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Who would want those sort of "friends?"

Ex-PM Howard - thrown out of office, including losing his own seat - has since the election last November been silent.

Breaking convention - a Howard trait - he spoke in Washington at gala [should that be galah?] dinner last week and attacked the Rudd Government. No doubt his "friends" at the dinner lapped it all up.

Mike Carleton, writing in the SMH, has his own observations on Howard and the dinner itself:

"At a gala black-tie dinner in Washington DC on Wednesday, in an act of near perfect symmetry, The Hermit of Wollstonecraft graciously accepted the 2008 Irving Kristol Award, a high honour bestowed by that bastion of liberty, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

For readers unsure of what all this means, a quick glossary:

The Hermit, formerly known as John Howard, was once an Australian prime minister. Irving Kristol, a name that by rights ought to belong to a B-grade Hollywood bandleader, is a strident propagandist acknowledged as the godfather of American neo-conservatism.

The American Enterprise Institute is a so-called think tank of hard right armchair warriors and Republican Party logrollers who have been wrong on just about every matter of global importance since the Tet Offensive of 1968.

Hence the symmetry. How fitting that the AEI should clutch The Hermit to its collective bosom.

Its "scholars" and "fellows", as they pompously style themselves, include Paul Wolfowitz, a former deputy secretary of defence, co-architect of George Bush's Iraq War and disgraced World Bank boss; John Bolton, a loopy US ambassador to the United Nations eventually skewered by Congress; and Richard Perle, aka the Prince of Darkness, another Washington Beltway carpetbagger who now spends much of his time attempting to disentangle himself from the business affairs of the recently jailed Canadian publisher, the criminal Conrad Black.

Disgracefully ignoring the convention that political figures do not bag Australia or its government abroad, Howard delivered a turgid, self-lubricating dump on Kevin Rudd's withdrawal from Iraq and the axing of Work Choices.

No one from the current Bush Administration turned up for the Man of Steel's last hurrah. Sic transit gloria."

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