In which the pond expresses concern for Gina Rinehart's welfare ...

(Above: First Dog ending discussion on one of the issues of the day. The rest of the cartoon here, paywall affected).

So just to rub salt in the pond's wounds, Lenore Taylor scribbles a piece proposing that it isn't Qantas that's picked up the carbon tax bill, it's the mug punters who fork over a special levy at somewhere between $1.93 and $7.25 a flight.

Qantas carbon tax bill has been covered by ticket surcharge, she says, putting all the whining and howling in a different light:

Zero! It was like the emperor's Joycean clothes all over again, except who'd be so cruel as to drag James Joyce into this net of befuddlement and lies ...

And then Clark and Dawe deemed it funny to have a parrot parrot over and over again "carbon tax" like a bloody great macaw with its beak stuck in a cracked 78. Welcome to contemporary Australia, they said cheerfully, presumably planning to work their way up to being door bitches for Satan's hell ...

Enough already.

The pond would, for a change of pace, like to get Friday into gear by proposing a great read on another matter altogether, the attempt to catch a star's fusion in an ITER bottle on earth and by a bit of luck, Raffi Khatchadourian's lengthy piece, A Star in a Bottle, is outside The New Yorker paywall.

It's either a gigantic folly or the salvation of humanity, but either way a marvel and a wonder to read about ...

Okay, okay, any stray reader of the pond knows that there's many exciting and engaging things to read out there in the real world. Head off to The New Yorker and you'll be stepping outside the tent for qute a while, but then that's no matter, because there's bugger all to see here...

Sadly, the pond's night beat for the daily is the demented world of the commentariat, the ones who believe in Noah's ark but call climate science a religion ...

What's that mean? Well for starters there's always the hagiographers and knob polishers doing their daily rounds of bowing and scraping:

Sheesh, how much can a possum bear? Now there's a very model of a model bouffant Pooh-Bah.

You mean we should celebrate Abbott's long held and consistent view that climate change is crap and that the carbon tax is responsible for Qantas's misfortunes?

Meanwhile, somehow the pond is meant to work out, on the fly, a discordant notion which proposes exactly the opposite:

Ah well, read Tony Abbott's plan is to have no plan at all if you must, but the pond settled for Simon Letch's illustration of a treeless vista populated by mining 'roos and a banana republic plane overhead ...

And over at the Daily Terror, the least trusted newspaper in Australia, the loudest macaw of them all, the one with a beak that cracks 78s in a single blow, was at it again:

So Akker Dakker has swallowed the Joycean pup. But given what else he's swallowed and sniffed in his useless career of idle abuse, who's surprised by that?

What else?

Well the woman who inherited a fortune, and has held it fast to herself, no matter the grasping fingers of her family, is at it again.

Naturally the Daily Terror - did we mention it's the least trusted newspaper in Australia? - gave it a hearty splash:

But you can get the gist of it by reading Australians living beyond our means says Gina Rinehart:

"I can already hear the left boiling with rage that I dare challenge their ‘bottomless pit’ and the belief that money doesn’t have to be earned before it is spent mentality. 

Actually the pond doesn't consider itself on the left, and it rarely boils with rage - the comedy of life is simply too rich for that - but it does enjoy a suppurating, festering dose of paranoia:

 "More nasty twisted articles will appear, forests and splinters of them. But every day Australia goes further into debt with no clear planning operation to get back even close to where we were. 

And exactly where were we back in the 1930s?

Happily there are many interesting features on Australia in the old days, not least this piece offered up by the NSW parliament, 1930 to 1939 - depression and crisis. Jack Lang was a funny old bugger and a curmudgeon but his plan was a good one. It was the Rineharts of the day that ruined it ...

It's always hard to pin down the "where we were" days. Are we talking about the great depression of the 1890s? Or the credit squeeze recession that Ming the Merciless produced with Holt's jolt in 1961-62 (ADB Holt here). Or the mess in the 1970s which can be shared amongst the Whitlam and the Fraser government?

Or is Rinehart hoping that Australia will get back to the glory days of a Hawke/Keating government? Well it can't be the mess that John Howard produced as treasurer ...

As always when the fatuous go in search of stereotypes, they land on Margaret Thatcher, and naturally she's a Baroness:

Ms Rinehart paid tribute to the late Baroness Thatcher, saying Australian politicians needed to follow her example. 
''Thatcher steered through a lack of courage in her own political party, which had become riddled with lefties or 'non-courageous wets' and self-interested power mongrels, who didn't grasp or didn't want to grasp what was needed for their own country,'' Rinehart said. 
''What Thatcher did for Britain our own leaders should do for us - cut spending, cut waste, cut the shackles and back hard work.''

Uh huh, Well if someone can arrange for the pond to inherit a stray billion or two, by golly we'll get right down the business of cutting spending and waste, cutting the shackles and backing hard work. Why there'll be stacks of work for the butler, the chauffeur, the cook, the maid, the pool boy, the gardener and a dozen more.

Of course you don't have to head off to Alex Pareene's hatchet job The woman who wrecked Great Britain to get an understanding of what Thatcher actually accomplished and what were her limitations.

You can head off to the UK Telegraph - hardly a hotbed of seething leftist radicals and read Ten myths about Margaret Thatcher exploded, and get to Number 7:

7. She restored the values of thrift to the UK economy. At best arguable. What she certainly did do though was begin some of the reforms that ended up undermining Britain’s once enviable private sector final salary pension system. She taxed surpluses in a manner which encouraged contribution holidays and corporate raiders such as Hanson, some of whose takeovers were more motivated by the opportunity for realising pension fund money than any real interest in the underlying company. Even the introduction of personal pensions was very much a double edged thing, since it ended up in a huge mis-selling scandal. 

And in a bizarre recounting of twenty ways Thatcher changed Britain - power dressing and shoulder pads anyone? - you might stumble on this:

Thatcher said that privatisation was a chance to give "power back to the people". In fact, as Robert Philpot, director of the Progress pressure group, wrote last week: "Now, in 2012, it's clear that the result of electricity privatisation was to take power away from the people. Small British shareholders have no influence over the overwhelmingly non-British owners of the firms that generate and distribute power in Britain."

Of course the rich don't have to worry that much about power bills, or the ruining of the town of Morwell for that matter, and frankly once that inherited billion or two lands in the pond's bank account, it's likely we'll become fiercely Thatcherite, because it's a certainty the family will be off to court demanding a share ...

So what's the real reason for all the frothing and foaming and resentment that regularly features in Rinehart's tracts, which on its more absurd days results in headlines like World's richest woman calls for Australians to take a pay cut - 'because African workers are willing to earn just $2 a day'?

When in doubt, the pond always goes Freudian.

You see all those jokes about being an heiress is what really gets the Rinehart goat, and really gets her going.

For all her efforts to have her late father venerated, however, Rinehart has also been at pains to point out that she deserves the credit for rescuing the company after his death in 1992. In an email to Tim Treadgold, she spoke of the “the mess and debts and liabilities I was left with”. Lang might have been the discoverer, but Rinehart has been the company’s developer. Her hatred of being labelled an ‘iron ore heiress’ is well known, precisely because she regards herself as a self-made businesswoman. Similarly, she never describes her father as the ‘King of the Pilbara’, because it would imply hers is a privileged inheritance. She is nobody’s princess. (Nick Bryant, What Gina Wants)

How absurd and desperate, and in its own way tragic and pathetic can this become?

