Foot in mouth, Jules pulls finger out
Date February 3, 2013 Category Opinion
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John Birmingham
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Illustration: Reg Lynch
What was Julia Gillard thinking? I’ll tell you what she was thinking: ”Omigod, no, Tim, not the one about the Asian doctor lady finger, nooooooo …”
And so, we’re all off to an election two-hundred-and-umpty-something days from now because if the Orange Roughy hadn’t come up with a suitable diversion the very internet itself would have melted into a glowing slagheap with the ferocious stupidity of the reaction to the First Bloke’s somewhat stupid but kind of snort-worthy little off-joke.
I feel for the Bloke, who’s probably a red-hot goer in the conversational biz when he’s standing behind you with a pair of sheep shears and you’re safely strapped into your barber chair. But like most human beings who fear public speaking more than death itself, the Bloke made the crucial mistake of going off-script in a moment of terror.
And then there we were, all perched over his writhing carcass as it glistened with panic sweat, ready to hack and tear away at it like vultures. All this fiasco needed to reach escape velocity was a great crisis moniker. I wanted ”Dategate” but none of my so-called colleagues were interested, so now we have the longest election campaign in the history of everything because Julia Gillard had to do something to pull his finger out of places it shouldn’ta oughta been.
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Nice to see, then, that the most notable reaction to her overreaction in setting out on this Long March was an immediate power dive into utter madness, with Malcolm Turnbull tweeting that the date was an affront to Jewish voters everywhere because the election would totally bork this year’s Yom Kippur celebrations. Shame, Roughy, shame. Turnbull may possibly have been extracting the urine but if so he was shaded by Twitter’s ShockJockWatch quoting the talkback caller who complained that the Roughy chose ”a Jewish holiday but would she have chosen an Islamic holiday?” It’s all downhill from here, my friends.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/foot-in-mouth-jules-pulls-finger-out-20130202-2dr3e.html#ixzz2JpAzROm4