i love a good smear campaign

so apparently mark latham once hit a guy, cheated on his wife and had a raunchy buck's night. this is unfortunate. unfortunate for the guy he may have hit, the woman he may have cheated on, and...well...i'm not quite sure who was hurt by the buck's night (perhaps some poor medical student who had to take a sexually exploitative job because youth allowance just wasn't enough to pay her bills.) these alleged incidents however have nothing to do with the rest of us, and certainly have no bearing on the man's ability to run this country.

perhaps if he'd sent a whole bunch of young australians to a foreign country to kill innocent people and die themselves in a ridiculous "war" in order to demonstrate his eternal love and devotion to a texan fool masquerading as the us president, then i'd question his prime-ministerial abilities.

if he consistently refused to acknowledge that the cycles of disadvantage experienced by the aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples are the direct result of bad government policies of both the past and present, and if he decided that it just wasn't a matter he could be bothered addressing any more, then i probably wouldn't vote for him.

and i imagine that if he was responsible for inflating the cost of education to such an extent that university degrees became akin to luxury consumer goods, affordable only to the upper stratum of society, then i might be forced to write bad poetry about him on public toilet walls.

hmm. i'll admit i'm still wary of latham's politics and unsure of his suitabilty for the role of pm, but does anyone else see the irony of the situation? maybe i should ask bill clinton when he finishes his book tour.