Represent - September 19

Malcolm Turnbull rolls Brendan Nelson at long last, and Barack Obama gets his lead in the polls back from John McCain as Wall Street goes to shit. 

This week on represent, the gamble of Brendan Nelson’s political life backfired spectacularly as he went on the front foot and challenged his treasurer, Malcolm Turnbull, to a leadership ballot.  The idea being that if he challenged Turnbull now, there was a chance that Turnbull wouldn’t have the numbers locked in so soon after Peter Costello ruled himself out for the top job.  Thing is, Brendan Nelson forgot that he’s Brendan Nelson, and that there was no way in hell he could win a leadership ballot after 9 months of such incompetent “leadership”, and Turnbull took the leadership, 45-41.  Now that Turnbull’s finally got the party’s permission to do things his way (instead of his usual practice of doing it without permission), it’ll be interesting to see if the Libs can pick themselves up from being a political embarassment. 

Speaking of political embarassments, John McCain’s probably wishing he could start the week over, as he used his Monday morning to declare that “the fundamentals of the US economy are still strong” on the same day that Wall Street dropped, like, 400 points or something huge.  He came out later in the day and tried to get himself out of jail by clarifying: “Strong workers are the fundamentals of the US economy”.  Needless to say that nobody bought this, and he’s been dropping in the polls ever since.  Obama’s been loving it, and taking him to town all week; of course it goes without saying that Represent is here to bring you the best bits.  On top of all this, Reuters released some polling data today showing that the vast majority of Americans think their country’s congress, president and economic & foreign policies are entirely incompetent and that their country is heading down the wrong track, an overwhelming 91% of Americans are proud of their country.  DERP.