But here, preserved in a screencap, is Australian uni student Nick Sowden calling Barack Obama a monkey during the much-publicised interview with Kerry O’Brien on the 7:30 report on last night:
Screenshot of @NickSowden calling @BarackObama a monkey during #obama730
He starts with this
I’m not sure why they paid kerry to fly to America, if they wanted to interview a monkey surely a Ferry to Taronga would have sufficed.
It obviously fails to get the reaction he wants, so he tries again using the hashtag created for the interview:
If I wanted to see a monkey on TV id watch Wildlife Rescue. #justsaying #obama730
He then gets some critical reactions – which he RETWEETS to his followers, whom he obviously thinks will have not only adored his first tweets but will be even jollier when they see the lefties getting upset about them. Not long afterwards, following a barrage of criticism, his account was deleted.
Doing a search on Twitter for “@nicksowden” today reveals retweets and critics galore, and it’s still going on this morning. Links to screencaps and blog posts have been tweeted to @TonyAbbottMHR to ask for his opinion (so far so shtum). But Nick Sowden’s name is not only all over Twitter, it’s being blogged and tumblr’ed heavily and also picked up by the MSM.
Nick Sowden is listed as a member of the Young Liberals (nb for USAians, our Liberal Party of Australia is a conservative political group) and has been very active in UQ student politics. He’s apparently also an openly gay conservative student politician, which is kinda refreshing but I bet he’s just alienated at least half of the people who might just have held their nose to vote for a Young Liberal candidate because he was a cute gay medical student. Tough luck if he had plans for standing for election in the broader public sphere any time ever.
Addendum: when I started composing this post, I could look at the photos on Nick Sowden’s Facebook account. Then I suddenly couldn’t any more. Do I hear the tinkling wand of the clue fairy whooshing by?
screencaps from Nick Sowden's Facebook photo albums
via Phil Gomes commenting on LP
Categories: language, parties and factions, technology
Hoyden About Town 
Found on Cursebird:
Tweet text: @xAleishaBrown ill be tweeting like a mad bitch. N.B. I try my darndest to offend during #qanda nothing like getting lefties angry…
It’s all fun and games until you get national attention for it, isn’t it Nick?
So happy that this horrible piece of shite has ruined any chance he had at a career in politics.
As a queer UQ student, all I can say is: fuck yeah it’s about time this retrofuck conservative douchesled got some serious flak for his actions. I could tell so many horror stories about his stint as Gender and Sexuality Officer at the uni, but I’ll stick to saying that this kind of “hilarious” [where hilarious is any adjective synonymous with ‘reprehensible’] bigotry is pretty much par for the course at UQ.
Although to correct that tweet from @katedoak, the LGBT room on campus is thankfully not that close to the Young Liberal office, although I have heard tell of the ‘f*** off ferals’ sticker (which appears to be no longer around).
Ugh. Josef Fritzl jokes on his Facebook page. Along with ‘Vote for Change’. Uh, yeah, being a racist turd is TOTALLY change.
On ABC Online:
Riiiight. He knows enough about right-wing internet sites to reference their common memes on his FB photos etc, but he somehow missed that “monkey” was a racist slur? Just exactly how stupid does he think the rest of the world is?
Also a story in Crikey (I’m not currently a subscriber, so can’t read it in full):
Shorter Nick: Aww, can’t you all take a joke, humourless PC police?
See that shit sandwich you made for yourself Nick? Eat it.
Obviously not a cricket fan either, or he would have been aware of the whole debacle surrounding Andrew Symonds and his statement that he was being called a monkey by a crowd at a cricket match in India.
He has a poster of Hitler with the word HOPE under it on his Facebook page. The man is full of shit if he says he ‘didn’t know’ that it could be construed as racially offensive; he seems to spend his time finding ways to pointlessly offend for shits and giggles. And really, if he wants to be a politician, rather than a gutless juvenile wouldn’t you think he’d spend his time doing something actually constructive?
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
A member of the Queensland Young Liberal National Party faces expulsion after he called Barack Obama a monkey on a social networking site.
Scores of party members this morning called on the party senior executive to immediately dismiss Nick Sowden, president Rod Schneider told brisbanetimes.com.au.
******************************************
“My phone has been off the hook with Young Liberal National Party members. I’ve had 20 emails saying ‘this guy doesn’t represent us’.”
Mr Schneider said Mr Sowden’s membership was over.
“I think he’s got a very, very short shelf life. He’s got a list of indiscretions,” he said.
“In extenuating circumstances, we can move [expulsion] forward.”
When asked if the party’s senior executive would fast-track consideration of Mr Sowden’s membership, Mr Schneider said: “I think it might.”
The senior Liberal National Party has also been inundated with complaints about the young man.
A spokesman confirmed it was likely Mr Sowden, aged in his early 20s, would face disciplinary proceedings about bringing the party into disrepute.
…Awww. Pity…
Sounds like the next Tony Abbott in training
Accoring to The Age, he is also a former Young Democrat. That’s one interesting change of allegiance!
Yeah, the SMH article had this to say on that issue Perla:
He is a former member of the Young Democrats and was expelled from the University of Queensland’s Young Liberal National Party for sabotaging promotional material on campus.
Mr Sowden immediately jumped ship to help campaign for the campus’s Labor Party at last year’s university elections.
“His views change like the weather,” Mr Schneider said.
“He’s one of those people who needs to join a group to belong.
“He’s not necessarily representative of anything.”
Actually, fuckpoliteness, they’ve got that wrong – he got kicked out of Young Liberals and instead supported a group called ‘Real Students’ which made the Libs look downright progressive. The Labor student leadership were predominantly LGBT and people of colour, so they wouldn’t let his wretched hatefull ass in.
I’m wondering whether the university he’s attending has a position on this – I know the uni I’m attending at the moment would probably have him marked down as hard as possible in any units where there was a “professional conduct” criterion (and if medicine doesn’t have one, it should). Okay, yeah, he’s in his twenties, he’s a uni student, and it’s to be expected he’ll do at least some things which are incredibly daft, but most uni students tend to confine their versions of this to getting utterly ratted at the Tav and telling all and sundry “you’re my best mate, you are”. They don’t tend to go out of their way to insult international leaders on a world-wide forum and create themselves provocative Facebook pages.
And indulge in all kinds of wimmin-hatred, Meg, as well – I don’t want to end up in some hospital bed in my dotage at the mercy of a douche like this one.
Apparently a complaint can be made to some professional medical organisation (sorry can’t remember exactly what it was) as students are expected to uphold the standards from the beginning of their course. What they would do??
SMH: “A spokesman confirmed it was likely Mr Sowden, aged in his early 20s, would face disciplinary proceedings about bringing the party into disrepute”
Because we wouldn’t want THAT to happen, now would we? 😉