Sorry, What Was That Bob?

During a panel discussion on Q & A last night about group sex and the NRL, Bob Ellis dropped this clanger on Tony Abbott.

Bob Ellis : "You have at least the record of a rugby tour, comrade."

Tony Abbott fear grinned for a few seconds, and the conversation moved, awkwardly, onwards.

UPDATE : From the Q & A transcript :

TONY ABBOTT: I thought you were going to say raise the age of consent for going on a rugby tour. Maybe only let 40 year olds go on rugby tours.

BOB ELLIS: You have a track record of at least a rugby tour, comrade.

Ellis was not making a lot of sense :

BOB ELLIS: The logic of this whole argument is surely to raise the age of consent because most of these people are saying, "Look, she's only 19. How did she know what was going to happen?" I mean, if you're going to go that far, you're either going to say how important it is or, if you're not going to go that far, you're going to say how unimportant it is.

Err, yeah?

Or he was making too much sense....

BOB ELLIS: But Roy Master's view of it is that it is, for better or for worse, common practice."

There you go. You really do learn something new everyday. I didn't know using the older, more famous one as reassuring bait to lure in a teenager and then stand by while the girl is, arguably, being raped, or at least seriously and severely abused, by up to dozen football players, watching each other masturbate, that this was common practice amongst rugby league teams.

"...and if this one man (Mathew Johns) is guilty and should be punished, there are thousands so placed...."

Thousands of rugby league players have done this kind, have they?

And then no sense at all. Ellis' mind is just about fried :

"....and I think there is a question not just of consent, but of complaint. If there was not consent on the night there should have been complaint the following the morning or complaint a week later. And if the complaint takes seven years...

TONY JONES: Well, there was complaint, as it happens, within days to the police.

BOB ELLIS: Yes. Okay. All right.

TONY JONES: So let me hear from Penny Wong...

PENNY WONG: I'm sorry.

BOB ELLIS: Okay. I withdraw that.

Fade out.

Bob Ellis Challenges Tim Blair To Public Debate

Tim Blair has been having great fun with Labor barnacle Bob Ellis in the past few weeks, on whether or not he deserves to be voted for in the ABC's 'Favourite Australian' poll, and a recent column published at ABC Online where Ellis gruesomely mused on how the world might be a different, and better, place if Hillary Clinton had spent more time orally pleasuring her husband in the mid-1990s.

Ellis responded to a Blair column bagging him in the Daily Telegraph with a letter, that Blair has now published as an opion piece :

Tim Blair said the Iraq War would bring oil prices down, and he still has his job.

He said there would be no humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq and now, with three million Iraqis living elsewhere, and a million of them, probably, dead, he still has his job.

He called George W. Bush a modern-day Winston Churchill, and he still has his job.

I think it's great he still has his job. He shows how wrong the Right are about most things, and how they never learn, and never admit a mistake.

Ellis' easy ire was sparked by this Blair colum and Ellis has now laid down a challenge to Blair that will be humiliating for him to refuse, even though it's clear that Ellis is hoping for a little attention, and money :

If he wants me sacked, impoverished and silenced, he should say why in detail.

Perhaps on a public podium, before a paying audience - one he shares with me.

Any time, anywhere.

Tim Blair's response?

UPDATE : It turns out Bob and Tim have been challenging each other to public debates for almost six years. Blair in 2002 :

...(Ellis) interrupted me with this challenge: we must have a public debate! I'm up for it, Bob. Name your time and place, and my appearance fee.

They're both hoping for attention and money. Six years, and they're still only making goo-goo eyes at each other.