Cory Bernardi and his illiterate groupies

Cory Bernardi is still opposed to same-sex marriage, believing that his earlier predictions of the consequences of marriage equality would be bestiality and polygamy have come true; though how same-sex marriage between two humans could be seen as a green-light for matrimony with mammals and for swingers to be “normal” – isn’t the whole point of swinging that it is “frowned upon”, and thus a group of horny and boring people with nothing better to do than get their rocks off can throw their stones at others? Bernardi previously voiced his opposition to marriage eqaulity in September 2012, claiming that if same-sex marriage was legalised,

“The next step, quite frankly, is having three people or four people that love each other being able to enter into a permanent union endorsed by society – or any other type of relationship … there are even some creepy people out there … who say it is OK to have consensual sexual relations between humans and animals.”

before adding

“Will that be a future step? In the future will we say, ‘These two creatures love each other and maybe they should be able to be joined in a union’.

Today he’s gone one better, saying that a petition presented to Parliament by the Polyaction Amory Lobby has proved him “right”, and then deciding to hit out at the entire left (as only a Lib can) by claiming it was a Greens-endorsed group (again, as only a Lib can do), and that bestiality and polyamory are part of the Greens “radical agenda”.

Bernardi is well known for subscribing not to the loony left but  – even worse – the loony right, once again proving that the Liberal Party should be done for false advertising. “Ah yes, but they’re only called ‘Liberal’ because they believe in a ‘free’ market’,” I’m told. Yes, and look where that’s got the world – KFC, GFC and sweet F.A.

Bernardi is a founder of the Conservative Action Network, known as CANdo, a right-wing rival to the left-leaning Get Up! group of grassroots activists. “Conservative Activist” sounds like an oxymoron to me, which reminds me: for all the talk of “well meaning liberals”, why do we never hear of “well meaning conservatives”? CANdo? More like a brat saying “shan’t”.

After a poke around on the CANdo site, there’s a page for supporters to suggest things for CANdo to campaign on. The best I’ve found is by someone called Ken Barton, “Stop This High Spending Government From Crippling Us – And Worse! (sic)”:

This crazy crazy Government, ruled by Fabians and deranged International Monetarists, must stop spending even if it means:
Stop funding the Aged Pension
Healthcare will now be 100% user pays
End all Welfare – churches will have to pick up the slack
All Education is users pays including childcare, universities etc
Armed Forces disbanded
All Foreign Aid will cease as of midnight
Close all Foregin Embassies
Sell all public buildings in Canberra and Capital Cities in first 12 months of an Abbott government
All tax revenue will go to repay the foreign debt – will take approx. 28 years to do so under this funding scenario
Until this is put into place we will have no chance of returning this society to the glory of the Howard years.

Spelling and grammar aside, it’s laughable. Yes, let’s scrap the aged pension so that Granny has to spend her twilight years begging for alms. Though the suggestion that social welfare should be junked and churches responsible for it is food for thought. For two seconds. Yeah, let the Catholic church pay all the oldies, disabled and unemployed a stipend – shouldn’t take too long, just look at how efficient they’ve been with victims of the church’s abuse getting compensated, if not finally acknowledged. And as for closing all Foregin embassies, perhaps that can wait until the nation of Foregin is established. Back to the drawing board, Ken!

In December 2011 in The Monthly, Sally Neighbour wrote a profile of Bernardi, and what I remember most of it are the quotes by unfortunately unidentified members of his own party:

“Cory is deluded,” says a Liberal Party colleague. “He is one of the least effective or important members of the parliamentary team. Cory is a person without any intellect, without any base, and he should really never have risen above the position of branch president. His right-wing macho-man act is just his way of looking as though he stands for something.”

and

“He wants to be some sort of conservative warrior but he’s not up to it intellectually,” says a Liberal associate.

Much like retiring Liberal politician Judi Moylan was widely quoted on yesterday, it’s time for the moderates in the Liberal Party to speak up, if not the party properly, to denounce the nuts who are moving inwards from the fringe; because with three months until the next election, there’s nothing worse than the thought of Cory Bernardi as President of the Senate.