It clearly needles Rinehart that her personal role in transforming Hancock Prospecting has not been recognised more widely. Her corporate website tries strenuously to advertise her achievements. The logos of recent awards, such as the 2009 Telstra Australian Business Woman of the Year, are displayed prominently in a kind of online trophy cabinet on the homepage. Her biography on the site also features a long list of lesser gongs, including her induction into the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels (a curious who’s who that embraces Bill Clinton, Pope John Paul II, Winston Churchill and Barry Manilow). More impressive to the ear is her 2011 Global Leadership Award for Masterclass CEO of the Year. She travelled to Kuala Lumpur to receive it in person, even though its sponsor was a bi-monthly Malaysian business magazine with a circulation of just 15,000. The website also links to a speech delivered by Tony Abbott that appears to be there because, in a room packed with her peers, he singled Rinehart out for special praise. (Bryant, ibid)

And so we come to the Freudian bit, courtesy again of Nick Bryant:

The company website, of course, shines little light on Rinehart’s vexed private life. In any event, a linear timeline could not adequately do it justice. It requires something much more elaborate: a graphic showing shifting Venn diagrams, perhaps, to illustrate her overlapping feuds at any given moment. Over the years, adversaries have included her father, her Filipino stepmother, her first husband, the children of Peter Wright (her father’s business partner), former employees, and a long line of sacked lawyers. In the late 1990s, she also settled out of court with a former security guard, Bob Thompson, who had filed a sexual harassment suit against her. “She’s just incredibly lonely and isolated,” Thompson told Woman’s Day. 
 Another acquaintance tells me she lacks emotional logic. Conflict is the recurring theme of her life. “People who spend time with her end up falling out with her,” says a former colleague. “Writing a cheque is her only way to advance things.”

And so to the current family feud, and the endless court cases, and bizarrely a poem engraved on a 30 tonne boulder in a shopping centre which repeats Rinehart standard lines in a way that soils both poetry and her intelligence.

But then the rich can do things differently while the rest of us are borne along by the tide, beating on, boats against the current ...

It's vainglorious stuff, as much a plea for recognition and attention as any actual nostrum as to how to run the economy and the government. It springs from the same alienation, the rootless and restless hollow ambition of that hollow man the Bolter ...

Every so often Rinehart will bless the world with her views, and the media will pay attention because she's filthy rich, and when she has a mind to it, she can help destroy a government's policies or help elevate a worshipful group thinker ...

Australia hasn't yet reached the peak of crazed billionaires or rich people American Koch style, but Rinehart is helping us get there, and yet not for the moment would it occur to her that it's because she's in reality deeply unhappy ...

The pond hopes by this point most have fled to The New Yorker, but if you've stuck around, here's your delusional, paranoid just desserts, wherein you'll discover all  that's been reported as news today was said long ago, and in a really inept and silly way.

And so to the poem. The pond fancies it's best said in a tremulous schoolgirl voice, trying to make rhythmic sense of the doggerel attempts at rhyme:

(And more on British comics here)

Our Future 

The globe is sadly groaning with debt, poverty and strife 
And billions now are pleading to enjoy a better life 
Their hope lies with resources buried deep within the earth 
And the enterprise and capital which give each project worth 
Is our future threatened with massive debts run up by political hacks 
Who dig themselves out by unleashing rampant tax 
The end result is sending Australian investment, growth and jobs offshore 
This type of direction is harmful to our core 
Some envious unthinking people have been conned 
To think prosperity is created by waving a magic wand 
Through such unfortunate ignorance, too much abuse is hurled 
Against miners, workers and related industries who strive to build the world 
Develop North Australia, embrace multiculturalism and welcome short term foreign workers to our shores 
To benefit from the export of our minerals and ores 
The world's poor need our resources: do not leave them to their fate 
Our nation needs special economic zones and wiser government, before it is too late.

What a shocker and strangely, how sad ... so much money, and yet, so little self-understanding or awareness ... so much anger, hostility, paranoia and conflict, so little tranquility ...

And if that's the future of poetry, the country is well and truly fucked. Put everyone on welfare, the pond says, and help them learn how to write ...

(Below: the pond wouldn't want you to go away empty-handed without a souvenir)

Put it another way:

Quick, the pond is in urgent need of some magic water ...

(Above: and more Moir here)

So now the pond knows how far Alan Joyce will go in forelock tugging, bowing and scraping in a bid to save his job and shake down the government ...

By coincidence, the pond has been reading about Vidkun Quisling - you can do a Greg Hunt and wiki him here - so nothing surprises the pond when it comes to servility and kow towing, but did Joyce really expect anyone to swallow the humbug that the second Qantas release on the effects of the carbon tax was just a "normal daily clarification" and "not inconsistent with what we've said before". (Joyce says Qantas hasn't changed tune on carbon pricing)

And now it turns out that Joyce rang jolly Joe Hockey to talk about it ...

Such humbug is admirably breathtaking, and a fair indication of why Joyce is a bad politician as well as a bad businessman.

No doubt Joyce thinks the "low level" writer of the original release should go, but that would be to entirely miss the point as to where the buck should stop - and with alleged friends like David Epstein furiously scribbling Alan Joyce's plan 'irresponsible', says former Qantas executive, who needs enemies? (forced video at end of link).

So that's the comedy of the day, though it reminded the pond of the recent Air Crash Investigations about a DC-8 pilot so focussed on his landing gear that he ran out of fuel and crash landed in Portland ... which reminded the pond that Portlandia is back ...

Oh dear freebasing again.

Time to straighten up and celebrate, because no doubt many will be exceptionally pleased that the carping curmudgeon, the generally grumpy Paul Sheehan, has returned to soil the pages of digital Fairfax in a way that suggests he really should have joined the reptiles at the lizard Oz long ago.

Yes, you can get the tone just from the header ABC management finds sorry is the hardest word, a genuinely comic gem from a man who somehow found sorry the hardest word for his sordid promotion of magic water. For those who came in late to that sorry story, the pond always recommends the Possum's Too good to be true, and Media Watch here.

Ah there's nothing like an old yarn to lighten the Thursday gloom, and for the real capper, you need to head off to Sheehan's piece in 2005, Magic of water is overshadowed by mystery, wherein he explains that three years after the original folly, I'm still taking the water, every day, along with several hundred other people who believe it has helped them, but the clinical trial has not since materialised.

Sheehan concluded that piece What on earth was he thinking?, without seeming to understand that linking thinking and Sheehan is a bridge too far ...

Three years on!! and still imbibing the magic water, even though it seems it was slowly dawning he'd been conned and hustled and duped ...

Back to the present, and Sheehan concludes his piece by muttering in best lizard Oz style darkly about Chris Kenny v the ABC. Indeed. Why, that's just the right time to link to Liam Kenny's bold and brave In Defence Of The Chaser's False Depiction of My Dad Having Sex With Dog.

But credit where credit is due, it was the routine presence of Sheehan in the old tree killer edition of the Sydney Morning Herald that saw the pond terminate its subscription to the rag, and frankly ever since the red backs in the purse have danced for joy ...

