What is it with the Lear Jet elites and political high fliers with their self serving book titles designed to frame their morally vain authors as deep, noble, contemplative and above the fray as they try and retcon or rewrite and airbrush their history?
This week it’s Malcolm Turnbull and his tome, ‘A Bigger Picture’ or as has been suggested a more accurate title would have been, A Bitter Picture or even A Bigger Prick.
The title is obviously meant to convey the impression that Turnbull is a visionary. Like some latter day Moses leading his people.That he could see much bigger and broader and deeper and larger and way beyond what we myopic deplorables could see and that we’re somehow the losers and it’s to our detriment that he’s no longer there to guide us.
Then of course there’s Kevin Rudd. Another moral narcissist who believes his unimpressive political career and his ‘truth’ contained in ‘The PM Years’ is somehow worthy of two volumes no less, pretentiously called a ‘memoir’ if you don’t mind.
Two volumes!!. What could a former Prime Minister who didn’t even complete a full term, possibly have to say apart from pages of hagiography, blame shifting and self justification?
In reality they are just attempts by otherwise unimpressive, lightweight and second rate political mediocrities to recast their political careers as falling somewhere between Menzies and Churchill.
Think about the names Rudd and Turnbull in the same sentence as Churchill, Menzies, Howard, Hawke and Keating.
People like Menzies with his ‘Measure of the Years’ had decades of experience to draw upon and something to write about and Churchill with his many books and again with many decades and his contribution to the history of the 20th Century. Same for John Howard. As Lazarus with a triple bypass, he too had a story to tell over thirty three years from 1974 to 2007 as treasurer, opposition leader and Prime Minister.
Former head of the FBI and the criminal mastermind behind the Trump Spy-gate and Russia collusion hoax, James Comey pompously titled his book, ‘A Higher Loyalty’.
In his case the idea being to get out in front with ‘his truth’, frame himself as the victim to justify what he did ahead of being fitted up for an orange jump suit.