Disturbing news on the electioneering front. The failure of Nicola Roxon’s bill to suppress free-speech earlier this year forced a Labor rethink on how otherwise to address critical challenges to Labor’s election campaign of mass flim-flam, such as pesky reporters asking awkward questions. The result, with considerable input from Team Obama, is a new stop-gap measure to help get Rudd over the line.

The feedback from Tuesday’s initial testing of this new strategy – having Labor’s degenerate Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury call the journalist interviewing him a ‘Liberal stooge,’ after exposing Bradbury’s bare-faced lie – suggests, however,  it needs a bit of tweaking. The recourse to abuse and name-calling to shut people up when they dare question what they say has long been the weapon of choice by progressives, and has previously proven immensely successful. But Labor using the same approach in this election may not quite get the desired results, as negative reports from the media the following day suggested.

Rudd’s humiliating new asylum-seeker policy having prompted much of Labor’s Left to defect to the Greens or kill themselves out of shame, the crafting of a political policy based on double-speak, hypocrisy and character assassination doesn’t, unfortunately, come as easily as it once did.

On the other hand, as Rudd (ever the optimist) confides to me: there are still plenty of corrupt and unscrupulous Labor stalwarts like Bradbury on hand ready to dish it out without compunction as needed, so things aren’t all that bad.