Monday, November 24, 2014

In which the push to elevate Julie Bishop to the throne takes on a new, urgent, hyper-real momentum ...


(Above: the prescient Rowe, and more prescience here).

It's taken enormous restraint and considerable discretion - a restraint and discretion lacking in the mainstream media - not to mention the cavorting of the buffoon and the Tasmanian ...

But as David Rowe confirms today in his splendid cartoon above, there's bigger fish to fry, and that's the pond's observation that the pressure in the cooker of the "Julie for Canberra" campaign is building to explosive proportions.

What's that you say? She's already in Canberra, so she doesn't need a "Joh for Canberra" campaign.

Sssh, it's code for 'Julie for PM' - don't want to startle the possums or the nervous nellies out there.

You see, there's bugger all else out there for your average, now profoundly desperate conservative.

Tony Abbott is irredeemably proven a liar, and Malcolm Turnbull is now a liar for the liar.

It's grim times. Jolly Joe and Mathias are just a budget nightmare with a very big black hole, while others like the poodle Pyne are beyond the valley of the jokes. Why even the reptiles are mocking the poodle as he's mocked by Turnbull:

There is something cheerfully, almost supernaturally indefatigable about Christopher Pyne. As Strewth once suggested, he could be caught in a tornado of piranhas and excrement and still come up smiling. And so it was again yesterday when, with the air of a Death Star officer hanging a “Keep Alderaan tidy” poster near his desk, he launched an online petition at Change.org calling on the ABC board not to can its Adelaide production facility. This while his colleague, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, was in Adelaide preparing to spell out the diet Aunty and SBS were about to be put on. People were soon flocking to Pyne’s petition. To perhaps nobody’s great surprise, many tried to process the emotions produced by this chutzpah, but failed to do so with any elan. Suffice to say that a sentence such as this — “Chris Pyne confirmed as a bigger moron in Australian politics than Tony Abbott or possibly even Billy McMahon” — counted as one of the politer efforts. And yet Pyne still responded as only Pyne could: “Great response! 1000 people have joined me in wanting ABC production to remain in SA. Have you signed it?” One journalist asked of Turnbull, “Is it a bit much for your ministerial colleague Christopher Pyne to be petitioning the ABC Board not to impose cuts when he’s part of the cabinet that has just signed off on the cuts?” Turnbull channelled Francis Urquhart from the original House of Cards and said, “You may very well say that but I couldn’t possibly comment.” Rather than try reading between the lines, we asked Pyne to characterise his colleague’s reaction. “Impressed,” he said. (James Jeffrey from his inner Sydney 'leet bunker, but no link, it would only lead to a begging letter).

O yes, I'm the great petitioner, petitioning that I'm doing well ...

What's left but Julie worship?

And right on cue we have an in-depth bit of worship from Allison Worrall at Fairfax - as Fairfax re-brands itself as really deep in its political reporting - with Julie Bishop amuses her Twitter followers:

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has amused Twitter users after she began using "emojis" in a series of tweets on Sunday evening. Emoji, or emoticon, stands for an emotional icon.

Strike the pond dumb with a communion wafer - that can happen to followers of Satan - that's deep, and it even manages to conflate and confuse the Japanese style emoji (Greg Hunt them here) with conventional emoticons (Greg Hunt them here), and what do you know, Jules has finally caught up with Puck magazine in 1881:


But talk about a wittering and a twittering, do go on with the holy Julie service:

The small pictures are widely used across social media and smartphone messaging services. 

Really? And is the punchline the news that Jules has caught up with the nineteenth century?

Ms Bishop responded to a number of her followers' tweets with smiley faces and even told a story in the popular icons after one user requested her to do so. 
She depicted a holiday in emoji pictures which included planes, the globe, the sun, a yacht, a hat, a hot drink and a cookie. 
One Twitter user joked Ms Bishop had learnt the "international language of emojis". 
Another challenged Ms Bishop to address the United Nations using the icons, to which the Foreign Minister replied with the pictures the Statue of Liberty, tall buildings, a pen, a book and a smiley with an open mouth. 
Ms Bishop is an avid user of Twitter, posting more than 3000 tweets to over 85,000 followers.

Dear long absent lord that's deep.

But wait, there's more. The pond's new Fairfax favourite, Latika Bourke, has channeled Jules in an exclusive seance, and these are the opening lines of Tanya Plibersek is no Kevin Rudd, says Julie Bishop:

Julie Bishop has revealed she and Kevin Rudd became close friends as a result of Labor's leadership wars and has suggested the Opposition's Foreign Affairs spokeswoman, Tanya Plibersek, is a lightweight on foreign policy compared to the former Labor prime minister. 
In an exclusive interview with Fairfax Media, the Minister for Foreign Affairs says she consulted Mr Rudd on policy issues in opposition and the pair still text each other about foreign policy.