What else? Well there's the splendid sight of Tom Switzer explaining how Vlad the impaler is doing a perfectly proper thing in the Ukraine, and it's Obama that's got it all wrong, as you can read in Barack Obama playing risky game of Russian roulette over Vladimir Putin's Crimea invasion.

It's always great to read someone defending the ways of dictatorial thugs and bully boys, often using the excuse that the United States is also prone to thuggishness and bullying, with the peculiar maths that two wrongs invariably produce a right. Given the pond's reading last night, what a pity that Neville Chamberlain's cabinet is now long gone, because Switzer would be a shoo-in for a posting ...

What else? After all, we haven't even gone near tree killer, forest hater, World Heritage delisting Tony Abbott (too much Tasmanian forest 'locked up') or The Australian on this overcast, gloomy day...

Surely the reptiles can come up with a bit of fatuous nonsense that will keep the spirits soaring?

Yep, that'll do nicely.

That's right up there with Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie's Tous les jours à tous points de vue je vais de mieux en mieux.

As usual, the real question is why the reptiles offer up, behind a paywall, expecting punters to fork over the readies to get access, a re-hashed, or more correctly, re-heated - perhaps in a nutrition-ruining fucking science over that lit their house on fire - piece that first saw the light of day back on the 16th January 2014 under the header The Realism of Global Optimism ...

The piece itself is a feel good content free zone, with a couple of conspicuous plugs for the Copenhagen Consensus, and at the bottom of the piece in the Oz, a plug for a book edited by Lomborg.

Why do the reptiles bother? Are things so bad in Murdoch la la land that they can't even find someone in house to drum up a piece explaining how things are much better in Australia since we decided to chop everything down and cover it in tar and cement?

Can it get any more fatuous?

Of course it can. The Bolter began the day with this plea:

Just wondering… Does anyone know of good video of the green pantheism at work? Some illustration of the religious fervour that had the Greens locking up forests because humans were too sinful? 
Long shot, I know. (A long shot)

It's lucky the pond read it, because it seems that the Bolter, already slumped in ratings gloom at Ten, seems to have forgotten Avatar.

That featured the sorry story of blue tree-hugger greenies who indulged in wilful Na'vi pantheism at the Tree of Souls, while kindly humans tried to go about the usual business of turning nice trees into chipboard and pulp, so the nice Japanese people would have enough paper for their present-wrapping ...

Needless to say, it was produced by Hollywood liberals, in the grip of the international Jewish conspiracy which also controls the banking system, the House of Windsor and the United Nations ...

Kill the blue creatures, kill the blue creatures ...

Oops, the pond apologises. That's what happens when you spend too much time in the company of loons.

Naturally the prime loon in the Murdochian stables was at it again today. First of all there was some dark muttering:

A very bruising attempt to get another article published means I will not comment directly on this very unfortunate development and risk inflicting yet more legal expenses on my long-suffering employer: Warren Mundine, the head of Tony Abbott’s indigenous council, has directly advised the Prime Minister to reverse his government’s plans to repeal a key section of the Racial Discrimination Act, saying he has the backing of the council.

You see, that allows martyrdom, plus it also allows the Bolter to duck and weave away from a direct assault on Mundine, currently an Abbott favourite. Well that wouldn't do, would it, attacking an Abbott advisor ...

Instead the Bolter cannily links to the reptile editorialist at the lizard Oz blathering on about free speech being a principle to be upheld consistently, where the Bolter's martyrdom is given yet another tedious going over, and there's not a word about said free speech routinely seeming like an excuse for the hive mind to parrot groupthink under the leadership of Chairman Rupert ...

But if Mundine's protected, surely there's someone the Bolter can pick on again? Seeing as how he's a posturing thuggish verbal bully of the first water ...

Why of course. Come on down Adam Goodes:

If you can be bothered to lower yourself into the cesspit of Adam Goodes' lecture lets us all down, you can see why the Bolter is so good at climate science denialism.

The Bolter's obsession with race would be painful to behold if it wasn't so nakedly Freudian and deeply disturbed.

In what is now a standard routine for the neocons in the Murdoch stable, he berates Adam Goodes for pointing out a 13 year old indulging in racist abuse. Suddenly the victim is the guilty one, and the guilty one, persecuted by a large, tall, powerful black man subjecting her to national humiliation, is innocent.

Try running that line with a couple of good time girls kicking and abusing a nearly blind man on a bus ...

As for Goodes himself and his early life, here's his version, as printed by the reptiles themselves:

Horsham, 300km north-west of Melbourne, 1994. Lisa May was a single parent raising three sons, the Goodes boys, Adam, 14, Jake, 12, and Brett, 10. Lisa May had separated from the boys' father 10 years previously, and had recently chosen to escape from an abusive partner. She chose not to be a victim, not to wallow in a past that saw nine of her 10 siblings taken from their parents; saw her removed at the age of five from her parents at Point Pearce, an indigenous town on the Yorke Peninsula, South Australia, 70km from Wallaroo where Adam Goodes was born on January 8, 1980. She chose to devote her life to her sons. (here)

And here's the Bolter's painful, convoluted attempt to deny that reality, none of it directly related to Goodes' or his mother's actual experience:

For instance, he said his mother, raised by an English family, was “a member of the stolen generations”. But whether the stolen generations exist is a highly contested issue. 
 She came from South Australia, which the state’s Supreme Court found in 2007 never had a policy of removing children just because they were Aboriginal. 
Brian Bennett worked for the Aborigines Department when Goodes’s mother was a girl, and told the court: “I don’t believe that I, at any time during my career as a welfare officer, had the power to remove an Aboriginal child from its parents.” 
The judge also cited a letter written in 1958 by the Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Board: “Our legislation does not provide that neglected children can be removed from their parents, except by transfer to the Children’s Welfare and Public Relief Board who in any case, will not accept them.” 
In South Australia, Aboriginal children could only be adopted “with the authority of the parents” but too few got that chance — as Goodes’s mother apparently did. 
“Unfortunately, there is a considerable amount of undernourishment, malnutrition and neglect,” the secretary mourned. 
 Our history is not as simple as Goodes claims. Nor is our guilt.

Pathetic, and risible. A good journalist would have tackled Goodes, would have taken the time to discover what happened, instead of citing Bennett and a court, followed by mysterious generalities - the pond is still pondering on the significance and meaning of "as Goodes's mother apparently did" ...

But then the Bolter isn't much of a journalist, so much as a rabid ideologue deeply hung up on race.

Still the pond knows who to turn to when the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines needs to be explained away and swept under the rug.

Yep for its sins, the pond has lately been reading up again on Sir George Arthur (ADB him here) and his useful fool George August Robinson (ADB him here).

Genocide, but don't you go worrying about simple history. Worry about how to gild the lily ...

Meanwhile, the pond is deeply tortured. Who to most like in this glorious smack down between David Rowe, here:

And David Pope, here:

The pond gives it to Rowe on points, but bless their socks, this pair are sometimes the only way to get through the day, especially when surrounded by racists and tree killers ...

Time for the pond's daily dose of ersatzwurst ...

(Above: screen cap, no hot links, here, thanks to a correspondent)

The pond was recently deeply moved on discovering that Germans during the first world war had invented over eight hundred different forms of ersatzwurst, or sausage substitute ...

