Saturday, February 19, 2005
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.