So now the Ruddster is a role model and an advisor, and we all, like Jules, remember him fondly, and the pond's not expected to roll around on the floor caught up in paroxysms of laughter?

Are there any other rich comedy stylings?

"We rarely disagreed on things," she said but said they did discuss the one major difference – Labor's bid to sit on the UN Security Council, which Ms Bishop and then opposition leader Tony Abbott regularly mocked. 

"He knew that the Opposition had taken a position from 2007 on the Security Council and we would discuss it quite openly," she said. 

That's astonishing. Banality taken to a whole new level, but even then, the pond wasn't prepared for the closer:

When Mr Putin finished his conversation she approached him and said she wanted to talk about MH17. 

"At all times he was warm, engaging and focused," she said. 
The former US president George W Bush once said he was able to get a "sense of his soul" when he looked Mr Putin in the eye. 
Ms Bishop, famed for her "death stare", said she looked into the Russian President's eyes. "I saw steely blue resolve".
And then he swept me into his arms, strengthened by long hours of mixed martial arts, and I felt his power, and yet a sudden serenity swept over me, and I knew peace and tranquility, and understood that life would now be different ...

Oops it seems like there's been a transcription error in that last sentence, but you catch the drift. Damned if Latika isn't going to give Sharri a run for her money in the hagiography stakes ...

Now there's plenty more - the Daily Snail crawled all over the Twitter story here, with examples - and it helps why Australia's Macbeth now sulks in his throne room ...

Meanwhile, back in the bunker, as faithful servants huddled beneath the Canberra earth, Lugers and cyanide pills at the ready, the raw nerves, the sense of being under assault, popped up everywhere:


The reptiles felt so threatened they trotted out the desiccated one, the pond's tip for winner of the dry coconut of the year award:


And just in case you nodded off during Henry - why is there a hole in his bucket? - Ergas's smack down, as some lazy punters are wont to do, the reptiles delivered an editorial which is a marvel of seething resentment and paranoia:


It had everything .... recycled second hand 'bromance' Sheridan, bitterness at the luvvies, and the shock horror that Obama had dared to insult Tony Abbott. Insulted him! By catching him in his brand new climate change believing emperor's clothes!

The next par after the excerpt above made it clear enough why the reptiles were so filled with angst:

Labor and the Greens will undoubtedly try to use Mr Obama’s speech against Mr Abbott at the next election. Doing so, however, would not further their cause because it’s unlikely to have shifted Australians’ views on climate change policy one way or the other. However insulting to his host, the speech deserves to have little impact ...

That bloody atheist Islamic socialist Kenyan ....

And then the reptiles wrapped it up this way:

When the leader of the free world speaks, Australians are always happy to listen. Unfortunately, on this occasion, on our shores, he pandered to a narrow constituency and disappointed the silent majority. Australians will continue to look to the US, however, as our closest friend and ally in the world.

It's so tortured and conflicted and confused, that usually when confronted with this sort of friendship, the pond recommends psychotherapy, but others might find laughter the best medicine as they read the raving outside the paywall here.

Sheesh, it's been a good long week since Obama delivered his speech, and much has happened, and yet the thin-skinned, hyper-sensitive wretches still can't get over it and get a life and more to the point get some decent policies on climate science and the reef ...

Could it get any better? Well yes, the pond started off with Turnbull and the poodle Pyne, and this very day the reptiles are agitated that the bloody ABC board might dare not to roll over, and show their belly for a good Turnbull rubbing.

Naturally the reptiles found a good moth-eaten politician and dragged him out of the bottom of the cupboard to air a parochial whinge:


Dear sweet long absent lord, the pond hasn't thought about John Bannon since it watched in close up as he fucked up the state bank matter, the Labor party and the state of South Australia.

What a gormless inept twit he was - yes the pond has a fund of Bannon anecdotes - and now he's back telling the ABC how to be efficient .... oh roll the pond over slowly and let's dream of Don Dunstan ... (you can Greg Hunt the man here).

Meanwhile, Sharri is on to the treachery and the defiance:


Dammit cardigan wearers, just take your medicine, or else Sharri will turn up on The Drum again, and we'll have yet another tedious bout of Oz journalists talking to ABC journalists talking to Fairfax journalists .... and Greg Sheridan might turn up looking really weird ...

From this:


To this:


Well if women always have to cop comments on their appearance ...

