How to Write: The Andrew Bolt Way

For the 9 or so people reading this from elsewhere in the world, Australia has a pundit named Andrew Bolt. He writes for Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper. Like conservative pundits everywhere, he's there to push a contrarian agenda. It's not about facts or right and wrong for Andrew, it's purely about left and right. Right is good, noble and pure. Left is corrupt, whiny and stupid.

Well, for this post I thought I'd give socially awkward mouth-breathers everywhere a helping hand on their road to professional punditry, and teach you to write like Andrew Bolt. To keep things timely and topical, I have chosen for this lesson, Andy-Pandy's recent article on the re-election of Barack Obama.

Warning: Andrew's article contains about as much white entitlement whining as this page does but in written form.

Are we ready? All buckled in? Good, let's begin with Andrew's lead-in.

BARACK Obama should not have been re-elected President. That he has tells us elections are now decided less by heads than hearts.

Start bold. Affirm your point immediately. This will distract people from your article only containing emotional grabs rather than facts or details. Look at it 'Barack Obama should not have been re-elected President.' Grabs you eh? You're immediately thinking 'oooh why?' His follow-up sentence 'less by heads than hearts' immediately places Andrew on a superior intellectual level. He is science, all you lesser primates are raging, erection-waving, emotion-beasts.

Of course, the whole initial paragraph is also complete and total horseshit. Obama should not have been re-elected! Why? Who knows? Why Andrew does. He's an expert. What with dropping out of uni to become a cadet reporter at The Age, he is enmeshed in the heady world of higher critical analysis. Less by heads than hearts? Well duh, that's the human race all over isn't it. Besides, some political issues are emotional - they stir passions. I doubt any one voter ever anywhere was purely clinical in deciding how to vote.

In short, Andrew's lead-in says nothing except 'Listen to me, for I am about to unchain my tumescent ego!!"

Is America better off after four years already of Obama?
More Americans – 7.9 per cent – are unemployed. The country is even deeper in debt, now totalling a frightening $16 trillion. Obama's foreign policy has left America, if anything, weaker.

By appearing to pose a question, it seems to tell you that what follows will be analysis, something that investigates the pros and cons, and delivers a shocking, but fact-based truth. Well, this is what you would think if you've never read an Andrew Bolt article before. America does indeed have 7.9% unemployment at present. There are many factors that have led to this, but perhaps the biggest and most obvious is the Global Financial Crisis, which started brewing before Obama became President. The GFC had a major and catastrophic effect on the global economy that still continues today. If you don't believe me, please by all means, travel to Greece.

The debt is also as huge as Andrew points out. Generated from predominantly 2 unbudgeted and inherited wars, as well as the various forms of economic fallout generated by the aforementioned GFC, the US does indeed have a debt problem. Stimulus attempts have been made, and attempts to raise the debt ceiling (to prevent further, more catastrophic debt, and the reduction of the US's rating) have been introduced during Obama's tenure.

Foreign policy is a dicey one. The war in Iraq is all but over, Afghanistan is winding down for a 2013-2014 withdrawal, but continuing tensions with Iran, kept on the boil by the fanatical, delusional, stupid and anti-semitic Ahmadinejad and responding sabre-rattling from Israel make for a certain amount of instability for the United States. An increase in the ethically dubious drone strikes, and the destabilisation and diffusion of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, mean that at least in the sore spot of middle east relations, things are as up in the air and unstable as they have ever been. Internationally, Obama is a preferred President, certainly to his predecessor and definitely to his recent challenger. He seems more confident, knowledgeable, erudite and charming. All emotional, subjective responses to be certain. Still the fact that he is a preferred President to who he succeeded and the man who tried to succeed him, point to the fact that the United States is really no worse than it has been in foreign relations in the past decade or so, and possibly a good amount better.

Still it's easy to string some points together, and by inference alone attribute those points to someone's deficiencies;

"Is Transylvania better off after 100 years under Dracula?"
"National blood shortages, werewolf epidemics, and a critical virgin deficiency spell doom for the bat-haunted, mountainous nation."

So it's all Dracula's fault, right? Well, not necessarily. You've not been told the causes of all these problems, only that they've been attributed to someone else. This is lazy journalism, smoke and mirrors used to deflect your attention.

Obama, who four years ago promised such a transformative presidency that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”, has plainly failed.

