The Weaselversary Post

This Week The Age is running a series on ten years of the Howard government. The general consensus seems to be that Howard owes his electoral success to low interest rates, low interest rates and low interest rates. Over at The Hun, Andrew Bolt has put a little more effort into analysing the Weasel's political success:

It seems Labor, at least, has finally learned not to be goaded into stupidity -- into monstering Howard just for saying an obvious truth, but one not endorsed by dinner-party moralists and snow-field socialists.

Of course, it should have learned this lesson long ago -- in 1996, when Howard won his first election.

That's pretty telling in my book - Howard is pretty much an expert at goading his political opponents into stupidity. It's also something of an unwitting self-revelation on Andy's part - when you come down to it, this is why he admires the little bugger. So much so, that he reckons:

LOOKING back over Howard's 10 years of government, it is in fact hard to spot anything he should be downright ashamed of having said.

That's not to say he hasn't made mistakes -- whether claiming children were thrown overboard or believing Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction.

And looking back over Andy's columns, you'd find it hard to spot anything he should be downright ashamed of having said either - most of that stuff has disappeared down the pay-per-view memory hole. But the page does feature an advertisement for an upcoming collection of Andrew's "best" columns under the title still not sorry.