That's one of the details in R.J. Evans review of a number of books about the start of World War I, for the NYRB, cached - outside the paywall - as 'The Greatest Catastrophe the World Has Seen' in case the direct text doesn't load here.

Yet when you think about it, the Murdochians, under far less pressure, in a comfortable domestic clime, routinely manufacture thousands of different forms of ersatzwurst, inserting straw, or newspaper pulp or sawdust ...

Take for example, that bubble headed booby Miranda the Devine, scribbling furiously for the least trusted newspaper in the country:

If you can be bothered to read Gender shouldn't define a career - yes, the eyes glaze, the body slumps, the mind turns feeble - the Devine gets really bizarre, and in the opening pars:

The hypocrisy of Labor dispatching its Emily’s List sweethearts Penny Wong and Catherine King to tear down one of the few women in the Abbott ministry made last week’s Senate Estimates hearings compulsory viewing. 
Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash, under siege over a Department of Health food rating website she had ordered taken down, got the full treatment from Labor’s feminist punishers. 
She was grilled, niggled, berated and rudely interrupted until she finally snapped at Wong: “What would be better would be if you were not asking the same questions 10 times trying to get different answers.” 
So much for the sisterhood.

Say what? Did anyone in the rag think about The hypocrisy of the Murdochians despatching a Catholic sweetheart bitch from hell to tear down a few Labor women doing their job as politicians? So much for the sisterhood ...

It's such a stupid opening gambit for what turns out to be a pro forma defence of the inept Fiona Nash that the pond struggled to read on.

But struggle on we did until we came to this:

If the Health Department is hellbent on spending money on nutritional public education, it would be far better to undo the damage done during the mad anti-fat campaign. 
Sugar is the real culprit and fat-free food often is packed with sugar to make it taste better.

Oh dear.

It seems that the Devine is part of the international sugar conspiracy, or at least a willing lickspittle dupe.

Sugar is the new tobacco, say cloistered activists like Liverpool University's Simon Capewell who fear "sugary drinks and junk foods are now pressed on unsuspecting parents and children by a cynical industry"...
The sucrophobes, derided and excluded from health conferences in the 1960s and criticised for their fat scepticism, are now in charge.

Yep, that was Nick 'the Caterist' Cater railing at length against the sucrophobes in Too many hands in the sugar bowl, safely behind the paywall so that the Devine won't be mortified at being associated with cloistered activists and sugar demonisers and the anti-sugar lobby and an international conspiracy that can be traced at least as far as the WHO ...

Just another contradictory day in Murdoch la la land, where the power of the ersatzwurst is strong ...

Never mind, today the pond decided on a thought experiment, a trip into the heart of the belly of the beast - namely the editorials at the Oz ...

The rag has lately taken to flailing about in desperation as it fails in the marketplace, incapable of understanding how in the process it's helping orchestrate its own demise.

The tone of the editorials is invariably hagiographic.

Simpering and mindless adulation spring readily to mind. Take yesterday's editorial about the Oscars, under the header Australian creativity shines.

Scratch simpering, substitute ingratiating fawning and licking of boots. The rag goes on about Catherine Martin and Cate Blanchett (and Michael Wilkinson and David Clayton) and the Australian industry and concludes:

Yet again, those who triumphed at the Dolby Theatre, formerly the Kodak Theatre, have done us proud.

Now the pond didn't think much of Blanchett's winning performance, nor much of the Woody Allen movie, nor much for that matter of 12 Years a Slave, but at the same time, that's not because of some vicious tall poppie streak, it's just a matter of personal taste and preference  ...

No, if you want a vicious hypocritical tall poppie streak you just have to saunter through the Murdochian hall of shame, where over the years Blanchett has routinely been assaulted for daring to express a view, or show signs of life and an interest in issues, or boldly refusing to follow the line decreed by the Murdochian thought police.

You don't have to look far. Along with his relentless excoriation of the likes of Adam Goodes - so much fear, so much loathing, so much bile - the Bolter routinely assaulted the woman who made the reptiles at the Oz passing proud.

Here's a perfect example, All hail our superwoman, which seethes with so much resentment, so much anger - along with cheap, bitter sarcasm - that it's truly a wonder to behold:

I know exactly when Queen Elizabeth mysteriously became our new head of state. It was when she left her four-day-old baby to give a florid speech at Kevin Rudd’s summit, praising artists . . . like herself. How that crowd of our “best and brightest” cheered. And cheered again when she said she heard her baby cry in the corridor. Such hearing! 
In fact, such was her hold on the audience that she looked less like Elizabeth for a moment and more like the magical Galadriel she’d also been, once more entrancing hobbits. Then she sat with the self-possession she’d shown as Charlotte Grey, another of her heroic incarnations. 
What a triumph it all was for the hardly more real character also known as Cate Blanchett, now cast as the country’s most admired woman.

Bizarre, weird, pathetic, with a bunch in the comments below joining in the Lord of the Flies 'kill the pig' routine, the sort of hating you'd expect of a serial killer muttering about women being too successful, too attractive, and needing to be taken down a peg or two:

Observe the miracle: Thirty-nine and not a wrinkle; glittering career, yet a mum; Hollywood celebrity, yet mingling with the crowd; beautiful, yet hailed as a great mind.

And so on. If you drag your way through the envy, you'll emerge at the other end feeling drained, and exhausted, a bit like indulging in the Tough Mudder obstacle racing craze (sadly behind the New Yorker paywall).

But back to the hagiographers. You see, it's not just Blanchett and co who do Australia proud. It's the wonderful Abbott government:

If you can be bothered reading Challenging Putin's aggression, you'll see that Abbott's got it right and Obama got it wrong, and in Boosting competition will see Qantas fly high again, Abbott's got it right, and nearly everyone else in view has got it wrong.

It's important to remember this when reading why Labor is hopeless and confused, a piece without paragraphs, in the manner of Samuel Beckett writing his novel Molloy, in which it's established that Labor is wrong about everything, and Abbott, we may infer - along with that prime doofus Martin Ferguson - is right about everything.

At the end, the pond reeled away from the sickening, sugary, over-sweet hagiographic excess, way worse than a dose of fairy floss at the Tamworth show (stick to toffee apples to really do harm to your teeth).

Perhaps the Devine was right after all.

And yet it was marvellous to see the adept way that the anonymous editorialist had failed to mention - what with the only chant  they could manage four legs Abbott good, and two legs Shorten bad - a most marvellous sight.

Yep, even though Qantas was under commercial pressure, and Alan Joyce was doing his level best to save his job by scoring government aid - when he should have been sacked back when he dumped his passengers in terminals all over the place - the airline couldn't manage to jump through the hoops and declare that black was white, and vice versa.

Even the reptiles felt compelled to note it in a cursory way in Qantas contradicts govt: 'carbon tax not to blame':

Qantas has said the removal of the carbon tax is not a priority in fixing its commercial woes, contradicting claims by the government and prime minister that the repeal of the legislation is key to Qantas' success. 
According to The Guardian, Prime Minister Tony Abbott in question time yesterday told parliament: “The best thing we can do if we want Qantas to call Australia home now and forever is to remove the shackles that are holding Qantas back … by this very day repealing the carbon tax.” 

