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PSEUDO-JOURNALIST LYNCH MOB PERSON
“The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail,â€? howled Steve Lovelady in the wake of Eason Jordan’s resignation. Bloggers were denounced as “scalp hunters”, “moon howlers”, “trophy hunters”, “sons of Sen. McCarthy”, “rabid”, and “pseudo-journalist lynch mob people.” The New York Times noted widespread concern: “Some in the traditional media are growing alarmed as they watch careers being destroyed by what they see as the growing power of rampant, unedited dialogue.â€?
Margo Kingston is part of the traditional media; a former head of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Canberra bureau, her views now appear semi-daily at the SMH’s website. The Times might be interested in Kingston’s recent attempts to destroy immigration minister Amanda Vanstone’s career over the incarceration of Cornelia Rau. The mentally-ill 39-year-old (Rau, that is, not Kingston; Margo is older) ended up in an immigrant detention centre after repeatedly telling authorities she was German. As Queensland police commissioner Bob Atkinson (Rau also spent some time in a Queensland jail) explained:
I’d have to say that, when on the face of what we know at the moment, this is an extraordinarily unusual situation and I just can’t see how this could’ve been handled any differently.
The only way I can see how it could’ve been handled any differently would’ve been in a sent of circumstances that has already been demonstrated, as I understand it, to be unacceptable in Australia today, and that would be that everyone in Australia had an Australia card and their fingerprints and/or DNA recorded.
Now, apart from that, there was no way to identify this woman.
Seems fair enough. Kingston’s response to all of this is, well, pure salivating moronism:
Please resign, Senator Vanstone. You’re a disgrace to Australia.
Margo’s even organising a lynch mob:
First thing though is to get everyone you know to email and phone their federal MP and State Senators. I reckon local is the way to go, especially when we enter the post July Zone. That means rallies outside local Coaltion MP’s offices, letters to local papers and maybe ads in local papers demnding a public judicial inquiry.
“Coaltion�? “Demnding�? Talk about your rampant, unedited dialogue. And here’s more:
Unless the government now orders a public judicial inquiry, every single Coalition MP is guilty of the crime perpetrated in the Australian people’s name on Cornelia Rau ...
Citizens have fought and died over hundreds of years for protection against State incarceration without charge or trial.
Do Govenrment MPs support the right of Australians not to be incarcerated by the State without charge and without recourse to the Courts? Bloody hell, citizens have died to get, then keep, that right for hundreds of years. We lost it and we didn’t even know we had until Cornelia Rau brought our loss into public view.
Enough from Margo. Let’s hear from Rau’s sister and brother-in-law, who wrote the following after Rau’s release (which Rau opposed; apparently she preferred the Baxter detention centre to her new lodgings at the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s psychiatric wing):
Amanda Vanstone is right. Authorities are in a difficult position when someone refuses to identify themselves and even gives false aliases. Luckily, we still live in a country where we are not held down while information is beaten or drugged out of us.
No one is immune from mistakes. With hindsight, our greatest mistake was not registering her with the police until August. There were several reasons for this, one of which was that my parents had already reported her as missing several months before her stay in the Manly psychiatric unit, after which she was found within two days. We did not want to be alarmist this time. The police are overburdened with mental health cases, which they are often untrained to handle, and we thought Cornelia would contact us as she had in the past.
There are no simple answers, just as there is no simplistic question of blame or a scapegoat.
Blame and scapegoating; that’s all you’ll ever see over at Margo’s Berzerker Webdiary Psycho-Hutch. Just as well she’s not as influential as a common blogger.
My take on Rau is that she felt she needed to get away from the particular institution she was in, but, knowing in one of her more lucid moments that she was mentally ill, also knew that she had to be institutionalised somewhere for her own safety.
So, she just found a way to change institutions. It worked, and she got what she wanted.
If there is an inquiry, perhaps it needs to look at the institution she ran away from.
Is that sex with you, rhhardin, or just sex in general?
Up in Qld, our Pete apologised to the family of Ms Rau. It was unnecessary but any moment for Pete to get his noggin on the camera is a good moment for Pete.
Posted by Major Anya on 2005 02 19 at 05:58 AM • permalinkI was waiting for this.
Had Ms. Rau been sent to prison, just regular prison, like so many other Australians whose only crime is to have a mental illness, Margo and her mates at the ABC couldn’t give a toss! But mention DETENTION CENTRE! DETENTION CENTRE! and the squawking begins in earnest! NOW they can EXPLOIT this person’s tragedy for all it’s worth, to whack the government and score themselves a couple of petty points in their pathetic, egocentric game of ‘gotcha’ journalism!
