the wheat of the moment

It's interesting to see Tim Blair ("Australia's funniest/most popular blogger!") lambasting Michael Leunig for focusing on the wheat scandal instead of drawing cartoons about the beleaguered Danish cartoonists. Look, the Mohammed cartoons issue is also very interesting and important, but I can't believe Blair can't even manage the slightest bit of outrage at the idea that our Government either knew and lied about it or turned a blind eye to transferring funds to a regime we were risking Australian lives to overthrow. It just makes the mind boggle at how the Government thought it could sweep this one under the carpet. Like Tim Dunlop I was surprised to see Murdoch's usually pro-Howard Australian run such a savage editorial. It made up the pathetic one I read a few weeks ago which lavished praise on John Howard for invading Iraq while niftily avoiding a single mention of the word "war". Instead, it was all about our wonderful "engagement" with Iraq on humanitarian grounds. One thing I've never understood is how the pro-war Right can turn a blind eye to other dictatorships around the world who we really should be invading and liberating. FOr example, when I heard on the news that a million Nigerians had "disappeared" in a year, and that people were "surviving on insects", I had to ask myself why people like Tim Blair weren't trumpeting about how we should invade Nigeria on humanitarian grounds, which is what the Iraq adventure has been post-emptively reframed as by the Right.
The whole thing makes me sick about our Government. And it makes me wonder just exactly what else is going on out there that John Howard doesn't know about, or doesn't care to know about.
By the way, I don't think the famous nickname "Rat" suits Howard nearly so much as "Ostrich" would.