The Age’s front-page smear of a soldier and a Liberal (note, Australia "Liberal" = conservative)

I don’t know how much lower The Age can go. This morning’s front-page hatchet job on the Liberals’ candidate in the Canning by-election is a disgrace.

We know The Age is desperate to destroy the Abbott Government, and we know it now sees Canning as its big chance. If the Liberals lose, Abbott falls.

Hence this attack on the Liberals’ candidate, once an officer in our elite SAS, risking his life to defend the likes of even Age journalists, safe at home to snipe:

The former SAS soldier standing as the Liberal Party’s prize recruit in a key federal by-election was the officer in command of a troop being investigated for chopping the hands off dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

Notes - the Liberal Party of Australia is the main conservative party in Australia - the name was drawn from the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not what leftists have done their best to pervert the word into today.

The Age is one of the two main daily newspapers in Melbourne, Australia second largest city. Along with its stablemate, the Sydney Morning Herald, these are probably the most left wing newspapers in Australia (they are countered in Melbourne by the Herald Sun and in Sydney by the Daily Telegraph and across the country by the The Australian which are all related, mildly conservative papers (they tend right, but nowhere near as strongly as The Age and SMH tend left.

I doubt I need to explain what the SAS is to most Freepers, but just in case, they are the Special Air Service - Australia's most elite special forces soldiers among the best in the world (Britain and New Zealand also have units referred to by the same name with the same traditions - the Australian and New Zealand ones growing out of combined British Empire forces of the Second World War).

The attacks in the left wing press on this soldier are vile. Not only was Captain Hastie not even present at the incident they are writing about, detailed inquiries concluded that the soldiers who did cut off the hands of enemy troops did nothing wrong - they were not defiling the dead out of any ulterior motive, they took the hands in order to have a means of identifying the bodies, having no other practical way of preserving identity evidence at the time and after checking with a military lawyer that it was legal in the circumstances. It was unpleasant but military necessary and therefore justified.

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