Michael Savage, Home Secretary Smith, a list of loons, and a fierce blow to Australian pride

(Above: Michael Savage).

It's incredible. It's outrageous. It's preposterous. The British government has banned loons from around the world - whether or not they want to actually visit Britain - and there's not one decent, dinkum Aussie loon on the list.

Here's the list:

Abdullah Qadri al-Ahdal, Yunis al-Astal, Samir al-Quntar, Stephen Donald Black, Wadgy Abd el-Hamied Mohamed Ghoneim, Erich Gliebe, Mike Guzovsky, Safwat Hijazi, Nasr Javed, Abdul Ali Musa (previously Clarence Reams), Fred Waldron Phelps Sr, Shirley Phelps-Roper, Artur Ryno, Amir Siddique, Pavel Skachevsky and Michael Alan Weiner (aka Michael Savage).

What to say? This is a list up with which we will not put. The pride of Australian loonery has been shattered. It's time to take a stand and get someone, anyone on the list. 

How about this? "Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and her team of officials are loonatics." 

That puts me right up there with US radio talkback show host Michael Savage, aka The Savage Nation.

No doubt it's a motley group - there's a Hamas MP (Yunis Al-Astal), a Jewish extremist (Mike Guzovsky), former KKK grand wizard Stephen Black, neo-Nazi Erich Gliebe and the two leaders or a Russian skinhead gang responsible for 20 racially motivated murders (Artur Ryno and Pavel Skacevsky). Bizarrely both are currently in prison, so making a trip to the UK in the near future seems an unlikely part of their travel plans.

There's a batch of radical preachers (like Amir Siddique), Muslim activist Abdul Ali Musa (aka Clarence Reams), Hezbollah terrorist Samir Al Quntar and Kashmiri terror group Nasr Javed.

Fundie Christian preachers American pastor Fred Phelps Snr and his daughter Shirley Pehlps-Roper are also on the list, but they're delighted to see it confirmed that Britain is in the grip of homosexuality and in its last days (these being the loons who picket Aids victims funerals and believe US soldiers are being killed because of US tolerance for homosexuality).

Michael Savage has already said he'll sue the British government for defamation for being placed on the list, somehow seeing it as the wrong kind of company for a man who loves to see himself as to the right of Rush and the left of god.

Savage is a quintessential right wing loon of the American kind, all the more strange for the way he started out in life hanging around the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. If you want a full case history, the essential Wikipedia has a detailed bio here.

Since those days Savage has taken a view about homosexuals, and perhaps his most famous rant is the one that got him sacked from MSNBC when a prank caller (later identified as Bob Foster) insulted Savage's teeth:

Savage then asked if Foster was a "sodomite", to which the caller answered, "Yes." Savage then said to the caller, "Oh, so you're one of those sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig; how's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig? You got nothing better to do than to put me down, you piece of garbage? You got nothing to do today? Go eat a sausage, and choke on it. Get trichinosis. Now do we have another nice caller here who's busy because he didn't have a nice night in the bathhouse who's angry at me today? Put another, put another sodomite on....no more calls?...I don't care about these bums; they mean nothing to me. They're all sausages.

He achieved another moment in the sun when he gave his expert medical opinion on autism:

Now, the illness du jour is autism. You know what autism is? I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a father around to tell them, "Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot."

Yep, Savage is a class act, and at one time or another in his rants about homosexuality, Arabs, Islam, feminism, sex education and immigration he's earned charges of fascist leanings, racism, homophobia and bigotry.

Even in his rant on NPR about the ban, following his assertion that the UK should respect his First Amendment rights (as enacted in British law no doubt), he took umbrage when one caller got snarky about his talk show rhetoric.

Savage called him a "foaming lunatic... someone in pajamas in a mental asylum" and then shouted, "You’re nobody and I’m not going to talk to you!" At that point the host ended the interview.

You can see Savage making out like a bandit for the next six months, on his own show, and stomping around the land, and dancing in the courts, which makes you wonder what Home Secretary Smith was on when she and her officials drew up the list, and then even more bizarrely made it public. Savage might even get a new book on the NY Times bestseller list, as he did with The Political Zoo, in which he cast himself as a zoo keeper and did caricatures of sundry political inhabitants of his zoo. 

Loons love the oxygen this kind of exposure gives them.

You know the loons of Australia have so much to learn from American loons. They're just small fish in the big pond of loonery, and not one of them managed to get on the list!

Maybe it's time for Australia to draw up its own list, and ban a few British loons, so then in a counter-strike, they'll ban some of ours, and then it'll be loon warfare at twenty paces. It could become the Ashes of loonery. Hmmm, which loon should we burn so we can put his ashes in a little urn?

For the first name on the loon banning list, can I suggest Home Secretary Jacqui Smith? 

And maybe in turn they'll ban Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair. Sure, that means we'll be stuck with them, but remember Aussie pride.

All summer we'll go floodin' through the Pommie immigration gates
To try and get a look at Britain's bureaucratic ingrates
No matter what the season
We always have a reason
To shout out come on Aussie loons with our mates

Come on Aussie loons, come on, come on
Come on Aussie loons, come on
Come on Aussie loons, come on, come on
Come on Aussie, come on