Oh yes, it's going to be an interesting week, and the wretched ABC is full of Abbott, from Abbott's problems go deeper than Bolt realises, to It's lose-lose for Malcolm Turnbull with ABC cuts, which discusses the liar lying to excuse the liar's lies:

Turnbull's convoluted defence did nothing to answer that direct charge, and it did nothing for his own reputation. When Turnbull led the Liberal Party, Kevin Rudd typically thrashed him as preferred prime minister. That was in part because the big C conservative Liberals didn't like him. Reducing the ABC's resources might please that group, but they'll thank Abbott for that, not Turnbull. In the meantime, he'll lose part of the middle ground that he has so successfully cultivated for so long.

There's no hope, no way out, unless we turn to that great friend of former Chairman Ruddster ... I mean, the Ruddster made Malcolm Turnbull sound like a pompous dud, and  how hard was that ... while meanwhile Abbott, now like an Oscar Wilde rocket descending from the heights into the mud below, can contemplate his and the reptiles' legacy (and more Moir here):





11 comments:

  1. ...it's been a while.. so, I recall Fraser when PM telling That ABC that his political 'philosophy' was very much based on her, but how-is-ayn-rand-still-a-thing

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  2. Julie Bishop's bid for wider public acceptance took on a new twist, using the ever-helpful Latika, in her slapdown of her opposite number Tanya Plibersek. Aside from a pot-kettle beginning about Plibersek being a 'lightweight', she claimed that Tanya was "no Kevin Rudd".

    I detected a reversion to her plagiarist days and Joe Biden's remark that some Republican pollie was "no Jon F Kennedy". No doubt Kev would take some comfort from being put on the same level as JFK, but many would have found the comparison better if he had not insisted on coming back from the dead and just allowed his less glamorous deputy to get on with the real work.

    And Bannon-Dunstan is also worth a passing thought. What stuffed his reign was the destruction of the State Bank, as Dunstan unkindly pointed out. It wasn't that the politicians could be expected to be across the detail of all bank activity. But who you appointed to the board could make a difference.

    Dunstan had no problems appointing union or party hacks to such boards, just as long as they knew who they were answerable to, and it was not the bank but people like himself or Hugh Hudson. They didn't even need to understand fully the transactions but they had to report on anything that they either didn't understand or were uncomfortable with. And they did and potential trouble was nipped in the bud.

    Bannon, and Cain in Victoria, both departed from this "jobs for the boys" formula, seeking both to make the banks more enterprising with their boards comprised of respected business leaders. A big mistake. These just waved through the jargon and management-speak without seriously weighing up the risk level. The bank heads were of the type carried away by the 'deregulation phase' of the 80s and were out to make their mark. The board members never applied the brakes or caution.

    Many indeed mourn Don's passing every bit as much as Gough's.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Kevin didn't exactly 'come back from the dead', GD. It was more like he was cryogenically frozen, and thawed just a little too fast.

      Delete
    2. Gorgeous, I agree with JB. Tania is NO Rudd. What amuses me is that JB thought she was insulting Ms P.

      Miss Pitty Pat

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    3. Yes, Miss Pitty Pat. The Libs don't do irony, or JB might've understood that was high praise.

      Agree, Anon. Thawing was way too early and too fast.

      Delete
  3. What the hell is going at Fairfax? As well as the Bourke nonsense, there's Sheehan saying Iran in more dangerous than ISIS, and Loiuse Evans sticking the knife into the ABC with The ABC has flab to be cut, and Jacquie Lambie was a plant sent in to PUP in a sabotage attempt.

    Maybe it's explained by this. "Fairfax Media is partnering with the Global Drug Survey. Tell us your habits."

    ReplyDelete
  4. Love Jony, that's fucking brilliant, bring on Saturday. So for the Libs no carbon tax means no carbon tax, *no changes means....damn let me check my pre-election Plans-R-Us baffalogue ooh here it is, *fuck you ner nerni ner ner.

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  5. Meanwhile, back in the bunker, as faithful servants huddled beneath the Canberra earth, Lugers and cyanide pills at the ready, the raw nerves, the sense of being under assault, popped up everywhere.

    Dear DP,you do have a way with words. Love it!
    Just announced in Senate that Lambie has gone free range: All reptiles to the bunker now!! Repeat:All reptiles to the bunker now!!!

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  6. Doesn't that Australian editorial make you just want to slap the writer? What a self-indulgent load of navel-gazing codswallop! Look at us!! Look at us!!

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  7. Trust me, DP, here's a phrase to store away, it will come in handy.
    “It’s difficult to give an explanation why I didn’t do it without sounding like a complete cunt,” from Lily Allen: Band Aid is smug and I’d rather donate actual money.

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  8. Greg Sheridan looks as though he might be undergoing chemotherapy.

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