Good luck to the little right-wing magazine. It has survived 50 years assisted by CIA and government funding, no small feat in Australia. Yes, many contributors are preternaturally rabid and intolerant, but when the newsstands are populated almost entirely by celebrity junk, a magazine focusing on ideas and, egad, poetry, merits celebration.

Except on entering the Quadrant metaverse - and, quite possibly, levitating with his cheer squad - John Howard seems to have gone a trifle bonkers. Quadrant, lauded the PM, had been "a lonely counterpoint to stultifying orthodoxies and dangerous utopias". It had slain "ideological barrackers for regimes of oppression opposed to Australia". It had fought the "New Left counter-culture ... a beacon of free and sceptical thought against fashionable leftist views". Where the "fangs of the Left" once tore into people such as historian Geoffrey Blainey, Quadrant took its lead from the "moral clarity" of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and pope John Paul II.

If you didn't know better you might think Quadrant a kind of antipodean Solidarity, with Paddy McGuinness and other editors our Lech Walesa equivalents, living on brown rice and risking life and limb to oppose and overthrow an oppressive regime. But then you remember conservative governments have presided over 34 of Quadrant's 50 summers. And the only remotely leftish oppressor, Gough Whitlam, was swiftly dismissed sans fuss. And the Hawke-Keating governments deployed their leftish fangs to float the dollar, deregulate banks, start untangling the industrial relations system and go to war with the US in Iraq.

True, eventually Paul Keating cut an arrogant, intimidating figure. Those who questioned migration and reconciliation policies risked being branded rednecks or scumbags as Keating hectored those who dared question his brilliance. But to argue the Left has ever held much sway in Australia is a stretch. As Keating predicted, 10 years of Coalition government has changed Australia. Far from being cowed, the cheer squad revels in its dominance. Those who questioned the Iraq war or stringent border protection policies risk being labelled appeasers or pro-terrorism. Those complaining about $200,000 degrees and cuts in funding to universities are ridiculed as elites. Forget fangs; wherever it detects a non-fellow traveller, the cheer squad applies a pointy, steel-capped boot.

It's beyond contention who is winning the rhetorical wars. Talking Right: How Conservatives turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-wing Freak Show has recently been published. No, the author isn't Alexander Downer but American linguist Geoff Nunberg, who marvels at the Republican Party's relentless, successful demonisation of its opponents. The tactic works in Australia, too; change The New York Times and Hollywood to The Age and Radio National and the Foreign Minister might easily have penned Nunberg's book.

Happily, two most excellent things about democracy is that most ordinary people are sensibly oblivious to the political racket, and the truth eventually outs itself. Keating could bang on about J-curves and soft landings, but when voters were presented with a half-acceptable alternative they unhesitatingly turfed Labor out of office. Expert rhetoric and abuse came to nought.

Similarly, no mountain of hyperbole can disguise the dire circumstances in Iraq. Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial, portrays a splintered White House metaverse where politicians, generals and bureaucrats are jockeying to attribute blame for the debacle. That Woodward fawned over George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in his previous books makes his scathing appraisal of a White House in crisis much tougher to belittle and ignore.

In Australia, where the war isn't nearly as incendiary, the Coalition's rhetoric remains defiant. To cut and run is cowardly. To leave is to yield to terrorists. To abandon the US would damage the alliance. My feeling is that having avidly barracked for the misadventure, Australia retains a moral obligation to stick about.

Yet Labor is determined to withdraw and, despite endemic unenthusiasm about Kim Beazley's leadership and Howard's alleged predominance on national security issues, the Coalition is losing the argument. This week's Lowy Institute survey sees a hefty majority of voters criticising the war and professing concern at too much US influence on Australian foreign policy.

Spin, abuse and skilful rhetoric may delay of shroud the truth, but eventually facts emerge. Even some folks at Quadrant struggle to discern much "moral clarity" in Iraq, although those AWB payments to Saddam Hussein, signed off by the Government, were clearly and profoundly immoral.

As Nunberg suggests, the Right has been expert at talking and Quadrant is influential in Australia's political conversation. But when discussion subsides, politicians are judged on results, not words or good intentions. Under intense pressure and on the verge of congressional elections, Bush's presidency may yet disappear into that cloud of pixels. With Labor competitive in the polls, those long-oppressed avatars levitating around the Quadrant metaverse must be feeling a trifle nervous.

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