One thing you should know about Andrew is that he belongs to that sad, little - and dwindling every minute - clique of conspiracy theorists known as 'climate deniers'. With that in mind, he likes to sink the boot into the bollocks of climate science at the drop of a hat. Obama did campaign on climate change. Well, why not? Even from purely a strategic viewpoint, it was a vital button to out-flank the Republican candidates - the moronic Sarah Palin and the Vietnam vet-abandoning McCain. Obama has done a little but not a lot on this issue, but then again he's dealing with a Congress, House and national constituency that believe more in demonic possession, that Noah's Ark was real and alien abduction than they do in things like climate science or evolution. It's a hard ask to go from complete inactivity, if not outright resistance, to zesty action in four years. But Andrew knows this. After all, this is not a point, but a tactic. There is little actual information, analysis or evidence in his article.

Still, from all these loose inferences, Andrew hammers home his insistent, and thus far unfounded point - that Obama has failed. How? On what criteria? Considering or discounting what mitigating factors? He doesn't and cannot say.

Yet he’s back in the White House, and Republican Mitt Romney, the successful businessman and governor is not.
Worse for the US, he’s back with the same deadlock in Congress – Democrats controlling the Senate, Republicans the House – and a smaller mandate.
What the hell happened?

These three paragraphs contain no information at all, yet are structured to make it sound like there's some meat in this sandwich. Mitt Romney - a successful businessman and governor. Well, if you actually look at him, he wasn't a particularly well-liked governor, and his business success revolved around being handed a business and a lot of money, and making it a bigger business that gave him a lot more money - mainly by sending American jobs overseas. Don't get me wrong, if we consider success as purely personal, then he is successful - he became governor in defiance of all logic and reason, and became a successful businessman by crushing to death the less-well-off. But being a ruthless businessman does not make you a good President. It may have worked for Lex Luthor, but he had the benefit of being purely fictional.

Likewise, the balance of Senate and House can only be laid at the feet of those who campaigned to be a rep or a senator. Obama has no hand in the election of these people, in any more than a broad endorsement or lack thereof. The House of Reps has been solidly pilloried, even by disenchanted Republicans, for its pigheaded obstructionism. 

None of these points make the slightest appearance, despite being entirely germane to the circumstances. Instead we are faced with Superman-Obama who is somehow capable of constructing or influencing every single parameter of global socio-politico-economical activity.

In a victory this narrow almost anything can be said to have made the difference: Superstorm Sandy blowing away Romney’s momentum, the blame-Bush hangover or whatever cause you want to push.
But Obama should have been swept away so comprehensively as to make such if-buts pointless.

Again, Andrew here is not saying anything, except putting some lazy and haphazard garnish around his ego. How did Sandy blow away Romney's momentum. Maybe he shouldn't have been discussing privatising or dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency before a hurricane wiped out people's homes, maybe it was the decisive way Obama responded - mid-campaign - to the crisis, so decisively that former critic Chris Christie praised the President's actions. Maybe it was the way Romney organised a fake canned foods drive as a photo op. Who can say? If Romney had been more genuine during the catastrophe maybe Obama wouldn't have looked so comparatively good.

'The blame-Bush hangover'. Andrew's not interested in hearing criticisms of conservatives, no matter how bad they may actually be. Bush Jr was never going to be one of the great Presidents, no matter what he did. A president who enters a war is never going to be as popular as a president who ends one. Still, love him or loathe him, Bush left America in a sorry state - two unbudgeted wars, complicity in torture, the impending GFC, bought about by a decade or thereabouts of cowboy activity in the finance sector, and so much more. Andrew likes to ignore these things. If they were done by a centrist or leftist leader, he'd verbally flay the skin off you.

'Whatever cause you want to push'. Which is funny, because until this point, there's been no content in Andrew's article. Lots of vague waving and pointing, but nothing substantial. Andrew's argument so far has all the substance of an Aero bar - 'It's the bubbles of nothing that make it really something'. Instead all he's doing IS pushing a cause, the cause of conservative politics over and above any serious analysis of the issues. Obama should have lost, Andrew is helpfully telling us, because he is Obama. The well-paid adult columnist's equivalent of a child screaming 'just because!' 'Obama should have been swept away...' Why? All Andrew is offering us is hand-waving and petulant waahhh-ing, that would make any red food colouring-hyped toddler proud.

