…there is no arc between Left and Right – the extremes of both tend to huddle together at the collectivist end of a line that has anarchy at the other. I’m somewhere in the middle, moderate as always, trying to balance the claims of individuality and freedom with the ballast of the collective.
Bolt celebrates his own milestone by summarising the wisdom he has collected over those years, while simultaneously recounting all of the battles against evil that he single-handedly fought and won:
For instance, if I hadn’t filled this space with columns warning that then Labor leader Mark Latham had character flaws that could “completely destroy not just Latham, but Labor”, you’d almost certainly have had to read the exact opposite, given almost every other columnist supported him.
…
Being of Dutch migrants, I was raised to respect authority. So imagine my astonishment when I checked the most basic claim of this campaign.
In fact, only two countries had “safe” injecting rooms, as well as other get-soft policies, and in Switzerland the overdose deaths had then tripled.
…
Here, for instance, are some of the facts which I found the more fashionable journalists refusing to report for fear the truth would destroy their Truth.
- The world stopped warming in 1998.
…
At first I was angry that such basic truths could be brushed aside for the sake of a “good” cause.
Now I mind less. I’ve found that if I report the simple facts that most journalists won’t, it will make me seem a genius. Fame couldn’t be easier.
…
So I put together pieces soberly showing that the first “stolen generations” claims had no evidence to back them. Just the facts, ma’am.
The first claim for compensation? In 1999, I showed it was lodged by a man, Peter Gunner, who’d in fact been sent away by his mother for an education.
The “stolen” Lowitja O’Donohue? As long ago as 2001 I showed she’d in fact been abandoned, which O’Donoghue then admitted.
…
I started to call Prof Robert Manne, the leading theorist of the “stolen generations”, its leading “propagandist” instead, and I challenged him: “Name just 10 truly ‘stolen’ children.”
It’s a shame that Bolt had to spend so much time outlining the achievements of his career as a columnist. His place in the world could be summarised with a few lines from a show that used to be on TV:
In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.
NB: The unsettling implication of this is that Tim Blair must be Faith, the somewhat more erratic and juvenile Slayer who must have been chosen while Bolt was momentarily brain-dead. It is beyond my capacity to contemplate that Blair could be as sexy as Faith, so instead I posit that he must be Kendra, and at some point in the future will be replaced by a new Slayer after an unfortunate incident with an undead polar bear.
