Facts Got In The Way

AT THE furthest reaches of abstract theory it is just possible to feel a little sympathy, even admiration, for drug dealers, whose entrepreneurial successes owe much more to prohibition’s market distortions than their customers’ weakness of character. The reality puts pay to that outlaw romanticism, of course, and if it didn’t, then the former spectacle of Tony Mokbel tooling loudly down Port Melbourne’s streets of a Saturday morning in his Ferrari did so in practice.  It is one thing to understand that demand will always be satisfied, quite another to accept that loud exhausts and the ugliest variety of look-at-me woggery are the incidental costs imposed on the law-abiding rest of us.

And there is another reason to detest drug dealers, particularly if you are a left-leaning chin-stroker. According to this morning’s newspapers, the home of Victorian state MP Lorraine Wreford was sprayed with bullets. Oh, how hearts must have soared in Fairfax and ABC newsrooms as word of the incident came in.

A female MP shot at! Our own Giffords, surely? Who could it have been? Billy tea partiers, talk-back listeners, Andrew Bolt readers? Quick, you can almost hear the commissioning editors screaming, get me one of the writers at Andrew Jaspan’s vanity press, someone who can pin this on Alan Jones, Tony Abbott and Viscount Monckton. The Norwegian disease, it’s here! It’s here! Run for your lives to the nearest argument for censorship and gagging. Poor David Marr was probably 4,000 words into another denunciation of John Howard and his coarsening of Australia’s ethical fabric before the order came down to set the keyboard aside.

Turns out Ms Wreford is a Liberal, and that the shots were allegedly inspired by one of her children’s refusal to pay a Mokbel imitator some $5000 in drug debts.

Ah, well, tomorrow is another day. There’s an anti-carbon tax rally coming up in Canberra in a week so, so it is not as if all that the thwarted fulminating and finger-pointing will go to waste. A Ditch The Witch sign, some angry and ill-advised words from a random member of the crowd – either will be enough to crank start the stalled engine of the New Establishment’s collective outrage.

And that is the big difference between drug dealers and lamestream pundits. People still want the formers’ dope, but as all the polls, declining circulations and Old Media stock prices attest, the citizenry has had enough of dopes.
 
A NOTE: No more posts until tonight at the earliest. Global warming has granted Melbourne a sunny, beautiful day, so it is off to Imperial Bearbrass for 18 holes.