Read this excellent Summary of Howard and Costello's appalling smear attempt on Kevin Rudd:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/a-cunning-pm-pulls-the-wings-off-st-kevin/2007/03/04/1172943275691.html

This is the stuff Christians should pay attention to. The Coalition is in government, and can actually enact policies to prove they are worthy of re-election. And yet they're spending all their time muckraking and trying to smear the opposition. This has been proven even further by the willingnesses of Howard to sacrifice his own equally innocent troops in an effort to get some of his mud to stick to Rudd. Vandstone wasn't sacked over Cornelia Rau. Peter Reith and Phillip Ruddock were never disciplined for 'children overboard', even though the official Senate inquiry proved that they had lied to the Australian people. Abbot wasn't sacked for outright lying to the media on numerous occasions, most notably about his involvement in destroying the One Nation party for his own party's political gain:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/22/1061529330032.html
(also known as the "lying is absolutely fine as long as it's in public but not inside parliament" affair)

And most importantly, nobody was fired over the biggest international scandal Australia has ever been involved in - where the (at the time) Government owned AWB siphoned international aid money directly to Saddam Hussein for inflated wheat prices, and several Government ministers (including the deputy prime minister) signed off on the deals. At absolute best this scandal involved gross criminal incompetence, at worst it was full-on international corruption. Mark Vaile probably isn't smart enough for international corruption, so let's go with gross criminal incompetence.

...

And yet Ian Campbell was fired for nothing more then doing his job, in this case legally and appropriately, because his actions got in the way of Howard's chance to smear his opponent.

Rudd (and Campbell, for that matter) did absolutely nothing illegal, and not even anything immoral. A Politician's job is to meet with people. So now some people are off limits to even meet? Howard has met with many people who turned out to be criminals. Most obviously and recently, many members of his government (including Howard himself) had direct and frequent contact with AWB board members who have now been found by commission to be corrupt. Even the most ardent critics of the Government's involvement in the AWB scandal woudn't go so far as to claim that every MP who ever met with a member of the AWB board is guilty of corruption. And yet Howard's new 'rule' suggests that they are.

Brian Burke (the ex WA premier and now a lobbyist) was only ever convicted of travel rorts, has served his time, and is no longer a criminal. He's currently involved in the WA Corruption scandal, but corruption isn't loose association, you have to be proven to have acted illegally. The current scandal is also bi-partisan - several federal liberal MPs have stronger links to other parties involved.

Bizarrely, Costello saw that there was nothing necessarily dodgy about the meetings, and wasn't painting them as 'Rudd's corruption' but as 'Rudd's bad judgment'. So even the prosecutor doesn't claim there was anything necessarily corrupt, but that to a few morons it could look slightly bad? Doesn't this mean that Costello (who should actually be - you know - doing his job as Australia's treasurer) is basically saying "The Australian public is stupid, and will see this as a bad thing even though it isn't. HA HA HA!!!"

And of course, the fact that the matter was brought up before it was made clear that Campbell had also met Burke shows the utter hypocrisy of the Government's charges. If they fired Campbell and THEN attacked Rudd, they would at least have a leg of logic to stand on, even though it would still be pointless and unfair. As it is, if they knew of Campbell's meeting then they were probably trying to hide it, which is hypocrisy and corruption. If they didn't, then Costello recklessly fired a bullet at an innocent without even checking if his own soldier was in the line of fire. As a result, they now have to claim that both men were 'in the wrong place and deserved to die'. This is incompetence covered up by corruption.

The third possibility is the most sinister of all - that they knew about Campbell's meeting, but fired anyway, deliberately sacrificing their own innocent foot soldier to hurt their enemy. Now they can claim "see, Campbell has been fired" (a lamb sacrificed to the god of the new rule they just created for future reference) - "what about others who have broken this 'rule'"? This option, if true, is the political equivalent of war crime.

Rudd himself said it best: "Mr Howard was deploying standards that were invented on the run in Parliament last Thursday, standards which did not exist before last Thursday,"

If only Howard had standards for himself and his own lying, inept, and corrupt government.