Bigger shifts help him, signalling the rise of a new kind of politics that could leave the US weaker, and us, too.
This election confirms the suspicion that the politics of seeming is trumping that of achieving. That what counts most in politicians is how voters “identify” with them, rather than what they do.
It also suggests that a culture of entitlement is eating at a culture of achievement.

Three more lines of filler. Waffle. You almost get the sense that Andrew is paid by the word. There are professional bomb disposal people who are less padded than this article. 'Bigger shifts...' like what? '...leave the US weaker, and us, too'. He seems to remember at this point, that even some of his most die-hard fans might be wondering why they should give the remotest of shits about an election in another country. 'The politics of seeming is trumping the politics of achieving' Andrew laments in his best hand stapled to forehead 'ah, me'. Of course, people do need to identify with their politicians. This is a no-brainer. You won't vote for someone if you don't feel like they synch with your views, even to a basic level. In fact, if Romney had won, Andrew's appraisal may have been true. What did Romney stand for? His debate tactics seemed to involve saying anything to dig him out of the hole he currently stood in. Even up to election eve, there was still a lot of commentary asking what Romney actually stood for. Romney is a conservative however. Andrew would never call him out on his 'politics of seeming', despite the fact that out of the two main candidates, Obama nudged ahead on sincerity, while Romney lagged behind. This isn't even partisan. I'm lukewarm on Obama personally, but I know that if both candidates made a promise, I'd be more likely to believe Obama's than Romney's.

The cultures of 'entitlement' and 'achievement' is a veiled paean to the Ayn Randian philosophy that scabbed to the Republican campaign like a cluster of syphilitic sarcoceles.

In the US conservative mindset, especially that promulgated by erstwhile VP candidate Paul Ryan, there are 'job creators' and there are 'parasites'. The job creators achieve, by becoming captains of business, letting their wealth sift in sand-sized grains through their fingers to the unwashed, poverty-stricken, slavering, greedy parasitical hordes below. Ryan is a big Randian, he would encourage his staff to read 'Atlas Shrugged'. While many workplaces may be tedious places, to be forced to read the ranting psychotic drudgery of Rand's novel is perhaps a bridge too far.

At this point Opposition Leader Tony Abbott should start to worry, since even here a Prime Minister’s vicious speech on alleged misogyny counts for more among many women than the waste of billions of their dollars.

Crossing over to the nation in which his audience is found, Andrew naturally tries to hitch his tottering, rickety wagon to the bewildered horse of Australian politics. 

'Vicious speech' and 'alleged misogyny'. See here's a valuable lesson in being completely biased and partisan while attempting to look neutral. There are three ways you could present the ear-bashing PM Julia Gillard gave Opposition Leader Tony Abbott some weeks ago;

1) The Prime Minister's condemnation of the Opposition Leader's history of misogyny. (partisan to the PM, as it states the misogyny as fact and the speech against it as vindicating)

2) The Prime Minister's vicious speech on alleged misogyny. (partisan to the Opposition Leader as it characterises the PM's speech as vicious, while claiming the misogyny is only 'alleged', ie it might not have happened.)

3) The Prime Minister's rebuttal of the Opposition Leader's perceived misogyny. (This is more or less neutral. A rebuttal carries no emotional overtone, and to call the misogyny 'perceived' means that it's true for some but not true for others - playing it both ways to be safe).

Of course, a journalist may choose the neutral option, but Andrew's not a journalist, he's a talking head, an op-ed writer, a pundit, and he will always - ALWAYS - choose the partisan option. Now I'm partisan like fuck, but then again, I don't call myself any of those things, let alone a journalist. I'm a blogger, for better or worse.

He also chooses to omit that Gillard's (I believe thoroughly justified) tirade against Abbott's misogyny, was not necessarily an 'OMG! She's just the best!!' moment for all women everywhere. Some women had a 'wooot!' moment to be sure, others saw it as a continuation of the bullshit nosedive our parliamentary discourse is taking, and others smirked a bit while realising that her verbal smackdown also came on the back of a cut to single mother payments. The lumping together of women as one homogenous bloc is something conservative male commentators do all the time, largely without thinking.

Please note also the nebulous wasting of billions of dollars that is not explained or defined, just thrown out as bait for the predictably reactionary. Ask them, billions of dollars on what? 'Like... the carbon tax... and... and poofs and all that!' Cheap bait for dumb fish.

