Fitzy the Boofhead is arcing up again. He's so emotional this guy. He just goes for it hell for leather - and damn the bloody consequences! - like he used to on the rugger field in his youth. Quite lively and amusng, but is it, er, appropriate for the opinion pages of a major newspaper?

In this piece he cracks the shits with John Howard, wheeling out the ol' "arselicker" angle. Yet, predictably, he expresses teenybopper-like adoration for Clinton, as all fluffs do.

Hey, but didn't Bill order a coupla bombing runs of Baghdad back in the late 90's? Oh, well, it had UN approval or something, so it was okay. Or, we know he was doing it for the right reasons, so we'll trust his good judgement, etc.

The Boofster concludes with these paragraphs, which predict the Government's grovelling behaviour in the hypothetical case of Howard Dean being elected prez, and yanking the troops out of Iraq: "Do John Howard, Alexander Downer, et al, then do a screaming U-turn and declare that is exactly what they were thinking, precisely the policy they were going to propose and, come to think of it, just about everything Dean says makes them want to leap to their feet with acclamation?

"Do we have no gravitas of our own?"

Well this ain't gonna happen - that Howard Dean bloke's got a butterfly's chance in hell, I reckon - but still, you could easily flip this scenario the other way around to illustrate fluffy wuffy hypocrisy.

That is, if a Howard Dean (or a Hillary Clinton?) were to become president and, surprisingly, keep the troops in Iraq, and seriously continue to wage the war on terror, "Do Peter FitzSimons, Anne Summers, et al, then do a screaming U-turn and declare that is exactly what they were thinking, precisely the policy they were going to propose and, come to think of it, just about everything Dean says makes them want to leap to their feet with acclamation?

"Do they have no gravitas of their own?"

Answer to the first question: Yes, they will, of course. And they'll also probably burst into tears of joy, then happily offer to kiss the guy's butt and clean out his limo with their tongues!

Answer to the second: Nope. They don't. Not even a friggin' scintilla.

Damn fluffs. They shit me big time.