Lord Mayo of Adelaide (aka Downer the “Clowner” or “Fishnets” to his friends) has been a member of the federal Parliament for 23 years & is Australia’s longest serving Foreign Minister, having held that portfolio in the rattus government for the past 11 years.

All the more remarkable that, in spite of his lengthy political experience at the most senior levels of government, Downer’s singular achievement is to be recognised as Lou Costello to John Howard’s Budd Abbott.

That Downer is a joke is beyond dispute. That his behaviour has contributed to the decline of Australia’s international standing & reputation is evident to even the most casual observer.

Lou scaled the political heights & accidentally succeeded in becoming Leader of the Opposition in 1994, a situation almost immediately reversed as a consequence of one of his more memorable gaffes, when he suggested that his party’s domestic violence policy could be called ’the things that batter”.

Compared to his Icarus-like flirtation with the coalition leadership, life as Foreign Minister has been relatively easy for Clowner, in particular given the paltry effort required to slavishly parrot whatever foreign policy line might be flavour of the day for the bush crime family, on the one hand, whilst imperiously lecturing only the weakest of other small nations on the shortcomings of their behaviour, on the other.

In the lead-up to the illegal war of aggression against Iraq, the great American cheerleader was an ardent critic of Saddam Hussein, alleging that the Iraqi government was guilty of breaching all manner of UN sanctions. How ironic then, that a few years later, Downer himself would once again face public ridicule when, at the height of the AWB scandal, it turned-out that our monopoly wheat exporter was the world’s biggest UN sanctions buster: sanctions that Fishnets, as Foreign Minister, was responsible for enforcing.

However, in spite of his success in bringing further shame & embarrassment on his country, Clowner survived the appalling scandal by steadfastly clinging to the “monkey defence”: claiming that he’d heard nothing, seen nothing & knew nothing about the affair, notwithstanding that alarm bells had been sounding for years. Of course, Lord Mayo was handed a “get-out-of-goal-free card”, along with the rest of the boys, during the public whitewash that was passed-off as an independent public enquiry into the scandal.

The coalition doctrine of ministerial accountability had been rendered irrelevant long before the AWB scandal erupted, so the fact that Downer failed to ensure that a major Australian enterprise observed international law didn’t give rise to any consequences for him & even now, not one person has been charged in connection with that major international crime.

And whilst the average person caught-up in such events might seek to spend the rest of their days in shameful seclusion - not so, Lord Mayo. The theatrical parliamentary hysteric is as renowned for his thick skin, as he is for his lack of substance. Indeed, he once said: “People I have observed who in life are successful are people that often have to endure very humiliating setbacks.” Obviously our nation’s top diplomat has the hide of an elephant & the lowest of performance expectations for himself. Perhaps Paul Keating was right when he characterised the chubby dimpled-one as “the idiot son of the aristocracy” - an obvious allusion to his privileged family upbringing in Adelaide – amongst other things.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss Clowner as just another inept, incompetent & accident-prone dill.

Quite to the contrary, Lord Mayo exhibits the same disgusting capacity for deceit & dishonesty as the rest of coalition crooks. In spite of his comical, boys-own demeanour, Clowner is as callous, calculating & devoid of morality as his cabinet colleague, Darth Ruddock, who contemptibly seeks to conceal his black soul behind his Amnesty International membership pin.

Worse, he is a self-righteous, sanctimonious & unabashed hypocrite.

Take his whingeing defence of Santo Santoro this past week, as an example.

As Mike Carlton observed: “Santoro arrogantly drove a horse & cart through the rules forbidding share trading by ministers & rocked the Government in the process. Resigning was the least he could have done, not the utmost. There are still interesting questions to be answered over the extent of his share dealings & the awarding of a lucrative franchise in nursing home beds to one of his mates in Brisbane. Santoro was a ruthless factional head-kicker, who swept all aside in his climb up the greasy, though stunted, pole of Queensland Liberal politics. In his backbench days, he was also a vindictive scourge of the ABC, obsessed with imposing his rigid template of hard-right political correctness on the national broadcaster, at great cost in public time and money.”

Clowner’s response: ”He's resigned. What more can he do? I mean, does the Labor Party want him to go out & do something even worse? Leave him alone now. He's resigned. Think about him as a human being. It's about time there was a bit more of that from the Labor Party. Does he have to be whipped & chastised more & more & more?"

As Carlton observed: “Well, yes. To see him hoist by his own greed & stupidity has given many people much pleasure.”

But that episode amounted to small change compared to Clowner’s shameful display in the Parliament last week, as he sought to blunt the Opposition’s attack on the government over Australia’s criminal involvement in the invasion & ongoing occupation of Iraq.