Eek, they use The Graudian as a news source! They need an English-based newspaper, The Graudian, to find out what happened in question time in parliament?

Oh, but do go on:

But a Qantas spokesperson said that it was "levelling the playing field" against competitors, who also pay the carbon tax, that was key to its turnaround. 
“Qantas’s current issues are not related to carbon pricing. We have been clear that levelling the playing field is the most important policy measure that needs to be fixed and with some urgency," they told the newspaper.

Say that again:

“Qantas’s current issues are not related to carbon pricing".

Well it might flash by in the news, but don't expect that sort of talk to turn up in the editorials at the lizard Oz. Not when there's exceptional feats of hagiography to be done ...

So where did that leave the pond?

Well it seems it's okay for a female columnist to berate female politicians for daring to berate another female politician, that sugar is bad except when it's Caterist good, that Cate Blanchett does us all proud except when she routinely irritates the Bolter and all the rest of the Murdochian neocon commentariat, that Tony Abbott is as sharp as a tack, and gets everything right ...  except when ...

Sssh, how many times does it need to be said? Don't mention the carbon tax and climate science ...

Talk about ersatzwurst ... probably as insubstantial and unsatisfying as the kind the Germans had to devour in two world wars ...

The pond suddenly felt at Yeatsian desire to construct an elegy for angry old white men, their time up, and yet without the wit to know or understand it:

That is no country for old men. The young 
In one another's arms, birds in the trees 
—Those dying generations—at their song, 
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, 
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long 
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. 
Caught in that sensual music all neglect 
Monuments of unageing intellect.  (the rest here)

And then sheesh, wouldn't you know it, along comes a cartoonist to remind the pond that cartoons are the only thing in the daily newspapers worth reading, and to hell with angry white males of the Bolter kind, especially when they're paltry things, tattered coats covering bitterness and resentment ...

Or perhaps worst of all, unseemly covetous villains, best seen as Bondian cat-carrying, book-buying figures of fun.

And as always more David Pope here:

Yes, the pond is deeply sorry too ...

Yesterday First Dog published an important and wide-ranging apology on behalf of The Australian.

While appreciating the Dog's valiant attempt to apologise for the rag's cretinous, curmudgeonly, cloddish, loutish behaviour - frequently passed off as vigorous investigative journalism, to the great shame of Woodward and Bernstein - the pond eventually decided there wasn't much point accepting the apology, when the actual recalcitrant villains of the piece continue on their sordid way without the slightest sign of regret or remorse, or any indication at all that they intend to change their ways ...

Speaking of climate denialism and their denial of their denialism, for example, you could hunt high and low for any indication that the lizards were remotely aware or interested in the launch of the latest report on climate by the CSIRO and BOM:

You can, thanks to the full to overflowing intertubes, bypass the irrelevant reptiles, and head off here and either download the report State of the Climate 2014 as a pdf, or read it online.

Heck, the pond is agency agnostic. You can do exactly the same at the Australian government's BOM, here:

You'll find a report on the report, currently down the page and tucked away in the environment section of the Fairfaxians, with Peter Hannam's Australia experiencing more extreme heat, high fire danger days, says the latest State of the Climate report.

But at least it's there.

No doubt in due course the Murdochians will wheel out the hacks, the paid professional assassins, to nit and cherry pick and cast doubts and dispute, while at the same time running the old, and odd, editorial line about how they accept the notion that the climate might be changing, and then do their best to deny any of the implications ... Bjorn Lomborg, anyone?

So what do we cop instead today?

Well there was a comedy item, of the hagiographic kind:

Oh yes, that's sure to have Vlad the impaler trembling in his boots.

And then like brain-dead clockwork came this:

Even the splash was a classic form of trolling click bait.

Many on the intertubes, for example, see nothing wrong in asserting that Nick Cater is a fuck witted wombat.

You see the impeccable logic?

"Many at the ABC" followed by "see nothing wrong in reporting unfounded allegations", in itself an unfounded allegation of the first water.

Well it wouldn't do if there wasn't a reference to World War II, and a veiled reference to Hitler, and naturally, being a Caterist, Cater obliges in the opening pars of The anti-military bohemian collective (inside the paywall for your peace of mind):

Peter Coleman once wrote about bohemians who met at Sherry’s coffee shop in wartime Sydney to consider “more important things” than the war. 
Nowadays the bohemians are organising the Opposition Leader’s diary and have decided that there were more pressing matters to attend to than welcoming home our troops in Darwin after their longest ever war.

Uh huh. The pond immediately stood by for an impeccable impression of Colonel Blimp, refracted through the addled mind of an armchair general.

And sure enough, the Caterist promptly careered and careened through a brief impressionistic history of the past which managed to link together inter alia, Billy Hughes, Labor and conscription in World War 1, the Wobblies, Arthur Calwell and the Vietnam war, and Gough Whitlam and the Vietnam war, with Whitlam "decidedly cautious about being associated with the anti-war movement, understanding that causes that stouten hearts on university campuses sit awkwardly with the broader population."

Indeed. Which no doubt explains why Whitlam ended Australia's involvement in the Vietnam war on election, and abolished conscription, and why many Australians, when looking at Vietnam and its government, right here and now see it is still ostensibly Communist. (Vietnam Communist Party tightens grip).

Outside dedicated right wing loons, many in the Australian population see the Vietnam war as a fuck up and a waste of time.

Oh dear, Caterism is catching. But hang on:

Twenty years after the North Vietnamese victory, in April 1995, an opinion poll marking the thirtieth anniversary of Prime Minister Menzies’ commitment of a battalion to Vietnam and the twentieth anniversary of Saigon’s fall found that 55% of Australians thought that it was wrong to have sent troops to Vietnam and 30% considered it the right thing to have done. (here)

Well there's wrong, and then there's futile ...

Next the Caterist careens on his way, bumping into Allan Ashbolt, Jim Cairns, Radio Australia, the first Gulf War, Bob Hawke, Robert Springborg, the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, the killing of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, David Hicks, navy brutality, Stephen Conroy, groupthink at the ABC, Jon Faine and a few listeners, and wondrously fatuously stupidities of this kind:

For politicians, this is the most treacherous category of cultural debate, one that pits the Wobblies and bohemians against Australians like Michael and Moira.

Actually the most treacherous category of cultural debate is that a man who peddles reductionist, essentially stupid and meaningless stereotypes that pits Wobblies against the western suburbs, and still, somehow, thinks that what he has to say is of any use at all:

There is no room for indifference. You either enlist or you do not. Either Conroy is on to something or he is completely barking mad.

Well as the pond always says, you have to be completely barking mad to call others completely barking mad, which is why the pond can assert with some certainty that the Caterists are completely barking mad, and in urgent need of a course in history, as opposed to a course in ideological caricatures.

The only upside? Well it made the pond revisit Colonel Blimp yet again for wisdom and insight:

And there's plenty more if you google Colonel Blimp, proving that everything changes only so it can stay the same.

But there was a downside.

You see, the pond wanted to close on the latest bizarre exercise by the reptiles at the lizard Oz, even weirder than publishing Nick Cater, which is pretty weird for starters.

