Some Latham stuff

As you might expect, Clarke & Dawe's take on Latham is an instant classic. See it here if you missed it last night. (I heard it replayed twice on ABC local radio today.)

The simplest, but most accurate, cartoon about the diaries is probably this one here.

On a more serious note, you would have to wonder about how dire his mental state would be if his wife ever leaves him, given how much he goes on about the joy of being with his kids. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it seems hard to believe that the contents of the diaries could do anything other than harm his wife's opinion of him. (To be fair, I have not read it, because I don't want to financially reward him.) But even if everything else in the book is not so bad, Andrew Bolt's list of the worst bits is bad enough. It would seem from some of the extracts that he is, in many respects, incredibly shallow. This extract quoted in Bolt's column floored me:

"Anderson found his own (Christian) faith as a young man when he accidentally killed his sister with a misdirected cricket shot to the head.

"Poor old Ando, he should have just played a straight bat and ignored all this pagan idolatry, masquerading as religion, all those kiddie-fiddlers masquerading as priests."

But of course, before the election, he was having to pretend to be not hostile to religion.
Look at this Compass interview from last year. Some extracts:

"Mark Latham:
No I don’t find it in religion myself. It’s more just in the interaction between people, the desire to be a social animal, a social person, a social being. And you’re really wanting to live your life with positive messages from other people. You couldn’t live your life in isolation. Our whole existence I think comes from the gratification of helping others and then having that assistance reciprocated. And it’s that two-way flow of helping people that – a caring for people, loving for people, that I think gives us the greatest joy in life. "

Geraldine Doogue:
So it’s a sort of humanism?

Mark Latham:
Yeah, I’m a humanist, yeah that’s a good description of my philosophy. It’s the human desire to want to be part of society. What does that mean? It means a society where we build self-esteem by helping others and then having that assistance reciprocated. "

I may be wrong, but it seemed to me he only just realised he was a humanist when Geraldine suggested it....

And he certainly knows how to spread the love around at the moment.

"Geraldine Doogue:
You were also in the past, I’ll quote you: “I’m a hater”. This was 2002. “Part of the tribalness of politics is to really dislike the other side with intensity”.

Mark Latham:
Yeah, that was an interview with Maxine McKew where we were talking about public housing cuts and the abolition of the better cities program in my electorate. And I started talking about how I hated what the government had done in policy terms to disadvantage my own constituency. So I suppose it flowed into a more personal description that I wouldn’t repeat now and probably wrong to express it that way at the time. I think you can have strong emotions in politics but it’s best to stick them, keep them to outcomes that matter for other people rather than the things about yourself. Probably hating others is a very corrosive thing in public life and a sign they might have got the better of you."

Irony of the highest order...

"Geraldine Doogue:
Do you see yourself as a Christian?

Mark Latham:
No, I’m agnostic. I think there’s a force, a spiritual world beyond the material. But I’m not in a position to define it, let alone put it into a certain form of religious practice.

Geraldine Doogue:
Are you curious about it?

Mark Latham:
Yeah I am, I am. I’m curious about it and at different times in my life I feel like I’ve had maybe an inkling of a connection to it...."

I saw this on TV, and thought at the time that he looked extremely unconvincing as he said it. I had more than an inkling of an attempt to suck up to the Compass audience.

What a pathetic character to have come within a few percentage points of being our PM.

I am hoping some blogger will extract further appalling bits from the book, so I don't have to buy it.