Said Clowner: “After four years, I think we can look back with pride & say that we made a contribution to bringing down a vicious dictator – a man who tortured & murdered his people, who used chemical weapons against his own people; a man who invaded neighbouring countries, who started a war with Iran in which a million people were killed. We are proud that we contributed to destroying that regime.”

And no, Clowner isn’t referring to bushit. In spite of the fact that his behaviour is consistent with the very best of dictators; in spite of the fact that the chemical weapons allegedly used by Saddam were supplied by the US; in spite of the fact that Iraq’s war with Iran was a proxy war for the US; in spite of the fact that the US & its coalition partners, including Australia, fabricated excuses to justify an illegal war of aggression against another sovereign nation, as a pretext to the blatant expropriation of its resources; in spite of the fact that the US itself deliberately engages in torture, forever stained by its crimes at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay & numerous other secret prison camps scattered around the globe. Oh, & as to the small matter of “destroying that regime”, wouldn’t it be more accurate to claim responsibility for destroying the whole country of Iraq; the most advanced secular society in the middle east - before we got through with it?

Foul, gloating, self-righteous hypocrisy: par excellence.

And on & on he went - indignantly defending the indefensible.

But Fishnets was only warming up.

The hypocritical shrill then had this to say: “I must say I have a great deal of admiration for those who have the courage to take up the fight to those terrorists, & I do not have any admiration for people who think the solution is to run away.”

Such noble sentiments from someone who conspired to perpetrate a war crime but has never participated in a war. Indeed, Lord Mayo absented himself from Australia during the last great illegal US military enterprise that the Americans dragged Australia into – also predicated on a conspiracy of lies – Vietnam, thereby missing the opportunity to participate in the draft that sent 500 of his fellow countrymen to their deaths.

Then he told the House this: “Some terrorists abducted two children in a car. They drove this car full of bombs into a crowded area. They left the children in the car because the children gave them the opportunity to get the car through security – security people did not think a car with children would be a problem. The terrorists ran away from the car, they detonated the bombs & they killed the children in an attempt to kill other people as well. These are not the sorts of people that we on this side of the House would ever want to give in to. We would never want to let people like that win. We would never want to see people as depraved as that victorious.”

We can surely only agree that the perpetrators of this foul murder are unworthy of our sympathy & support. But if the commission of that a crime is such a great evil, then how should we judge Lord Clowner & his fellow co-conspirators for their actions: actions that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children?

On March 22, an article called Four Years: One Million Iraqi Deaths, by Gideon Polya, was published in Countercurrents.

To quote from that article: “In December 2004 in an article entitled Non-Reportage Of Mass Murder, I gave estimates of post-invasion Iraqi under-5 infants deaths and excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen), QUOTE: “The latest updated UNICEF report (December 2004) reveals massive under-5 infant mortality in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan totalling over 0.4 million for the year 2003. However Anglo-American-dominated global media will simply not report this horrendous mortality in these US-occupied countries…

In late October 2004 the prestigious UK medical journal The Lancet published an expert study with data indicating a post-invasion excess mortality of up to about 300,000 (ie: 180,000 per year). However there was only limited subsequent mainstream media reportage of a lower estimate of post-invasion excess mortality of 100,000 (arrived at by deleting mortality data from the Fallujah area as being unrepresentative)…

My calculations published in Australasian Science in June 2004 indicated that since the beginning of US-UK attacks in 1991 the excess mortality in Iraq had been 1.5 million and the under-5 infant mortality 1.2 million. My conservative estimate that excess mortality and under-5 infant mortality were of the order of 100,000 per year since the final invasion in March 2003 is consonant with the latest UNICEF report (December 2004) and the data in The Lancet paper (late October 2004).”

It is now the Fourth Anniversary of the illegal US, UK and Australian invasion of Iraq (March 20, 2003). Mainstream media are still IGNORING the carnage – but now the post-invasion Iraqi excess deaths total 1 million.’

There is no question that the murder of the two children reported by Lord Mayo was an evil crime.

But for Lord Mayo to use the murders of those children as a justification for our country’s continuing involvement in Iraq, when he & his colleagues are responsible for creating the carnage that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, is an obscenity.

The Prime Rattus & his cabinet colleagues, including Lord Mayo, would have us believe that their resolve in continuing Australia’s involvement in Iraq is all about winning the “war on terra”; protecting our values & delivering us from evil.

If there is a “war on terra”, then surely it exists only because they & their bushit benefactors have poked & provoked others to the point where they must resist.

And if the sustained criminal violence visited on the peoples of the middle east by the great powers is being perpetrated to “protect our values”, then surely they are hardly worth defending.

As to delivering us from evil, we need only look to ridding ourselves of politicians like Lord Mayo to begin that task.