Now you might be thinking of the weirdnesses noted in Media Watch last night - the Tele slipping on Slipper, and the vicious, gutter, bully boy personal assaults - Attacks get personal - which saw the reptiles  sink their steel-capped toes into Michael Stutchbury and give space to that pre-eminent boofhead John Singleton so he could ravage anyone within earshot.

But no, it was this exercise in post-modernist, surrealist irony, worthy of a Salvador Dali, or even a Bunuel, found here, behind the paywall for your protection:

Really weird stuff, but happily it brings us back to First Dog. The Dog noted the strangeness:

By some strange synchronicity, Andrew Marlton had turned up on Insiders on the weekend, talking about cartooning. He's got his eye on them:

Which no doubt helps explain why his apology for the reptiles was so heartfelt and extensive, and inclusive:

(You can get the original, in one piece, by heading off to Crikey here, though it might still be behind the paywall).

Yet the Dog didn't even mention by name Dennis 'the bouffant one' Shanahan or Nick 'the Caterist' Cater.

But he did cover the bases, and we're all sorry, sorry that grown men and women can happily put their names to this stuff ...

And we're sorry that a once useful broadsheet, now in sharp decline and fall, sees the way forward as turning itself into a down under clone of Faux Noise.

We already have one of those to lighten our days with its apocalyptic paranoia, as Jon Stewart noted in relation to Arizona. And if you missed that by wasting your time reading the reptiles at the Oz, lordy lordy, you really do know how to waste time, and we're sorry for that too.

Not the demographic ...

First to a community service above and beyond the call.

Yep, they also serve who watch,  and in a remarkable feat of televisual endurance, way beyond eating 69 hot dogs in the Nathan Hot Dog Eating Contest, Katharine Murphy sat down and watched the full hour of the Bolter, and then wrote about it in Bolt is back but he's missing the spark.

Murphy astutely noted that life might have strangely detained the pond on Sunday morning - staring at an ingrown toenail for a full hour will do that for you - and thus might have missed the entirety of the Bolter, but never mind, she was there to fill in the gaps and the memory loss.

Her report extinguished any curiosity about the contents - ye ancient cats and withered dogs, Gerard Henderson and Michael Costa and Peter Costello and Tony Abbott - and with a bit of luck, Sunday will continue to be a dead zone for the Ten network.

Meanwhile, the generally grumpy Paul Sheehan continues to be missing in action, and it occurred to the pond how little all the absence of all the hysteria and blather meant in the general order of things.

Did anybody miss the Bolter while he was on his extended, worse than the ABC style break? Maybe a few extremists who enjoy getting agitated and lathering up a hearty dose of bile and anger.

But does anyone really care that Sheehan has taken his grumpiness away on holidays?

The hapless Fairfaxians are left to run optimistic stories like Adam Spencer proposing we can switch from lucky to clever country, thereby ignoring the reality that the Bolter has returned - there goes 10 IQ points in a flash  and climate science with them - and the likelihood that Sheehan will return and that's another 10 and union bashing to add to climate science bashing...

Instead the Fairfaxians have had to drop in James Allan as pinch hitter for Sheehan, and right from the get go, Allan completely lost the pond by starting off with a header that says These elitist hate-speech laws erode democracy.

Could Allan have been so dumb, so dim-witted as to give the word "elitist" yet another tedious outing, yet another run around the block?

Was it just a mischievous sub making up a really dumb header to make the Canuck sound like Air Canada in search of a lost dog?

Nope, Allan actually lets the word out for a run, and even helps it chase the rabbit in this sentence:

If there was a polite way to express my disdain for that sort of elitist bull, I would use it. But there isn't. So I will just say it is wholly misconceived.

Aw, it must be terrible to scribble for an elitist middle brow rag where a spade lover can't call an elitist shovel out for bullshit ...

To get to that position of indignation about elitist bull(sssh), Allan has to erect several straw dogs in order to give them a good pummelling.

Instead of paying attention to the argument, the pond was left wondering when all these elitists - Allan is a professor of law at the University of Queensland - blathering about elitists and elitism will stop abusing a word which perhaps once upon a time long ago had some meaning ...

As piss follows too much drinking, sure enough the Weimar regime and the nuanced understanding that Australia wasn't the Weimar republic, and Nazi Germany and neo-Nazis and all the rest of it got an outing as well ...

Because you know, if you want a straw man, remember to remind readers that everyone else always points to Nazi Germany, and so it's only right for Allan to raise the spectre of everyone else talking about Nazi Germany ...

By the end of it, the pond was convinced that Allan would be much better, and the world much happier, if he'd stayed behind the paywall bashing the ABC in Aunty a poor judge of bias for the reptiles ...

Or Allan on Gillard's climate spin for Quadrant, where inter alia, Allan gets agitated about citizens' assemblies and re-education campaigns ...

Is it possible to get the pond offside by arguing for freedom of speech? Somehow, some elitists can manage it ...

Meanwhile, Troy Bramston manages a Herculean feat which is completely admirable.

Here's the splash:

Uh huh. Sneering condescension, as you'd expect from a reptile in full flight (yes reptiles can fly and the reptiles at the lizard Oz routinely impersonate Pterosaurs).

Yet bizarrely in a piece headed Paper won't make headlines - with a strong suggestion that the rag will be an irrelevant flop of no interest to a general readership - Bramston starts off with a glass half full view:

The launch of Morry Schwartz’s The Saturday Paper is a sign of the growing diversity of Australian media and a vote of confidence in the future of print journalism. 
The launch of a new weekly newspaper makes a mockery of the former Labor government’s attempt to regulate an industry that it believed was narrowing its sources of news, analysis and opinion. 
The reality is that the Australian media has never been more diverse. The mainstream media platforms of print, television and radio now compete with a variety of instant news and opinion, much of it free to consumers.

Uh huh. Yet according to Bramston's analysis, this diversity is a faux piece of useless nonsense. It's overpriced and it simply lacks the diversity of the reptiles on a Saturday.

That's right, now the reptiles are pitching diversity as a feature of their rag ...

It turns out that the rag simply doesn't have a decent audience and its coverage is entirely predictable:

Where The Saturday Paper fits into this growing diversity of media outlets was evident after a cursory flick through its slim 32 pages. This is a publication that caters to the narrow green-Left fringe audience clustered around the affluent inner-city suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. 
 Its coverage was predictable: Australia’s bipartisan and “barbaric” asylum-seeker policy, mooted savage budget cuts that could force up the cost of medicines, another of David Marr’s tedious critiques of George Pell, an account of “embattled” Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash, among other polemics. 

Which is of course completely unlike The Australian's running yet another of Gerard Henderson's tedious uxorious hagiographic pieces on the wonders of George Pell, the reptiles at the lizard Oz doing their best to ignore Fiona Nash, and Greg Sheridan and Dennis 'the bouffant one' Shanahan writing love poems to Tony Abbott on a daily basis.

It seems diversity is meaningless and the new rag won't appeal to anyone much at all:

The Saturday Paper is not a paper for Coalition voters. But nor will it find an audience among the vast swaths of Labor voters living in the outer suburbs of the major cities. They too will be alienated by its content.

So much for diversity.

Now is there any way to take a really cheap shot?

