Whip me harder sir! The AFR finds the only Aussie to enjoy a thrashing from the Poms

AND who also sees the silver lining in the storm clouds drenching Queensland.

Geoffrey Barker in the Australian Financial Review yesterday:

ENGLAND's thrashing of the Australian cricket team and the Queensland flood crisis could be among the best things to have happened to this country for years. They are an opportunity for Australians to start to understand that sporting success is not the measure of national greatness. For too long sports have been the opiate of the Australian masses. Millions throng to arenas and TV screens with beer, scarves and silly "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie" shouts to express and to demonstrate vulgar nationalism based in athletic success. Governments don't need to spend millions of dollars subsidising athletes who wrap themselves in the flag and whack or kick balls, or who run and jump and swim for tinsel medals, at the interminable international "meets" now held around the world. Australians like Patrick White, Nellie Melba, Joan Sutherland, Geoffrey Rush and many more define and shape our nation in ways that are beyond the limited imaginations of sportsmen and sports fans with their banners and chants.

More pain please. Hugh Mackay in The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday:

IN 2009 we were braced for economic catastrophe, and then, suddenly, we were bragging about being the strongest-performing economy in the West. Strange as it may sound, we might have done better, psychologically, to have suffered a bit more, and got over it, rather than having been promised a crisis that never arrived.

E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post:

LET's begin by being honest. In the late 1960s, violent talk (and sometimes violence itself) was more common on the far Left. But since President Obama's election, it is incontestable that significant parts of the American far Right have adopted a language of revolutionary violence in the name of overthrowing "tyranny". And, yes, it was [Sarah] Palin who put those gun sights over the districts of the Democrats she was trying to defeat, including Giffords.

BBC News, September 1, 2006:

THE Republican Party in Texas has said it is "shocking" and "disturbing" that a TV drama is to depict the assassination of US President [George] Bush. Death of a President uses archive footage, actors and computer effects to portray the president being shot dead. Peter Dale, head of More4, described it as a "thought-provoking critique" of contemporary US society.

Frank Lovece in Film Journal International:

[CONDEMNATION of Death of a President, about the assassination of George W. Bush] by politicians and pundits from James Pinkerton to Hillary Clinton is understandable and completely predictable. [But] none of them seriously believes that this work of fiction will really make someone take a potshot at the president, and anyway, the attempt on president Ronald Reagan's life came out of a crazy guy's fascination with Jodie Foster, so you may as well decry movies starring blonde former child actresses.

Stephen Cole in Toronto's Globe and Mail on Friday:

SHLOMI Eldar, Gaza correspondent for Israel's Channel 10 News, [made] Precious Life, the story of a Palestinian infant with a rare and deadly disease who can only be saved by a Jewish doctor in the Tel-Hashomer Hospital in Jerusalem. Eldar reveals the child's dire situation to Israel, explaining the infant needs a $US55,000 operation. A Jewish man who lost his son in a battle with Palestinians offers to pay for the surgery. The reporter gets the infant's family through a war zone to the hospital. Asked how she feels about shaheeds (suicide bombers), [the mother says], "For you life is precious, but not for us. After Mohammed gets well, I will certainly want him to be a shaheed. If it's for Jerusalem, then there's no problem."

Fatah TV interviews a relative of a Palestinian killed laying a landmine in Gaza, December 26, 2010:

HE wanted to become a martyr for a long time. When I told him: 'Find a job', he said: 'I want to be a martyr.'

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