The Latham v Howes spectacular! It's got more tit for tat than a topless tattoo parlour

Mark Latham takes union leader Paul Howes at face value in The Spectator Australia yesterday:

IN Howes's world, ideological consistency is a vice while careerist opportunism is a virtue. He claims to have left the Trots because of their suppression of political freedoms and free-thinking. His answer was to join the NSW Right faction of the Labor Party. This conversion, however, has had an unlikely upside. One of the unwritten rules of political activism is that all Trots are ugly. Aesthetically there is something to be said for turning them into faceless men . . . Howes has benefited from this transition.

Preferred the book then, Mark?

HIS Confessions [of a Faceless Man], nonetheless, are a jumbled mess . . . I have never been to a Trot meeting, but they must give their underlings a crash course in dissembling, so much so that Howes consistently dissembles against himself.

Enough Trots. Can Latham get Trotsky's comrade-in-chief into The Spectator as well? Yes, he can:

IT is sometimes said Lenin used the expression "useful idiots" to describe the trade union leaders of the West. This is how I feel about Howes. In his avalanche of interviews, newspaper articles and books, he provides great copy for columnists who write about the Labor side of politics. His comments are so contrived, contradictory and, more often than not, plain stupid, that he adds instant colour to a piece.

Howes in Confessions of a Faceless Man:

I WOULD have given good money to see Mark Latham tasered.

Bob Brown in parliament on Wednesday:

JAMES Hansen, the chief scientist for NASA in the US, who drew the impact of climate change so clearly to congress's attention in 1988, describes as criminals people who open coalmines like this and transport the coal to be burned.

Hansen in The Guardian, February 15 last year:

THE trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains . . . The German and Australian governments pretend to be green . . . The Australian government was elected on a platform of solving the climate problem, but then, with the help of industry, it set emission targets so high as to guarantee untold disasters for the young, let alone the unborn. These governments are not green. They are black, coal black.

Hansen testifying to the Iowa Utilities Board, October 22, 2007:

IF we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains, no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.

Then US National Mining Association chief Kraig Naasz in 2007:

THE suggestion that coal utilisation for electricity generation can be equated with the systematic extermination of European Jewry is both repellent and preposterous. Your advocacy on behalf of global warming is ill-served by an invidious comparison that manages not only to trivialise the suffering of millions but undermines your credibility as a rational observer of a complex phenomenon. Your suggestion that an additional coal-based power plant here in America could somehow constitute a tipping point in the build-up of greenhouse gases, while China builds a new plant each week, defies common sense. I believe you owe the hard-working men and women of both the coalmining and railroad industries an apology and respectfully request that you refrain from making such comments in the future.

Ain't too proud to beg. Mark Scott shares Aunty's dirty collaborators' secret at the Screen Producers Association of Australia conference in Sydney on Wednesday:

I THINK you've got to couch the arguments in terms of what we are in a unique position to deliver that is in the interests of the government of the day.

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