pressure down up

Blood pressure, that is.

In another of her typical efforts at eliding the truth to suit her extreme views, Miranda Devine manages to confuse so many elements in this piece railing against Jon Stanhope's nomination of Terry Hicks as Father of the Year it's hard to know where to start.

A "cult" that has grown around David Hicks? He is being "sanctified?" No, just an increasing number of people who have woken up that he is a political prisoner. Get him in open court, get the facts out. And why would Australian youths be seeking to emulate him, given his treatment by his own government? She's a dill, but that's no impediment to earning a living as an opinion writer, I realise.

Then Devine slides artfully into a review of Flight 93, just to confuse those who may have forgotten that any alleged links between what Hicks may or may not have been doing - with the Taliban, remember - and the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States, are yet to be proven.

However, her most egregious error is to sign off with "Lest we Forget". That should reel 'em in, eh Miranda? Draw some inference between the awful Mr Hicks and our fine diggers?

Oh, how I wish the old man was still here so I could get him going on this one. Because one of his main objections to the glorification of war in this country was the (in his view) misappropriation by the RSL of that particular phrase from Kipling's "Recessional". I wish I had a quid for every time I had to listen to him ranting that the poem was all about regret at England's loss of empire and nothing at all to do with honouring those who lost their lives in war. He was quite monomaniacal about it and it was, I believe, the reason he never joined the RSL. See this article, he was pretty much on the money.

Finally, from everything I read that is happening in Canberra recently, Stanhope appears to be a grade-A dill. If he really wanted to get Terry Hicks up, he should have organised for someone else to nominate him, because his own nomination is such an easy target.