Nine days ago The Weekend Australian ran a cartoon by Nicholson in which Kevin Rudd was represented by two legs protruding from the posterior of Barack Obama. Two days ago Nicholson depicted Rudd as lost under the dinner table at the G20 banquet. In this same edition of The Weekend Australian an editiorial rebuked those who had taken offence at Nicholson's crudity. The gist of it was that "lefties" wouldn't cop their poster-boy being attacked.
I was annoyed by both cartoons, not because of crudity or being a thin-skinned "lefty"; the cartoons were simply baseless. Rudd has not distinguished himself with any particular sycophancy towards Obama and has been less Obameffusive than many other heads of state or government. As for the banquet, the seating was absolutely according to the international conventions of protocol and, in terms of personal favour or otherwise, signifies nothing.
The article in the same edition which dwelt on Rudd's "slight" was, for the same reason, a complete waste of space. If anyone is pushing a barrow here, it's not "lefties".