What dragged Romney down was, first of all, a ferocious ad campaign attacking him as a rapacious venture capitalist from a privileged white rich background. He was not a man who could understand voters’ concerns.
He was also attacked for having a “woman problem”, made worse when one Republican Senate candidate claimed women in a “legitimate rape” did not conceive, while another, on the other hairy hand, opined that a pregnancy in a rape was "God’s will". (Both candidates lost elections they were tipped to win.)

Romney IS a rapacious venture capitalist from a privileged white background. He proved, with his own words, that very same image when he derided just under half the nation as parasites. It is not that some advertisements made this up about him, but that the advertisements jibed with an impression he gave of his own accord. If Romney was attacked as having a 'woman problem', it was because he was tarred with the brush of the Republican party, who DO have a woman problem. They conceded themselves that their popularity with women was waning, and so sent the lizard-like Ann Romney out to persuade women what a lovely man her husband was, presumably after she read up on 'Emotions for Dummies' to remember what being a human being was like. The ramblings of the Akins and Mourdocks were shocking and not just to Andrew's favourite caraciture of the hairy, man-hating socialist lesbian. They shocked women swing voters, they shocked moderate Republican women. Dropping bombs like that during a campaign is electoral suicide, no matter who says them or why. If the Republicans did not want to be seen as women-haters, then maybe they shouldn't have embarked, at state level, on a 2 year reproductive jihad beforehand. Stick that in your binder.

Obama, though, was a man white Leftists could vote for and feel moral. More critically, America’s minorities could assert their own identities simply by voting for America’s first black president .
And vote for him they did, in big numbers. About 9 per cent of voters yesterday were Latino, and polls suggest they vote Democrat by more than three to one.
Black support for Obama is even more overwhelming – about 96 per cent, according to exit polls yesterday.

Are you ready? Because we're about to enter the fantasy land of a paranoid racist. See, in Andrew's world, all leftists - every single one of them - think that just because you're not white, you're magically awesome. 'I voted for a black dude!' he imagines they say 'Boy, I sure am cool and progressive!' Of course the fact that Obama's broad policy stance is more progressive than the science-denying, climate-denying, often overtly racist, nouveau aristocratic, Ayn Randian, no social net, woman-hating Republican Party's policy stance must just be pure coincedence.

Another coincedence is the fact that maybe Democrats are more popular with black and latino Americans because the Democrats have a smaller number of overt lunatic racists. Clinton was popular with black and latino voters and he's possibly the whitest man in America, hailing from illiteracy and cracker capital of the US, Little Rock, Arkansas. The trend of Democrats polling and voting better among these communities is not new. It didn't start with Obama and it won't end with Obama. Though it might end if Arizona stops racial profiling, and the Republicans stop vigourously trying to deregister black voters or hanging out with active Klansmen.

Again, Andrew will not mention these things. In his happy white man's world, white men are always good, especially if they're heterosexual and conservative. Ready for some more racism? It gets better stupider.

This hurdle will only get higher for Republicans. Although whites still make up two thirds of the US population, minority groups this year for the first time produced more babies.
This is a reality Romney identified in a damaging video leaked during the campaign of a private speech he gave to donors in May.
Speaking of his rich white father, Romney said: "Had he been born of Mexican parents, I'd have a better shot of winning this."
He added: “If the Hispanic voting bloc becomes as committed to the Democrats as the African American voting bloc has in the past, why, we're in trouble as a party and, I think, as a nation."
But this is not just a problem of racial identification. The Latino and African American voters are also likely to be the kind of people with their hand out for benefits.
Unemployment among African Americans is more than 14 per cent, twice that of whites. One in 10 Latinos is jobless, and average earnings are even lower than they are for blacks.
This makes welfarism even harder to wind back for any president who needs to win an election.

More babies! Including 'anchor babies'! Aaaagghh!! The decline of whiteyism!!! SHIT! IT'S FUCKING ARMAGEDDON!! So the fuck what Andrew. You're still talking about Americans, no matter whether they're black, white or purple with yellow fucking spots. There's one race - the human race, and according to the Romneys, the people of Kolob as well.

