Today in Unfuckingbelievable, noted orator Prime Minister Tony Abbott has this afternoon made his second – count ’em, two; one and two – Nazi-related gaffe in as many months, invoking the Holocaust through the brainless, facile, wholly insensitive and entirely fuckheaded comparison of Opposition Leader Bill Shorten to Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.
Abbott’s exact words were “[Shorten is] the Dr. Goebbels of economic policy”; Goebbels wasn’t even the Reich’s economics minister. Abbott then withdrew his remarks – too little, too late, buddy – and apologised for “using that phrase.”
See? Unfuckingbelievable.
In the ensuing uproar, during which cabinet members did little bit smirk, Labor frontbencher Mark Dreyfus – who, by the way, is Jewish and whose father, composer George Dreyfus, fled the Nazi Regime at age eleven – was kicked out by Speaker Bronwyn Bishop for disorderly conduct.
The Guardian add that Michael Danby, another Jewish Labor MP, also left the chamber in protest; Danby has since told the ABC that the Prime Minister “can slag us as much as he likes but it is silly to use an example of the ultimate evil in politics. He’s the Prime Minister – he is supposed to have standards.”
Prior to that, Labor frontbencher Tony Burke attempted to appeal to Bishop’s better nature, asking that she not expel Dreyfus in the interest of the house to no avail. Unfortunately, Bishop is without better nature. As is our Prime Minister, who has repeatedly demonstrated a disturbing propensity for invoking one of history’s darkest periods with neither redress nor regret.
Unfuckingbelievable.
