Sunday, February 20, 2011

Paul Sheehan, and let's be immoderate, so we can swing dead cats, bash Muslims, bash multiculturalism ... oh and bash wee Mal too ...

(Above: damn right, the service is unavailable as the railway buses swing up and down the street for the entire weekend, since City Rail loves to be City Bus. And dammit the ALP is still offline this morning).

Heaven to betsy, as my grandma used to say, I hadn't realised the extent of the tsunami. Talk about 2012 coming a year early. Time for the Labor party to head to Mount Kosciuszko, but will even its 2,228 metre height be enough to save a few?

You know, like Elijah Wood and Leelee Sobieski on the motorbike heading for the hills in Deep Impact, a handy nuclear family in the making ready to breed a hardy new generation, while those lost souls Téa Leoni (playing Kristina Keneally) and Maximilian Schell (surely just right for Eric Roozendaal) stand on the beach and cop it sweet ...

Local Enmore celebrity - I see him on the streets all the time, but can only sneak bashful looks - Antony Greene reports that his swingometercalculatorthingie has the Coalition on 73 seats, Labor 14, Greens 2, and others 4, if there's an even swing, a worse result than 1904, the election wherein Labor emerged as the official opposition ... (here). And here I was thinking it was only going to be a bloodbath ...

Never mind, enough of the fun, it's Captain Grumpy day, which is shorthand for 'end of the world' day, as Paul Sheehan devises yet another scenario in which we'll all be ruined by Sunday, just in time to welcome his next Monday column proving that eternal damnation and horrendous suffering is our lot ... and certainly by Sunday ...

Talk about a disaster movie columnist. So what's he banging on about today like a loose dunny door in a cyclone? Well it turns out it's about the Liberal party, but federal rather than state, and he's tremendously disappointed because he knows for a dead cert that the vile campaign about the Islamic hordes would be a winner if it weren't for a few recalcitrants, moderates, layabouts and recidivist tossers.


The common denominator in their (European) experiences was that Muslims are over-represented in welfare dependency, unemployment, crime, sexual assaults and religious intolerance in all four countries. Islamic fundamentalists now dominate the concerns of the security services in Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Sweden.

Yes, Sheehan is a fervent believer in the dead cat on the table, and is remorseful that moderates thought bashing Muslims on the day of various funerals was a tad unseemly, because you see that 1.7% of the population that got The Australian's anonymous editorialist into a high dudgeon is ruining Australia:

Exactly the same pattern has repeated itself in Australia. Despite the success of many among the highly diverse 400,000 Muslims in Australia who are productive, integrated and high-achieving, there are also disproportionate negative indicators among Muslims in the welfare statistics, prisons and courts.

Yes, yes, yes, never mind the productive ones, swing that dead cat of negativity and abuse.

But I guess indigenous people should be happy. They've moved on notch up on the rung of abuse. And then, for a bit of completely abject rhetorical nonsense, Sheehan comes out with this:

One language, one law, one culture.

One culture? And on which alternative universe would that culture be? Paul Sheehan's culture? The culture of unhappiness, divisiveness, grumpiness, and eastern suburbs poncy git bias and stupidity? The culture that allows you to slag off anyone perceived to be different or other or alien? The culture that recently saw him slag off the Celts?

England makes, the Celts take. (For moochers, by moochers: Brown's disunited kingdom).

And never mind that England swings like pendulum do, grasping English bankers making out like bandits on bicycles, two by two (oh yes, there's been a fine old fuss in the English press about Barclays managing to pay just 1% in corporate tax in 2009, here, and fine feathered attempts to protect the tax avoidance nest, and stop the news from getting out, in How the Guardian was gagged from revealing Barclays tax secrets).

But I digress, and all I can do is blame those bloody useless Celts for the distraction. As bad as the Islamics ... no wonder they were once called 'the exotic term for blacks' of Europe in The Commitments. (ah Roddy Doyle could you get away with calling the Irish the niggers of Europe these days?)

Back with Sheehan and he produces a few more zingers, as he somehow manages to drag wee Mal into the fracas. Wee Mal has had his head down and bum up these last few weeks. If you consult his blog, here, there he is, on song, chortling away about the NBN, and nobody in the slightest bit interested, since everybody knows he knows he's talking guff for the sake of it ...

So Sheehan produces this zinger:

Turnbull emphatically denied he was the source. I take him at his word, especially as there are about 10 people in shadow cabinet who would like to leak on Morrison. But he might want to consider how this reputation came about.

Wow. Talk about an irrelevancy dragging in an irrelevancy.

