Hmm, Attention Deficit Disorder, the leading public health menace in world politics today.
Carl ******************************************************
The country was pretty much divided down the middle on the war, just as it was on the election. Howard got less than 50% of the vote. His National friends got some more to add to the Coalition. That Family First Party is a worry. They're basically the tip of the Christian fundamentalist iceberg coming to the organized surface.
The ideological bottomline was that people down here voted for Howard because they see him as a strong leader who has gotten Australia on the radar of the world. Some people down here worry about that. There was the Australians don't "cut and run" rhetoric which got a lot of Ozaryians in a macho-nationalist tizzy, as Latham's Labor Party was going to withdraw Aussie troops from Iraq before X-mas.
Then of course, there was the economic bottomline. The Liberals kept hitting Latham with the "interest rates will rise!" club--even though Labor trotted out its own experts to say that that there wouldn't be any diff between the parties being elected vis a vis interest rates.
Still, fear and loathing of change--as usual--brought the conservative out in majority --not that much of a majority--of Aussie "souls".
Regards, Mike B)
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===== "In the shadow of its own incomplete emancipation the bourgeois consciousness must fear to be annulled by a more advanced consciousness; not being the whole freedom, it senses that it can produce only a caricature of freedom-- hence its theoretical expansion of its autonomy into a system similar to its own coercive mechanisms."
Adorno, NEGATIVE DIALECTICS
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