Of course. You criticise the rag for its advertisements and for its readership being aspirational:

The advertisers in the first issue provide a clue to the likely readers: they dream of wearing a Rolex watch, driving a Mercedes-Benz, owning a suit from Harrolds and living in a luxury home. There was even some in-house cross-promotion with Schwartz’s Black Inc book publishing company advertising James Brown’s Anzac’s Long Shadow opposite a favourable review of the book. 
The pitch to advertisers identified an audience of “lighthouse” readers. “They are 35-49,” the brochure said. “They are image-conscious and environmentally conscious, brand-aware and socially aware.” We are told they are creative and have money to spend. “(H)e has a Moleskine and a Netflix account” and “she subscribes to Vanity Fair and The New Yorker”.

Because, you know, aspirational and wanting to be a billionaire in a four storied apartment in New York is so naff.

This is a bit like the pond heading off to the marketing arm of the reptiles and reading this sort of tosh:

Can it reach fatuous levels of stupidity in its copy?

Of course it can. Here are the reptiles pitching for the 25-54 all people demographic:

They’re always in demand for the Monday night trivia team. On the weekends they’ll talk politics with their parents. Or the politics of parenting. 
 She firmly believes you can taste the difference with organic apples. And she’s willing to sort through 30 of them to find the perfect one. He says as long as it’s green, he’ll eat it. He believes in climate change but don’t call him a greenie. 
This is Mel and Ben. We have another 7,724,000 more Australians just like them nationally. And this is just one example of the power our people have.

So she's barking mad, and so is he. Yep that's about right for the reptiles.

If you want more, head off News Corp Australia's desperate, somewhat pathetic and tragic attempts to make their mastheads attractive to advertisers, here.

Meanwhile, Bramston is busy proving he's a smart-arse:

There were pages devoted to sport, business, fashion, interiors and recipes. And Mungo MacCallum provided a cryptic crossword. MacCallum is described as “one of Australia’s most influential and entertaining political journalists”. So there are jokes, too.

That's unlike the jokes they call Chris Kenny, Gerard Henderson, Greg Sheridan ... hang on, there's too many jokes to list ...

What's most bizarre is the way Bramston purports to welcome the new rag and see in it signs of hope:

Nevertheless, a new print media publication should be welcomed. The best journalism - those who break the most news and offer the most perceptive analysis - is still found in mainstream newspapers. There are reasons to hope there is plenty of life left in print. While digital subscribers to newspapers are growing, print advertising and sales still account for about 90 per cent of industry-wide revenue.

But once you get past the deluded dreaming, the yearning for 45s and LPs and Kodak Ektachrome and perhaps even Kodak Tri-X and printed newspapers, you begin to understand that Bramston has absolutely no interest in alternative opinions or views that differ in any way from the collective kool aid sipping hive mind alive and well in Murdoch la la land:

For most consumers, I suspect that after the underwhelming first issue of The Saturday Paper, it will be viewed as an add-on to other papers that are already thrown on to the front lawn, picked-up at the local newsagency or downloaded online. 
It is possible The Saturday Paper could hasten the decline of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald - which shrunk to tabloid size on Saturday - and are already seeing their Centre-Left audience decamp. But Fairfax should not fear too much. The Saturday Paper is likely to rival only one other weekly newspaper: Green Left Weekly. After all, they are chasing the same audience and offer the same ignorant, moralistic and simplistic worldview.

Would it be possible to find a better example of hubris and preening pride in what is after all a rag kept alive not by its audience, by its market, by its subscribers and readers but by a demented plutocrat in search of political influence and power?

Yep, the pond can't resist quoting an informed source, even though it's old news to pond correspondents:

After lavishing praise on The Saturday Paper’s founder Morry Schwartz and his contribution to Australia’s “intellectual life”, Turnbull quipped: “You are not some demented plutocrat pouring more and more money into a loss making venture that is just going to peddle your opinions.”

... in a blog posting on his website today Turnbull denied the line was intended for Murdoch, saying: “Given that earlier in my speech I had referred to William Randolph Hearst (immortalised by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane) I was surprised that some people have inferred I was referring to Rupert Murdoch.”  (and more at mUmBRELLA here)

Is there any irony or comedy to be derived from a journalist working for a loss-making rag with an ignorant, moralistic and simplistic worldview, in keeping with its demented plutocrat, berating others for the same crime?

Well yes, it's a reptile completely unable to see that things are changing in the digital world, a reality even big Mal managed to notice ...

At the end of Bramston's piece, the pond was reminded yet again that it's read and heard enough more than enough crap to last well beyond death's door ...

Remember, all the best journalists get gamed on Trip Advisor ...

(Above: Nicholson on the good old days. More Nicholson here. How the Murdochians loved them)

The pond is always delighted by comedy routines, and it has to be said that the comedy stylings by Miranda the Devine in the Terror - the least trusted newspaper in Australia - are routinely a tabloid delight.

Today she picks up the baton which is usually reserved by the reptiles at the lizard Oz who at least once a day rage at Clive Palmer, and with the new senate election in Western Australia, will now shortly embark with renewed vigour on an escalating bout of Palmerbashingmania.

The Devine opens her routine this way, with a cascading gag:

Clive Palmer, the unlikely darling of the ABC, had two Tony Jones outings last week, most recently on Lateline, where he expounded on aviation matters while snuffling and snorting like Darth Vader in an iron lung. 
When Palmer supported the LNP, the ABC treated him like a fat buffoon. 
Now, of course, he is a sage. Palmer is licking his rosebud lips in anticipation of power to come. But first he has to get through a re-run of the WA Senate poll, and there is every chance that voters might wise up to the gimlet-eyed ­opportunist beneath the fleshy jocularity. 
He’s been on the ABC’s flagship shows, Lateline or QandA, on average once a fortnight since the election, and is treated like royalty.

Once a fortnight? He's held up as Satan in Murdoch rags once a day at least. Satan couldn't buy the sort of publicity the Murdochians offer him ...

Of course when Palmer supported the LNP, the Murdochians treated him like a sage.

Was it only in March 2012 that the Devine was shrieking this?

Wayne Swan is carrying on more like Hugo Chavez than the Treasurer of Australia with his extraordinary attacks on “greedy” billionaires.
His complaint against miners Clive Palmer, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart and any other wealthy “vested interests” who don’t agree with him is that they are “poison” to Australia, as he wrote in an essay in The Monthly magazine. 
“The combination of deep pockets, conservative political support and, of course, the ranting of shock jocks more and more brazenly has sought to defend promote the interests of a very narrow section of our economy,” he told the National Press Club yesterday. (here)

Oh those hapless, defenceless billionaires. Pluck that chook Swanee's feathers good, pluck that duck hard ...

Brave Miranda, fighting for truth and justice and the rights of billionaires...

Of course Clive was right on the same page, and turned up on Lateline to say it, and get quoted in Australian Conservative:

...what we have got to consider for the future is what works for our country. We know the resource sector has been working. 
 If it ain’t broken, leave it alone. Don’t try to tinker with it. Don’t try to destroy it. You know, don’t try to bring it back to some… Just because you happen to be a socialist or a communist like we know Mr-Mr Swan is, as he wants equal distribution. 
Those ideas have been tossed out in Eastern Europe. They’ve been tossed out in Communist China. But comrade Rudd and his team are going to bring them back to Australia. 
 “Let’s have fair distribution across the board and no productivity! Let’s shrink the pie completely till it’s the size of a lamington.” 
 My god! What’s going to happen to this country if we let people do that? Let’s say -- let’s make a firm stand against the ALP and send them into the Opposition where they belong.

