Aptly Named

In a post cleverly titled Pond Scum, Big Gav quotes The Rodent PM of Australia, John Howard, pooh-poohing the idea of a national summit on oil prices:

"If there's some outcome, some merit in those sorts of things (I would support the summit), but if it is just a talkfest, and I fear that such a gathering would be precisely that, with no practical outcome, then there's no point in having it," he said. "If there was some magic wand that could've been waved, I'm sure the American and Japanese and European governments would have done so, I would've done so."

This attitude portrays concession straddling the boundaries of defeatism and hopelessness. The guy really plays the part of a loser in that he doesn't have the intellectual honesty to provoke his constituency to action, instead encouraging people to not talk about the situation in the hope that it will go away. After all, he claimed to bust a gut trying to determine if somebody else found a solution, and, tough nuts, came up empty handed.

The way of a rodent -- burrow into the ground in the hopes of avoiding your adversaries, all the while secretly hoarding away all the nut-fruits you can find for the long winter.