UPDATE – Senator Bernardi has now claimed that his words yesterday were “taken out of context”. This article in The Australian reports on Liberal leader Tony Abbott’s sister Christine Forster, a lesbian, responding to Bernardi in a tweet. Again, another Liberal non-apology for hatred and stupidity.

Bill Cosby and his plague of arrogance

“The Offending Article”, from nypost.com

It’s time for a rant and I hope you’ll agree that we all need to speak up on this.

I’ve just read Bill Cosby’s op-ed in the New York Post – a pale imitation of the New York Times – and what he thinks is a “plague of apathy”. It’s the usual Cosby schtick: go to school, get a job, respect your elders and pull your own weight. All admirable qualities to strive for but Cosby’s now gone and thrown a clanger in the mix, saying that the only people who live up to these ideals are Black Muslims. Yes, that to have a cosy little family-centred up-bringing, we must all take note of a religion whose fundamentalist side is rooted in the patriarchy: women are nothing more than bits of meat, stonings and torture take place over a fair trial and, sorry Bill, but I’ve never known a Christian or Jew to behead others for daring to have different beliefs.

Never mind that the piece is hyperbole anyway (of course), but I’ve read it three times now and it still doesn’t make any sense. It rambles from stories of people growing up and being strung about by controlling parents to mentioning the deaths of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston and then to how we all should emulate Muslims, and that cigarettes and alcohol are more harmful than extremism.

Cosby likes to get in a snit over the smoking of cigarettes (and yes, I’m an out-and-proud chain-smoker, so have a puff on that, Bill) but didn’t cigarettes as we know them today come about after the British soldiers serving in the Crimean War were inspired by the tobacco-smoking Turkish soldiers, and how many of the Ottoman Empire’s armed forces were Muslim? Please correct me if I’m wrong, but could this not be a streak of hypocrisy on Cosby’s part?

There is no such group of “Black Muslims” – it’s instead an umbrella coterie including the Nation of Islam, United Nation of Islam and the Five-Percent Nation – not a land of “mates rates” but a splinter group of the Nation of Islam. If the Southern Poverty Law Center is against them, then shouldn’t we all? Is Mr Cosby happy to sing the alleged praises of these groups’ anti-Semitic and anti-gay and above all, racist, rhetoric?

The Nation of Islam believes that Jewish people are ‘responisble’ for ” … the filth of Hollywood that is seeding the American people …” which smacks of Joseph McCarthy’s mad reign of witchhunts and “reds under the beds”. They even believe that Hitler was “a great man” and leader Louis Farrakhan is noted as saying

“[I’m] not proud of Hitler’s evil toward Jewish people, but that’s a matter of record. Well, in a sense you could say there is a similarity in that we are rising our people up from nothing.”

Charming! The Nation of Islam even has a “Health Minister”, not just a spokesman, accusing Jewish doctors of injecting African-Americans with AIDS. Do you believe that, Mr Cosby?

The United Nation of Islam’s founder is Royall Jenkins, a guy who believes he spent time on a spaceship with angels. And yet Scientology too is based on other unbelievable sci-fi schlock and is espoused by Cosby’s fellow A-listers. And the Five-Percenters are mostly profligated by the dullest hip-hop “artists”, Wu Tang Clan, Nas and Queen Latifah.

Surprisingly the best criticism of Cosby’s half-arsed rant I’ve seen is from a Republican Congressman, Allen West of Florida, who is African-American and tweeted:

“Bill Cosby said we should [be] more like Muslims,” West wrote. “[You] mean honor killings, beheadings, suicide bombings? Hope [you’re] kidding sir.” 

Despite being before my time, The Cosby Show always looked like it was for saps anyway. Rubbish for touchy-feely wimps who need to be slapped into the real world. Come on, how could that show have beat Cheers and Roseanne in the ratings? I wonder if the Huxtable kids were schooled not just in respect and common courtesy but Sharia law, too? I’d hate to see an argument between the kids in that house. I’d also check out your own life, Bill. You’ve had quite a few lawsuits and are an adulterer yourself despite your crazed preaching like Pauline Fowler or Peggy Mitchell that family is everything.

It’s not just kids who say the darnedest things, but Bill Cosby too, and why should he get away with it?