Bob Ellis: Embarrassment To The Left

Bob Ellis is the Unskewed Polls of Australian politics.

A digression: once, I used to feel some sympathy for Ellis.  Some may recall Bob Ellis cost his publishers $277,000 with basically a single multiply false sentence in the book "Goodbye Jerusalem", which defamed Tony Abbott, his wife, and Tanya and Peter Costello.   When the full facts about Tony Abbott's abandoned "son" came to light, I thought that the discrepancy between Abbott's former personal life and Abbott's religious-morality attitudes as a Howard Government minister said far more to Abbott's detriment than any scuttlebutt falsely claiming he was sexually seduced into the Liberal Party ever could.  There are some small things in that case that might have gone down differently had Abbott's full biography been known when it was heard. 

However, the sympathy I had for Ellis from that has been wiped away many times over by his recent series of comically bad attacks on mainstream opinion polling in Australia.  Quite aside from his the defamatory and tinfoil-hat nature of much of his work, a big problem with Ellis's comments is that what he writes about opinion polls is riddled with easily avoidable factual errors.