If I was Ms. Rau’s sister I’d just shut-up, given that her own bloody family didn’t report her missing for over FIVE MONTHS!My God, Nic White, what do you then call Margomind?
You can call such thought “normal” if you want to. But I’m at pains to see it as nothing less than a severe, incurable neurosis.
If not a form of literal insanity, it’s a form of thought “racism” or bigotry which hates free-thought and wants it dead or surrendering in slavery.
What else do you call it?
Tim was rather kind, in my book.
After Ms Rau was detained by Qld police they had her assessed at the Princess Alexandria hospital in Brisbane and where told by the mental health staff that she was not ill. At that time they had to believe that she was a german national and as such detain her as per the immigration act.
Margo and Co are argueing against that act and as such in their alternate world the police would have just released her back onto the street. Do they truly believe that would have been better?
While she did not recieve the level of mental health care she needed at Baxter, she did aleast have general medicial care as well as food and shelter. The alternative life on the street would have in all likelihood seen her dead or seriously injured by now.
Posted by Robin J Wade on 2005 02 19 at 09:54 AM • permalinkDamn - if she’s not older than dirt what the hell happened to her? Did she get hit by a meteor?
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 02 19 at 01:33 PM • permalinkUnless Tim can offer proof that Margo is older than Rau I think he should withdraw the comment.
Heh, heh.
Posted by Quentin George on 2005 02 19 at 06:05 PM • permalinkI’m still waiting for the crushing logic of the bleeding hearts’ complaints to hit them like a meteorite.Imagine the headline:
“Left wing media and pollies to support national ID register - all to be fingerprinted, DNA registered, and microchipped”.
Left wing loonies first, since they are most at risk of being incarcerated.
Miranda Devine correctly identified the msm tendency to run off with any issue of the day, using it as a bludgeon for their public enemy no.1 (Howard) and his cohorts.
Wouldn’t want to address the real issues about mental health etc, would we?“Unless the government now orders a public judicial inquiry, every single Coalition MP is guilty of the crime perpetrated in the Australian people’s name on Cornelia Rau ...”
Is it possible to overreact any more than has been done here?
Reading the sad story of Ms. Rau, it seems the government did all it could to try and help her, while attempting to check out her story.
What actions would have satisfied Ms. Kingston and others who claim Ms. Rau was treated badly?
Oh, I’m sure things could have been done better in terms of the mental health bureaucracy and communication. Seems there were some mistakes made there. They’ll probably be putting more checks into their system to ensure better communication in the future.
But I see nothing that calls for the amount of hysteria this seems to have created. Nobody tortured this woman. She seems to have been well treated. She was NOT helping the government get her the help she needed. She was misleading people.
One of the negative side effects of people who expect governments to take care of us (the nannystate), and protect us from any injury we can think of, is the expectation of perfect results all the time. There’s no tolerance for mistakes, because they upset the order of our perfect government-controlled world.
If mistakes can happen, then perhaps the government CAN’T protect us from everything and we may get injured. This idea seems to make people crazy. Unfortunately, it’s the real world.
Posted by CJosephson on 2005 02 19 at 07:35 PM • permalinkUnless the government now orders a public judicial inquiry, every single Coalition MP is guilty of the crime perpetrated in the Australian people’s name on Cornelia Rau ...
Actually, the government was remiss in the Cornelia Rau debacle. Everyone knows that the standard treatment is to give the patient an opinion column in The Age/Sydney Morning Herald.
We could go for weeks on this post.
Perhaps, instead of ‘moonbats’, we could refer to Margo and her ilk as ‘goodlife’?
Saberhagen
“In their battle, the Berserkers have found ways to brain wash some humans into being puppets for their assaults (these being called “Goodlife”) and traitors of humanity who wish to serve their own goals by helping the machines.”You’re crazy, Nic! Oops—I’ve just implied you have a mental illness. I guess you’re gonna sue me now, huh?
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 02 20 at 11:47 AM • permalinkRog2 — #16 — Wait till she hits 60. You could split kindling.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 02 20 at 03:47 PM • permalinkNic has severe mental problems, and is most likely autistic.
Ooops! There I go again!
Posted by Quentin George on 2005 02 20 at 04:15 PM • permalinknic white’s ‘crazy’ about margo! simply ‘mad’ about her!
Posted by Lucky Nutsacks on 2005 02 20 at 09:52 PM • permalink
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There you go, flogging them with their own hypocricy again. If it weren’t so funny, I’d say it wasn’t fair.
=^D