Dear Prime Minister,

It seems that every day you do something completely lacking in logic, and, frankly, rather whiffing of overweening ego. Today, it's that you say:

i) your ban on gay and lesbian marriages in Australia is not designed to offend same-sex couples.
OH?
But you HAVE offended. You DO offend. Whether you "mean" to, or not, is irrelevant. You do.

ii) "I realize in public life that what you do sometimes offends some people. It's not designed to do that, but I equally don't apologise for wanting to put into the law the simple proposition that a marriage is a union between a man and a woman hopefully for life."
OH?
That's some "simple proposition," John. It may come as a surprise to you, but, first, it is NOT a simple proposition, and, second, it does not describe reality, or anything like it. It describes the idle fantasy of wishfully thinking middlebrows who would prefer to deny reality in favour of their underexamined, selfserving morality.

iii) "That doesn't in any way prevent people from having same sex relationships."
OH!
Well, that's mighty big of you. Thank you SO much. But, inherent in this statement is the notion that you have any say in that, which you do not, unless you mean that you're going to be really, truly bighearted, and not BAN same-sex unions.

What will you get up to tomorrow, I wonder.

Sincerely,

Mr. Howard,

So, you didn't know about the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib (and, of course, throughout the American gulag). You say: "All of this" – this being, Labor's demand that you explain to your electorate these strange coincidences of ignorance – "is about trying to imply some guilt by association because that is the stock and [sic] trade of the Australian Labor Party," as the ABC reports.

Well, John, unfortunately your position is untenable. For starters, you may have overlooked the fact that you ARE associated with the guilty; that is not something the ALP needs to invent.

And:

i) If you did not follow up the Red Cross's first report of concern, you failed in your duty to ensure that we are not aligned with brutal, lawbreaking brutes.

ii) If you did follow it up, and your American masters told you all was well, you now know that they are damned liars, and you can conclude that you shouldn't have hitched Australia's wagon to their deceptions and brutalities; but of course, you've learned this lesson, already, from proof of their earlier mass deceptions about weapons, and their overall intentions and motivations for their illegal war. (Did your government ever seek assurances that the American invaders would set up best-practices prisons in Iraq? Even if you did not – even though you should have – you now have to face the fact that the American masters put renegade prison officials, of known histories of abuse and infamy, in charge of the Iraq prisons; and, it now comes to light, these mongrels have been abusing Australian prisoners, in response to which you limply wring your hands and fret, but do nothing as you have done nothing about this situation in the past, but instead have allowed the American masters to run roughshod over international law.)

iii) If you did know, and have any pride and honour, you will have to resign, won't you?

With appropriate dismay and disgust,

To: John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia

Dear Mr Howard,
You said something really silly and plainly wrong the other day during the celebration of your innumerable years in public life (thanks, for that, by the way - you've at least kept some true mongrels like Amanda Vanstone and Tony Abbott from fulfilling their larger aspirations)... Now, what was it...?
Oh, yes, that's right. You said that you had restored Australia to a posiiton of respect in the world, among such potent allies as the US and the UK. Wrong, Mr Prime Minister. Plain wrong. You might have attracted the tactical and disdainful applause of megalomaniacs who think God appointed them President of the "Free" World (while torturing Australian citizens along with so many others), but I can assure you that, here on the ground, among the majority of Americans who did NOT vote for Dubya, Australia's position of respect has slumped badly, in recent years. The majority wonder how it is that a country whose citizens opposed the Putsch into Iraq by a margin of 10 to 1 could have gone in, anyway. They wonder what kind of patsies their leaders are. That's the plain truth, John. I'm not kidding. Anyone here who has any sense of how the US megalomaniacs work thinks your people are taking it in the shorts.
But, carry on. The more your tactics of cluster bombing, depleted-uranium spraying, and wholesale torturing with top-level approval come to light, the sillier the Coalition of the Armtwisted is going to look. And whether or not complicit leaders are dispatched sooner, and longer, to the Opposition benches, they are going to have to live with their implication in a debased, hypocritical reign of terror.
Alas, we, your unheeded subjects, are going to pay for it with increased risk in their world, but you'll be sitting in some twilight home for disgraced pols, listening to the likes of John Laws blame someone else for your contributions to inviting terror attacks to our own shores.

Sincerely,