And then Jamie Briggs and Steve Ciobo and Alex Hawke cop their standard pounding, and Hawke cops the blame for the federal performance in NSW, and then we come to this:

Briggs, Ciobo and Hawke describe themselves as ''moderates'', a term used by some journalists when quoting anonymous critics within the party. The term is toxic to Liberal cohesion. Use of ''moderate'' by internal critics or journalists implies that the trio's factional adversaries are immoderate (adjective: not moderate, excessive, extreme).

Moderate sir? Dammit, I spit on your moderation, and your moderate vale of tears:

Thus they might want to consider that when media reports quote anonymous ''moderate'' critics within the party, many will assume it is one or all of them. This impression might be wrong, but it is an impression they will have to manage.

Yes, yes, it might be wrong, but as Paul Sheehan knows the media will get it wrong, because he's there to prove that it does get things consistently wrong. And that's an impression he never fails to manage.

And then this zinger:

Because of the way people think in Canberra, it will be assumed this column is coming out of Abbott's office, but I have not spoken to him or any member of his Praetorian guard about this story and in the past we have had a sharp disagreement over his faith in Hockey, Morrison, Turnbull and Christopher Pyne.

Because you see, the Coalition is on a winner becoming the new One Nation, and bashing the boat people, and bashing immigrants, and especially bashing Islamics, and above all bashing multiculturalism. It's Paul Sheehan's cultural way, or bugger off, it's the highway ....

It's a remarkable performance for a commentariat columnist - of the kind you'd expect from someone intimately acquainted with immoderate extremist thinking - to get through the past few weeks hi jinks, without mentioning Andrew Robb's singular efforts at rocking the Julie Bishop and Joe Hockey boat (Andrew Robb: I'm out to get Joe Hockey's job), or Scott Morrison's singularly inept treading on toes, dead cat on the table performance (Migration malignancy could kill Abbott), or Abbott's singular mistake in endorsing Morrison, until he realised he'd dived into the deep end of the pool, and needed to tread water, or the bizarre role that Menzies House played in the farce. (That tirade against Joe Hockey at Menzies House)

That saw fundamentalist hardliner (by which we mean immoderate) Islamic headkicker Cory Bernardi dragged into the affair (Cory Bernardi denies website attack on Hockey was a strike on Liberal moderates), and which saw two editors, including a Bernardi staffer, quit the site (Menzies House website editors quit amid anonymous Joe Hockey article fallout).

And all because jolly Joe did the decent thing, and refused to swing a dead cat on a day of funerals, Christian as well as Islamic.

And so Sheehan comes out swinging against everyone else, most of whom haven't been centre stage, and several of whom have been idle spear carriers in the proceedings.

All because Sheehan's peeved because there can't be any decent Islamic or multicultural bashing, by the Liberal party, at least in the short term, in the way that Sheehan has indulged in tribal animosities and culture wars for the last few decades.

What a useless miserable malignant immoderate Captain Grumpy lump of humanity he is ...

(Below: the first CD I ever bought, even before I had a CD player, was The Drifters. And instead of running this on a Friday, after suffering through Paul Sheehan on Monday, why not seek any nearby roof. I'd have preferred an original video clip, but you'll have to settle for Melbourne, and trams. And in Sydney it was a Labor government that did the dirty deed that killed light rail. Talk about service unavailable).

3 comments:

  1. "What a useless miserable malignant immoderate Captain Grumpy lump of humanity he is ..."

    A small typo there, Dorothy:

    "What a useless miserable malignant immoderate Captain Grumpy lump of anti-humanity he is ..."

    Fixed now.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for that.

    I've been going through processing for the rest of the day and have finally arrived at new and better understandings of anti-matter anti-humanity.

    We now speak with one language - get lost cheese eating surrender monkeys - under one law, and one culture.

    All hail big brother Sheehan and the Ministry of Truth ... and death to thoughtcrime.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Funny business the myth of uni-culturalism, isn't it. Even during the period of the great British Conformism (aka The Reign of Empress Victoria Saxe-Coburg and Gotha), there were at least three distinct cultures even just in London: the rich; the middle class; and the poor (of several subcultures, eg Cockney, and not to forget the regionals, eg Yorkshire).

    Any group of two or more people will comprise at least two incompatible cultures. Even if they do sit down to eat fish and chips, or pie and chips, every night of their lives.

    But I encountered a saying t'other day which I think has finally helped me to grasp Cap'n Grumpy just a wee bit:

    "If faced with a decision as to whether to save a threatened tree or an endangered human life, the true conservative would request to first view the tree and then to be introduced to the human."

    Now there we have it: you'd probably save the human, I'd probably opt for the tree, but Cap'n Grumpy would ignore both: "Meh, why should I interfere with condign fate ?" he'd say.

    And there you are: at least three different cultures already.

    ReplyDelete

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