Yes, take that you socialist pinko pervert commie lamington, comrade chook Swannee ...

Back in the day, everyone on the right loved Clive. He was a generous donor to the Liberals, he made the right noises about climate change, he was opposed to the mining tax, he was opposed to the carbon tax, he was on side with a federal Liberal government, and no one in Murdoch la la land worried about him or what he might have got up to as a wheeler dealer.

Lordy how the wheels do turn:

A turncoat conservative is a rare prize to be carefully cultivated. Especially one full of colourful bile who, by an accident of electoral history and lots of cash, has found himself in a position to wield enormous power. 
Palmer is a loose cannon who deserves scrutiny. 

Ah that old gag:

But the ABC’s interest is not the investigative probing of The Australian’s estimable ­reporter Hedley Thomas, who has dug out facts on Palmer’s wealth, business dealings and numerable legal stoushes so that the Australian people can judge whether they have themselves a pig in a poke or a pearl in the parliament. 
Is Palmer an altruistic self-made man under siege from a media controlled by a Chinese Mata Hari? Or is he a tyrant who inflates his wealth and achievements? 
But what the ABC seems most interested in is what Palmer will do to foil the Abbott government in the Senate.

Poetic comedy gold. Of course if you re-wrote it, you could turn it into dull as dishwater prose:

A turncoat conservative is a rare prize to be richly loathed. Especially one full of colourful bile who, by an accident of electoral history and lots of cash, has found himself in a position to turn that bile on Tony Abbott.
Palmer is a loose cannon who deserves scrutiny. Not when he was a loose cannon aimed the right way. Now when he's a loose cannon who takes pot shots at Tony Abbott and The Australian.
But Murdoch la la land's not interested in how the conservative media turned Palmer and Gina Rinehart into valiant billionaire warriors batting the heathen socialist commie pervert Swannee, the carbon tax, climate science, Queensland and Federal Labor, and all the rest of the bleeding heart greenie leftie alliance ...
Now they're changed their collective hive minds, and have decided that the Australian people, rather than getting a pearl in parliament, have scored a pig in the poke who won't follow the party line, and so must be exposed on a daily basis, and no matter how absurd the trivia dug up by one time estimable reporter turned tragic attack dog, Hedley Thomas... and speaking of trivia, you haven't seen trivia until you've seen it done by Miranda the Devine ...
Is Palmer an altruistic self-made man under siege from a media controlled by a Chairman Rupert, who recently divorced his Chinese Mata Hari? Or is he a tyrant who inflates his wealth and achievements? And is he helping fuck the planet? And is that Clive Palmer or Chairman Rupert?
Well what Miranda the Devine and the rest of the Murdochians seems most interested in, and direly concerned about, and so will do anything to run him down, is what Palmer will do to foil the Abbott government in the Senate.

What's most wondrous and marvellous is the way that the revised history, worthy of Orwell, except for the cost to the Godwin's swear jar, is written.

It seems it's all the fault of the ABC that these scenes appeared:

There was a time when the national broadcaster delighted in mocking Palmer, always running footage of him waddling onto his private jet, collapsing onto a kingsize seat and promptly falling asleep with his mouth open. ABC cameramen have lost count of the apnoea snorts they’ve captured for posterity. Those were the days when Clive and his juicy rolls of filthy lucre were valued members of the LNP family. 
Like the night of the hung election in 2010, when he squeezed onto a couch at the Four Seasons Hotel alongside party grandees, crunching numbers himself on a little silver laptop perched on his lap, loudly proclaiming results to all and sundry.
He was incorrect, as it turned out, but, hey, it was a tough election to call. He soon felt scorned by Campbell Newman and Tony Abbott, who failed to recognise his unique political acumen, so he started his own party and tweaked into parliament with two senators.

Filthy lucre? Alongside party grandees? A loud number cruncher? What, like a billionaire Bob Ellis?

What's the ABC got to do with a bunch of phoney right wing politicians fawning over a rich man?

Never mind, the pond will bite because Miranda the Devine must have some really good stuff to roll out on Clive. What grubby dirt, what shocking revelations has she got?

Well she's really down on Palmer's Coolum Resort on the Sunshine Coast ...

The fearless, dedicated, intrepid, 'turn up all the stone's investigative reporter has hied herself off to Trip Advisor and selectively quoted feedback on the site, including the thoughts of Natasha, shouting "WE WOULD NEVER GO THERE AGAIN EVEN IF IT WAS FREE!

Look, you can do the same by heading off to Trip Advisor to read about Palmer Coolum Resort.

Oh sure you  might say that Trip Advisor regularly gets gamed, that there are positive as well as negative comments, but you clearly don't know how to do it.

You should only pluck out a few negative comments and just like that, lickety split, the hatchet job is done.

And there you go, you're now a senior investigative reporter, and should forthwith report to duty at one of Chairman Rupert's tabloids.

But don't stop there, a genuine investigative reporter would also take in wotif.com, here, and so on.

Then it suddenly occurred to the pond, with a deep sadness, the depth of the decline in Australian reporting and commentating.

Trip Advisor?! With the capper, the punchline, That is good advice for WA voters, too.

It's beyond the valley of the pathetic and the weird. It's Fawlty Towers journalism at work ...

Of course there's plenty of genuine scandals surrounding Clive.

For example, the way Waratah Coal was given environmental approval to develop the Galilee Basin by the Federal Government during the Xmas silly season, which will involve creating an expanded Abbott Point terminal, and dredging 3 million cubic metres and disposing of the contents within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Along with it, the 8,000 hectare Bimblebox Nature Refuge is likely to be destroyed by the project (here). Given the nod by Tony "climate science is crap" Abbott and henchman Hunt ...

And for what? So we can ship even more coal overseas and do our best to add to the dangers the planet faces ...

And to its undying shame the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority approved the 'dumping of dredged gunk' proposal, here, thereby supporting big business at the expense of all the small businesses who make money out of tourism.

And there are other matters, like Clive Palmer's company Queensland Nickel not prosecuted over toxin discharge in Barrier Reef marine park.

And yet all that Miranda the Devine can offer is a few comments on Trip Advisor ...

It's understandable of course.

The Devine shares all Clive Palmer's views on coal, climate science, digging up Australia and shipping it to China, comrade Swannee, the filthy greenies, throwing the rubbish into the Great Barrier Reef, destroying the environment, and so on and so forth ...

In fact if you put the two ideological peas in a pod, you couldn't pick them apart. Except that now Clive has gone feral and native, and somehow it's all the fault of the ABC ...

Pig in a poke crappy journalism? Or pearls of tabloid wisdom? Or pure comedy gold?

The pond merely reports and you decide, but does suggest that if you rely on Trip Advisor for genuine insights for your travel arrangements, you also should learn how to put chlorine in your pool and how to set a Kreepy Krawly in motion ... but don't expect it to work for the Great Barrier Reef ...

(Below: Clive Palmer, with Miranda the Devine in those days guest starring in the role of the cat. An old David Rowe, with new David Rowe here)