Monday, September 12, 2005
CHRIS OF DEATH
Any cause championed by Cretan Chris Sheil is doomed. Wesley Clark, Mark Latham, the Australian rugby union team, John Kerry ... no matter who, once old Chris lends his support, they sink faster than a bad Australian TV show. Latest to suffer the Chris of Death are opponents of Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi:
So it seems we have a divided government party, fighting on a pro-postal/bank privatisation platform, in the face of opposition from a large segment of its own campaigning infrastructure. Will Japan’s conservative LDP lose power for what would be virtually the first time in 50 years? I wouldn’t have a clue, but hope springs.
Hope didn’t:
Junichiro Koizumi’s Liberal Democratic Party scored a crushing victory in Japan’s general election on Sunday, vindicating the prime minister’s strategy of making the election a referendum on postal reform.
Sheil is fatal. On the very day Margo Kingston launched her independent poverty site, Sheil wrote in The Age:
Even The Sydney Morning Herald’s Margo Kingston, a bete noir of many right-wingers, could never be read as a Labor apologist. On the contrary, Kingston’s support is ever conditional, with a sharp turn against Labor only a betrayed principle away.
By then Kingston was already some months past being described as so closely connected to the SMH. How’s her new site working out? Mark Bahnisch—an occasional publisher of Sheil’s doom posts—writes:
I really do think she doesn’t get new media. I’m absolutely unconvinced that the quality of the average post on her non-blog matches the quality of the average post on good Oz political blogs.
Good Oz political blogs? Let’s see her first match the quality of bad local blogs. The only thing that can save her now is a brutal attack from Mr Reverse Effect himself ... Chris Sheil.