Lustre comes from within, Mr Rabbit

It's okay, apparently, to compare the Prime Minister to Colonel Gaddafi, a name synonymous with derangement since my youth. But I must say I'm enjoying the way that hate speech in public life, so clearly an import from the worst and craziest of US public life and, alas, rocked in the cradle of Christianity both there and here, is being countered in Australia by an increasingly public awareness that this vile stuff is being encouraged if not orchestrated by people with money and/or power who want to hang onto both and are perfectly prepared to exploit the mean-spirited, the short-sighted, the ignorant and the unbalanced in order to do so.

I really would like to know what the motives were of the man who rang up Tony Windsor and threatened him with death. I'd like to sit him down and talk him through what he thinks and believes, and why. I'd like to ask him exactly where he got the idea that this sort of behaviour was acceptable. And I'd like to ask him whether he understands that 'tax' isn't just something 'the Guvmint' (have you noticed how Tony Abbott's pronunciation of this word becomes more strident and nasal with every passing day?) rips off you because they can; to find out whether he actually understands that the point of taxation is to make stuff, manage stuff, buy stuff and build stuff about whose absence he would be the first to complain.