Weird blindness of the Right

What fun it is to watch the outrage of frustrated Abbott lovers (and Turnbull haters - he believes in global warming, after all) over the Niki Savva book.   (Which, it would seem, has been selling like hotcakes.  I'm even tempted myself.)

Rowan Dean, about the most obnoxious of right wing warrior commentators in Australia at the moment, is quoted by Bolt as writing:

Moreover, in interviews Ms Savva has repeatedly trotted out the claim that Ms Credlin attempted to have herself and Peter van Onselen fired from the Australian (an irrelevance given they are both still there), as an excuse for not following the normal procedure of putting allegations of an affair to her two subjects prior to publication.

Um, it's more than "a claim":  in the Australian this morning she has the communication from then editor Mitchell confirming that not only had Credlin demanded it, but Abbott was on the case too!

And, quite frankly, your average person might think it is a pretty damn good reason for a writer not to bother asking them about an affair, especially when the claim in the book is not even that there were having one, but that a large slab of their own party thought it looked that way and that it was causing problems within the government.  (And Abbott's - and I think Credlin's? -  denials to the messenger is in the book too.)    Working up indignation about her not asking them is therefore just piffle.

As for the hypocrisy of all of this - a word Bolt is flinging around with his lack of insight - I thought Righties considered it an outrage when Gillard did her nut at The Australian for running a Milne piece which contained a claim that had previously been nixed by their lawyers as defamatory.   We don't know if she asked for his sacking, but he got sacked, and then this was supposed to be the biggest outrage to freedom of speech ever.

Now, clear evidence that Credlin (and possibly Abbott) was specifically telling Mitchell to sack Savva for her reporting unfriendly stories, and we're supposed to feel sorry for Peta??

Gillard, as her reward for being uppity about a report she didn't like, got a plethora of Right wing purely politically motivated witch hunting lasting years over allegations involving her love life  20 years ago, which had already been aired and denied about (I think) 12 years ago, and which Bolt chose to help re-publicise.   The end result was always predictable - if none of her internal enemies had evidence 12 years ago, they were hardly likely to turn it up now.  And the relevance of this to how she was doing her job now - precisely nil.   (The relevance of the Abbott/Credlin relationship - huge within his own party, right now.)  The only good thing to come out of it was the utter humiliation of Michael Smith.

The right wing pundits are absurd.   (Oh, and to be fair, so is Bernard Keane on this.  He's way off mark on this.)