a free society (its usual meaning these days), then Phil is obviously referring to Iraq. He still hasn’t quite understood that the Iraqi people — as distinct from a small but highly toxic group of murderous theistic fundamentalists — the Iraqi people have benefited from America’s intervention and, providing that George W. Bush has the will to go ahead with his program until the Arab totalitarian dictatorships of the world have been secularized and democratized, then the Iraqis will continue to benefit into the distant future.
Adams has long presented himself as an atheist skeptic, with little time for religion. And yet like so many left wing hypocrites, he has fallen in love with Muslim fundamentalism. Why? Well, because its half-crazed, hysterical savages cheer and dance in the streets when thousands of Americans are murdered. But I bet you knew that all the time.
As a matter of fact, Adams has done rather well from living in a secular, free society. It seems strange that he would deny the same chance to others. One can only assume that he has a bigoted loathing for peaceable, ordinary Muslims.
Nothing else makes sense. Bret Stephens in the Australian, in an article expressing amazement at how journalists these days miss everything of importance, and get everything wrong, wrote:
“Above all, never forget the obvious: that the Soviet Union was a state governed by fear; that Iraqis aren't barracking for their killers; and that, if given the chance, people will choose to be free.
“Simple maxims, but how much embarrassment would the media be spared if only they followed them”.
Adams will never follow them. That would require a reassessment of his whole morally squalid life.
And there’s more.
President Bush also has the United States Supreme Court under his thumb. In fact, no president in history has ever had the Supreme Court under his thumb. They are an entirely independent body, which is recent years has been noted for the leftist twist of its ‘interpretations’ of the American constitution. If Bush has achieved this historical first, he is certainly not the idiot that the lockstep left make him out to be.
Adams sees the United States as characterised by the stupidity of its people. This is just a variant of the ‘Labor didn’t get in because the voters are stupid’ argument. And the furiously flailing left’s bete noire, John Howard, is in power because no-one in Australia has “ sufficient guts or stature to take him on”.
Of course it might also be that Howard is offering Australia a peaceful, stable life with minimal inflation, low interest rates, and that he does not have a ‘vision’ for Australia.
Because visions, and lights on the hill, are both destructively expensive, and destructive of liberty. But Howard doesn’t have a vision. He has no charisma, and is characteristically ordinary. He just wants to leave people alone to live their own lives.
Perhaps that’s why they keep re-electing him.
According to Adams, “John Howard is as much in control of this country as Causcescu was in Romania. And far, far less likely to be toppled”. As I have said before, for any person who was forced to actually exist under Causcescu’s barbaric, charnel-house Marxism, sentences like this defy words.
Adams shows himself to be a political moron, who has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. One is reminded of Barry Humphries’ definition of ‘pinko’: an Australian academic who has never been to Eastern Europe.
Adams certainly doesn’t like Howard. Back in the 1990s Adams’ anti-Howard articles were accompanied by drawings which were strongly reminiscent of the anti-Semitic illustrations in Julius Streicher’s pornographically anti-Semitic publication, Der Sturmer. And I believe that is not coincidence: it offers a very accurate reflection of the real Phillip Adams.
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 14 March 2005
On Wednesday we were treated to Phil the economist. First he has a go at Sir Alec Douglas-Home (pronounced hume) because Douglas-Home found economics difficult.
At least the former prime mister — the last British PM, incidentally, to be pictured grouse-shooting on the moor — understood that it was a difficult subject. Adams thinks it is easy, but the whole thing unravels in his last paragraph.
Adams writes, “The deficits being run up by Howard’s best friend [President Bush] are staggering, and may well push the planet off its axis”.
Well, let me put this to you. Say Phillip Adams owes somebody $5000. Now say that I owe somebody $5000. It wouldn’t be a problem for Phil, who has had his hand super-glued inside the Australian taxpayer’s pocket for much of his life. But for me it would be a considerable debt. And yet the amount is the same. But from the point of view of economics, debt can only be understood in relation to the ability to pay. This is basic economics, a subject of which Adams is entirely ignorant.
The United States deficit can only be understood with relation to the United States gross national product. It is the ratio of the two which is germane. The debts of the Marxist death states that litter Africa are not particularly high compared with those of free countries, but they are debts which a system such as Marxism, which would cause a sand shortage in the Sahara, can never meet.
The United States, on the other hand, can pay theirs, and as a matter of fact the current USA debt–GNP ratio is not that high anyway. Accounting for inflation, it was higher under Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. It was even higher in the prosperous 1960s, and higher in 1950.
I don’t think the earth’s axis is in any danger, do you?
A glance back to the previous week shows Adams whining about criticism of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). It is outrageously unfair that people should keep pointing to the left wing bias of ‘our public broadcaster’. Why are these ignoble conservatives so mean-spirited?
Some time ago journalist Bill Moyers made a speech which alleged that James Watt, a former American secretary of the interior and supposed religious fundamentalist, told the US Congress: “After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back”. It was nonsense of course, as Moyers admitted weeks ago.
But Alan Ramsey did a ‘Dan Rather’ and repeated it in a biased article of his own. The Sydney Morning Herald (the harbour city’s version of the Age) was forced to apologise, but — would you believe it — Adams repeated it yet again on ABC radio, with the full knowledge that it was false (I look forward to haring all about Adams’ conscious lie on the ABC Media Watch. Only kidding).
This is absolutely typical of the ABC. And similar mendacity goes on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for ever. ABC radio makes Der Sturmer look temperate by comparison. And that’s why people criticize the ABC. Without people like Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman, and Christopher Pearson, the country really would be like Causcescu’s Romania.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor