It’s very strange: Australians are freaking out over Tony Abbott eating a raw onion. It’s a country full of giant spiders and poisonous everything, and it’s onions that have you boggled?
I’m not personally a fan of raw onions, but my father liked to eat certain kinds raw. There are varieties of sweet onions — Vidalias and Walla Walla sweet onions, for instance — that have less of the acrid sharpness and a mellower flavor, and I never found it odd that some of my relatives would munch on them.
I’m sure you can find better reasons to dislike Abbott. Here’s a list to get you started.
He ate it with the skin, like an apple. I have a suspicion he might not be aware how an onion is usually prepared and eaten. You see, in Tony’s world onions are served to him on a plate by females (once they are done ironing, obviously).
My Grandfather (a Hungarian peasant), drank a glass of vinegar every day.
To thin his blood, for his heart.
He also ate lard on bread as a snack.
He died of a heart attack at less than 60 years old.
Whatinhell does ‘ironing’ do to an onion?!?‽?
I am no great fan of Tony Abbott myself. Goodness knows there are plenty of worthy reasons to mock him, but I really don’t understand why the “budgie smuggler” picture is inevitably always one of them. As far as I can tell, all this picture tells us is that Mr Abbott is in great physical shape, especially for a man of his age. Why does he get shamed repeatedly for this ?
Won’t be any onions left to eat by the time Tony shuts down all of those inconvenient remote communities that grow them.
Yes, yes. We’re all quite aware of how stupid (and more importantly, utterly vicious) Tony Abbott is. Scarcely a day passes without some new outrage from the nasty bastard, so that when something like the onion thing happens, we’re kind of relieved. When eating a raw onion with the skin on is the most noteworthy thing the scumbag does, it’s a good day.
*looks nervously towards the cornfield*
Tony is sick and tired of carping criticism and ABC journalists asking him relevant questions (all the others are owned by Rupert Murdoch so they wouldn’t dare). It is chemical warfare. If his onion breath won’t keep them away his onion farts just might.
onions are pretty tasty, and some are quite mellow.
It’s not strange, and it’s much less important than his horrible advocacy of coal power and putting immigrants into concentration camps.
cornfields are good!
onionfields are good!
la,alala
If by ‘freaking out’ you mean ‘rolling our eyes at yet another prattish moment from Australian George Bush’ then sure, we are freaking out big time.
#7 garydargan
Wait, what about the fine fellows from Fairfax? I thought the land of Oz was blessed with at least two evil media conglomerates. Besides, there’s the Grauniad, which is likely better than everybody else (except at spelling).
Yeah, two years of Abbot, WTF are we talking about onions, it’s like the only non-idiotic thing he has done.
Why dwell in gratuitous hatred when there’s more than enough to be pissed off for real reasons?
I suspect we just need the comedy break to distract us from the complete bleakness that is the political scene otherwise (although there is more than a little schadenfreude in the knowledge that they are coming up on the time when they’re meant to have this year’s budget passed and they still haven’t managed to pass last year’s yet).
I didn’t look at the picture of him eating an onion though. Mostly because there’s no sense in trying. I’ve got the plugin that replaces pictures of him with pictures of kittens, which is much better for my sanity. As a bonus it tends to kittenify Craig Abbott as well.
@chigau
It’s a reference to this quote:
“What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it’s going to go up in price and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up.”
Feel free to see it and many such clueless quotes via http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tony_Abbott
Eating the onion raw is not that strange. Eating the onion with the skin on is strange. To me it leaves two possibilities, either he thought tasting the onion would make a good photo-op, and the sort of thing that makes it look like he has a genuine interest in the stuff he is inspecting( but the fact that he ate the skin really shows that he couldnt give less of a fuck if he tried, he doesnt even care what he is actually eating, he wants power for powers sake like most of these politicians.) The other possibility is that he is actually so out of touch with middle- or lowerclass life that he has never actually had to peal an onion before.(Reminds me of Lucille Bluth: “It was one banana, Michael, honestly what could it cost? Ten dollars?”)
Either way, its a moment that reveals something rather disturbing about this guy.
Well I can’t wait to see what the Cartoonist “First Dog on the Moon has to say. Here is an example of his style,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/13/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-and-fall-again-of-the-palmer-united-party#img-1
Tony Abbot, that superior product of a Catholic education, rarely manages to do or say anything that isn’t either cringeworthy or risible. What good Australians fear is his premature replacement with someone more competent but just as evil, and keeping the conservatives in power for another cycle.
I really appreciate my friends because they completely ignored this story so far. I really hope that First Dog on the Moon will do the same.
Let’s not forget the “Aboriginals living on remote communities are making a lifestyle choice.”
Completely OZ ignorant, I must ask. Is he doing it as some kind of proof that he is so hardened that he can eat an onion raw, just like an apple? Or as some kind of metaphor: that he so frequently has to eat nasty stuff (politically) that even an onion is tasty? Or that the onion itself is the metaphor for politics and demonstrating how he has to eat that politics all the time?
~~ imagination running away with me. maybe I should read that list linked in the OP…
Okay, I read that list. While he sounds “awful”, he’s not nearly as bad as some we got here in ‘Murica.
And I found one (somewhat) good point in his “negatives”: He is unwilling/unable to answer difficult (and not so difficult) questions. Seriously. His ploy when faced with a testing question is to simply stop talking.
Sheesh, if only our politicoes would do that; instead of contradicting themselves, thinking a week is long enough for us to forget what they previously said, even though it was recorded both times. Or worse, doubling down. You know the trope about “holes”, and “when to stop digging”? That is too frequently our tacit advice to our politicoes. It is almost unheard of here, that a politician, when axed a quest. [see what I did there?] will just go silent to “pretend” to think about it. Ours, more frequently, will just spout their first thought, regardless of relevance, and then blame us for not understanding.
And on a slightly different point, we’re not worried about the deadly spiders and poisonous everything because we’re used to that.
Everything here is trying to kill us – it’s no big deal.
The PM eating a raw onion, though, that’s unusual.
Yeeeaah, people eat onions raw all the time. What they really mean is he left the papery skin on.
The Sweet Vidalia variety are supposedly routinely eaten raw by themselves like an apple. Not having lived in Georgia, I don’t know if that is true and happens routinely or if it is just something they tell northerners to make us look like idiots.
And we’ve probably all eaten onions raw on sandwiches or in salads, so just eating an uncooked onion isn’t a big deal.
Hey, Floridians, go to the link in PZ’s post, watch the video of Tony Abbot not answering questions, and tell us if he reminds you of anyone you know.
The thing is, the onions are also poisonous…
Yeah, Tony Abbott rarely make. me want to laugh. Cry sometimes, hit things occasionally, but rarely laugh.
At least there’s this.
Wait, doesn’t the legend state that when the red star lights the sky Tony the abbot will come looking for onions. He will bite one. It is very important that you help him stay elected. I guess that’s just something only a troll would believe.
beardymcviking
Gold. I posted the article and it’s picture on another site and two people seem to have bought it without clicking the link to check it.
Hey, nobody is the suppository of all wisdom. How was he supposed to know that people would think it was weird?
@ #4 billforsternz I’ve never really understood the problem with the budgie smugglers either, considering that the most unattractive bit is above the neck and he happily exposes that everywhere. Maybe a gimp mask would help. I’ve taken to asking the sort of people who complain about it whether they would prefer to see Turnbull in budgie smugglers.
Oh lawks. I didn’t realise that PZ’s list was compiled before Abbott actually did anything as Prime Minister.
For the benefit of those who don’t know, his government is every bit as bad as that list might indicate and a lot worse in many portfolios. The very first thing he did was to reinstate royal honours so that people-like-him could get to be knights or dames. You might all like the idea of the country’s Attorney General – the man for all legal matters – blithely saying they were going to change the discrimination laws relating to public speech because “People do have a right to be bigots.” http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/attorneygeneral-george-brandis-people-do-have-a-right-to-be-bigots-20140324-35dj3.html They’ve had to pull their heads in on that one.
And that was long, long before Tone Deaf Tony made the eye-wateringly stupid decision to award a Knighthood in the Order of Australia to … Prince Philip. Not even an Australian.
The list is endless. He refers to these daft decisions as a Captain’s Call. So far, he’s managed to get it wrong every time.
mildlymagnificent
Is it true that the Abbott government had a celebratory Women’s Day dinner… at a men’s-only club?
Honestly, munching on an onion has been the least worrying thing that pile of dicks has done!
rq
Well yes, at a club that only men can be members of. Women are allowed in of course, so long as they’re invited. News article here.
Yes it is a men’s only club. Last time I went there, (invited by my boss because normally I wouldn’t be caught dead in the place) one of the women in our group was refused admission because she was wearing trousers. Even though I compromised my principles by wearing a tie I was still refused admission along with two others because I was not wearing a jacket at the height of an Australian summer. While the respectable people dined with the boss I joined the rest of the undesirables for a nice yum cha in Chinatown.
Well, it is the Onion. Pah doom pa.