Where Does Gerard Hendersen Get His Talking Points?

Oh dear. It looks like Gerard Henderson's SMH Op-Ed yesterday, Deputies stand by their sheriff, was plagiarized by (or itself plagiarized?) a US Op-Ed by Paul M. Weyrich, America and Bush Are Not So Unpopular. Or do these rightwing hacks just get their talking points issued from the same source?

Shorter Hendo:

- Blair is gone but Gordon Brown will hang tough with Bush. The Alliance is solid.
- Merkel and Sarkozy are both pro-Washington.
- Even Canada and New Zealand are helping NATO in Afghanistan, and quietly sucking up to Bush.
- Bottom line: "the US is not as isolated as many of its critics maintain".

Shorter Weyrich:

- Merkel and Sarkozy are both pro-Washington.
- Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is helping NATO in Afghanistan. He is like a "twin" of Bush.
- Blair is gone but Gordon Brown "will turn out to be a good friend of America and of Bush".
- Bottom line: the US media is lying when they say "Bush has destroyed the image of America".

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute, a conservative thinktank. Weyrich is the Chairman of The Free Congress Foundation, a conservative thinktank:

Most think tanks talk about tax rates or the environment or welfare policy and occasionally we do also. But our main focus is on the Culture War. Will America return to the culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture? Or will we continue the long slide into the cultural and moral decay of political correctness? If we do, America, once the greatest nation on earth, will become no less than a third world country.

Here's the dictionary definition of a hack:

1. a person, as an artist or writer, who exploits, for money, his or her creative ability or training in the production of dull, unimaginative, and trite work; one who produces banal and mediocre work in the hope of gaining commercial success in the arts: As a painter, he was little more than a hack.
2. a professional who renounces or surrenders individual independence, integrity, belief, etc., in return for money or other reward in the performance of a task normally thought of as involving a strong personal commitment: a political hack.

If you find this sort of orchestrated, misleading, global rightwing bile as offensive as I do, let Fairfax newspapers know that it's time they dumped Henderson's columns.