The rage of Greg Sheridan

Look out, Greg Sheridan appears to have been into the cooking sherry again! I'd suggest something else, but it can't be, because Shero frequently declares his loathing of anything that entered popular culture between about 1959 and 1975, including the dreaded weed and other mind-altering substances.

This morning's Review section of The Australian carries a positively deranged rant against the 1960s and anyone who wasn't a decent, god-fearing supporter of continuing to slaughter Vietnamese in those tumultuous times.

The flimsy pretext for this extraordinary outpouring is that our new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, is a lukewarm devotee of a 2000-odd year-old crucifixion death cult surrounding a Palestinian carpenter. This, it seems, is some consolation for a ranter whose world is in ruins after the revelation in the recent elections that hardly anyone takes much notice of what Sheridan and his mates write in their sinecures as columnists for Australia's duopolised daily print media.

The closet Liberals of the Quadrant supplement of The Australian (laughingly referred to by some as the op-ed page) campaigned with all their might for Howard's Liberals in the recent elections, and the silly voters ignored them.

Now, as a result, we must suffer the rage of Greg Sheridan against what really gets his goat: the fact that when it has really mattered, all his life, he has been on the wrong side. He supported killing Vietnamese in the name of the American Century, he was against the liberation of women from domestic servitude, he thought it was impolite to reject mindless subservience to arbitrary authority, and the list could go on.

For a while, during the ascendancy of the neoliberals and neocons, it looked like the tide had finally turned, and the crowing of Sheridan and his mates became almost deafening, but now it's all coming undone. The US occupation of Iraq has turned into a disaster and the neocons are out of favour, the world capitalist economy is sinking into one of its periodic crises and the neolibs are looking a bit green around the gills, young women show no signs of wanting to return to the days when the kitchen sink and the bedroom defined the boundaries of their lives, it's no longer possible to rely on conscript armies to slaughter misguided opponents of imperial grandeur, and above all no on thinks much of the greatness of John Winston Howard and his good friend George W. Bush.

Promoting the latter was the highlight of Sheridan's sorry life. Howard was said to be the greatest PM ever. Sheridan's hero was the man whose government left desperate refugees to drown (SIEV X), set up concentration camps for other refugees, lied to us about the reasons for going to war in Iraq against majority opinion, stripped away protection for the wages and working conditions of millions, and much more.

And this tawdry propagandist presumes to deliver lectures on morality. He's got a nerve.