Interestingly, Andrew turns Romney's racist crack about hispanic voters, and the suspicion he daubed on the fake tan extra thick to address them, into the voter's own fault. Don't you see? He HAS to be Mexican for them to vote for him, because - you know - they're Mexican. And as we all know Mexicans, blacks, asians etc, only vote for people who have the same skin colour as them because they are never remotely interested in any issues at all ever. Right? No, in fact that's delusional racist nonsense, that only makes sense to an idiot who thinks 'not white = THEM = hive mind'.

'We're in trouble... as a nation'. How? More ambiguous, alarmist doom and gloomery. Fortunately Andrew is on hand to tell us what will happen when the Darkapocalypse comes. See they're the 'kind of people with their hand out for benefits'. Andrew tells us clearly - African-Americans, Mexicans, non-white people in general are ALL lazy. Including presumably Herman Cain who was a Republican Presidential candidate. After all, he's not white, so he must be wandering around with his hand out somewhere, waiting for some fat government cash to drop in it.

Andrew then drops some stats on us, to 'prove' his point, when all it proves is that it is hard for non-white Americans to get sufficient employment. There could be any reason for this, but Andrew gives us one - they're a pack of lazy c**ts, who - like Obama - aren't as white as hard-working people. Which is a crock of the ugliest shit outside of the rantings of the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, there are probably Klansman who at this point would go 'Whoa, Andrew! Mate! Steady on eh?'

Andrew ends with his own word, or maybe something he heard on Fox, 'welfarism'. This obviously means the political ideology of being on welfare. Which must be something one is indoctrinated into, in order to tear taxes from wealthy white people, or possibly just what happens when you wake up one day and realise you have no food or money, and eviction, followed by death are in your immediate future. If you want to learn to write like Andrew Bolt, try to learn these peculiar right wing abuses of the english language, that you're not poor because there are no jobs going in your area, you're being poor on purpose to distress white people.

And that was the other problem Romney identified in the secret video which so hurt him.
"There are 47 per cent ... who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it." Romney said.
"They will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax ... I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility."
And true, nearly half all Americans live in households receiving a government entitlement.
How do you start to wind that back and slash the deficit, as Romney threatened, without alienating more voters than you can win?

Now onto the myth of the 47%. This has been a right wing talking point since OWS and the bandying about of 'the 99%'. Immediately, right wing bloggers, talk show types and politicians started talking about the parasitical '47%' versus the industrious, hard-working, largely white '53%'. These people were so dedicated to the cause of the 53% they lied and photoshopped as much as they could to prove that more than about 8 guys actually thought this way.

In many respects it's no surprise that Andrew has bought into this, because understanding the huge flaw in the argument, requires reading, and a complexity of thought beyond 'right wing = RIGHT ALL THE TIME LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!'.

47% of the population of the United States do not pay federal income tax, but still pay other taxes, including various state taxes, and may include people on benefits. To pay federal income tax, you need to meet a tax threshold, and many people simply do not meet it. However some people are also exempt. Like soldiers. You know, the ones fighting AND FUCKING DYING for you. So by all means, call the many elderly people parasites, welfarists, whatever. It proves nothing except what a complete inhuman douchewad you are.

Of course no-one ever talks about how the loyal Republican states are the ones who take more tax money than they pay. If there's a culture of freeloading, it's not ethnic, it's divided red or blue, and the reds (Republicans) are the biggest freeloaders.

The barb of being told to 'take responsibility' is all well and good, so how do you find a job when EVERY. SINGLE. JOBS. INITIATIVE. put before Congress was torpedoed by the GOP? It's like if I kick you off a boat, and instead of tossing you a life preserver I tell you to swim or drown on your own. Andrew will never acknowledge this. To write like him, you must simply ignore that conservatives have any negative effect on a situation. Their only response is to fly in like Superman and make everything magically better 'just because'.

This is America’s great challenge, and its future strength hangs on making the rational choices it yesterday dodged.

If anything, the US narrowly dodged a bullet in their election, after all it's not like space aliens from Kolob were gonna fly down and magically make things better by less regulation, less stimulus, less jobs initiatives and less tax on the very, very rich. That only happens in the partisan mind of a pundit that only sees the half of reality he chooses to see.

To write like Andrew is simple, choose your end goal, wave some alarm around, throw in a healthy dose of racist paranoia, and at all costs avoid fact, detail, critical analysis, and anything that paints conservatives as less than the most perfectly magical space ponies EVAR.