Saturday, August 01, 2015

In which the pond, thanks to Pope and Pussyfoot, enters the tent of death, and just loves the show ...

The blizzard of words isn't going away, the thunderers keep thundering.

Editorials have been offered up:


Oh dear, poor tortured public servants, which helps explain why David Pope should be much loved in Canberra.

His cartoon this day is rich in exquisite understanding of the terrorised, caught between the peace they desire and the truth they must obfuscate (and more Pope here):


Yes, we've reached that point:


Needless to say, the Fairfaxians continue to make a meal of it:



Why just look at the feast of reading in this very special tag:


So much reading, so little time. Even the AFR felt the need for a discreet editorial.


But it's not just the Fairfaxians canvassing the sack or new names for the job of speaker.

True, Bishop has once again disappeared from the front page of the Murdochian rags, but not from some tabloid hearts and minds:


And Laurie Oakes conjured up a splendid vision of a dysfunctional parliament with Labor rampant and difficult:


Oh there were a couple of anonymous comments tut-tutting and blaming Laurie for talking about Bronnie - sheesh, it must be hard working in Bronnie's office and attending to all the correspondence. Or perhaps it was the hard-working Murdochians?

But as well as the vision of parliament grinding to a halt - no big deal really - there was this:

Bishop was kidding herself if she thought her apology on Thursday would get her out of trouble over that $5000 chartered helicopter flight from Melbourne to Geelong and her other questionable claims on the public purse. 
Apart from anything else it was several weeks too late. 
Bishop forgot the political maxim that an embarrassing issue is best dealt with quickly because “no matter how smelly it seems to be at first, it always gets worse as it ages”. 
Her delivery of the apology, in any case, was considerably less convincing than her performances in the Nine Network TV drama Divorce Court during a brief professional acting career in the 1960s.

And this:

No one should doubt the resentment government MPs feel over Bishop’s behaviour. 

They can’t talk to constituents anywhere without the matter being raised. 
“They’re angry,” a Liberal backbencher said yesterday. “The ones who aren’t angry are making helicopter jokes.” 
In a desperate bid for support, the Speaker’s office sent out to all ministers, Liberal backbenchers and government staffers the transcripts of the radio interview and subsequent news conference in which Bishop offered her belated plea for public forgiveness. 
But there is no reservoir of goodwill towards the Speaker among her colleagues. 
She has alienated too many of them over the years. 
Former Labor senator Stephen Loosley, in his book Machine Rules published this week, recalls a dinner attended by Bishop in the 1980s when she was being touted by some as possible leadership material. 
According to Loosley, Peter Costello leaned across the table and said: “I bet you’re thinking it would take you only 10 minutes to demolish Bronwyn as Liberal leader. Well, you’re not going to get the chance. It will take me only five minutes.” 
In the affection they display for Bishop, Tony Abbott and Pyne are oddities. 
But Abbott’s affection was not so great he was prepared to have her in his ministry. 
When the Coalition won the last election she fought hard for a portfolio but had to make do with the Speakership as a consolation prize. 
Pyne made clear what he most admires about Bishop during a commercial break before a recent TV interview, saying: “If you dropped the Empire State Building on her, you couldn’t kill her.”

Oh dear, is there a nuke in the house?

By the time the pond got to the Graudian, exhaustion was setting in:



Even the Oscillator was firm for once in the lizard Oz, and the illustration piquant:



What would stop this endless babbling, this barbed blathering, this forensic fossicking?

Which all amounts to two simple notions: Bronnie should go, and the system reformed.

And there was one other matter.

Tony Abbott, to quote a wise man, forgot the political maxim that an embarrassing issue is best dealt with quickly because “no matter how smelly it seems to be at first, it always gets worse as it ages”.

That's what it all comes down to, the chance of a simple move missed, and acres of trees tragically lost to the world.

A headline summed it up:


That was on another disgraceful matter where Abbott failed the test, but it was also the general mood of the week.

Pussyfooter! The sort of figure you'd find in a Chuck Jones cartoon:


Well the pond is outraged at these intemperate calls for Bronnie to go.

She must stay. We must be able to experience all the fun of the fair and a chaotic week in parliament.

It's getting closer and closer, when everyone gathers to witness the performance, better than an old TV show, more like that trip to the show to ride the octopus, or long lost memories of cracker night and the big bang of a rocket going off, until it falls back to the muddy earth ...

The alternative? Bloggers and journalists and cartoonists out of business.

Too painful to contemplate, eh Mr Moir? (and more Moir and other Fairfax cartoonists here).



8 comments:

  1. Remember Tony regards himself as Howard/Bishop's love-child. And Pyne is perhaps the jealous younger brother I think a bit of post-Freudian psychobabble may be appropriate.

    In Neo-Freudian psychology, the Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Gustav Jung, is a girl's psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her psychosexual development, the complex is the girl's phallic stage; formation of a discrete sexual identity, a boy's analogous experience is the Oedipus complex. The Electra complex occurs in the third—phallic stage (ages 3–6)—of five psychosexual development stages: (i) the Oral, (ii) the Anal, (iii) the Phallic, (iv) the Latent, and (v) the Genital—in which the source libido pleasure is in a different erogenous zone of the infant’s body.

    In classical psychoanalytic theory, the child's identification with the same-sex parent is the successful resolution of the Electra complex and of the Oedipus complex; his and her key psychological experience to developing a mature sexual role and identity. Sigmund Freud instead proposed that girls and boys resolved their complexes differently—she via penis envy, he via castration anxiety; and that unsuccessful resolutions might lead to neurosis and homosexuality.[ Hence, women and men who are fixated in the Electra and Oedipal stages of their psychosexual development might be considered "father-fixated" and "mother-fixated" as revealed when the mate (sexual partner) resembles the father or the mother.

    Wiki of course.

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    1. Sheesh, and for a minute there we thought we had a genuine Freudian on the premises and was ready to develop an appropriate case of female hysteria ...

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    2. Seriously Anon, Freud had some good insights into how some *men* think and behave but he was a bit of a dick, if he was anything like he was portrayed in that movie about him and his bestie, Jung, called "A Dangerous Method".

      There is a funny review of it here:

      https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psychologist-the-movies/201210/freud-jung-in-dangerous-method

      "In the film, they (Freud and Jung) meet for the first time and have a conversation that lasts 13 hours. This is actually 100% accurate, according to Jung’s account of the meeting. While they experience a bit of a man-crush on each other for several years (both in the film and in real life), inevitably, they had to break up due to the same reason most of Freud’s students (having) moved on..."

      I'm not a psychiatrist but I'm interested in how these early psychiatric ideas can be fitted into contemporary psych and evo psych; I'm thinking that classic theory - as per your quote from wiki - is a bit more realistic than poor old Freud who was dealing with many unresolved neuroses and using so many defence mechanisms to keep himself sane.

      Karen Horney's theories are worth reading about.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Horney

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    3. Anon2 - much better is the 1984 BBC mini-series starring David Suchet.

      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0135093/

      An amazing family. Including other luminaries such as Clement, Lucian and Anna.

      Delete
  2. Don't worry, DP. One may be forgiven for thinking it's all a beat-up to get jaded electors back to viewing QT, but, in case BB is on the way out, there is a perfect replacement in the wings. Sophie has just said that, despite the "personal vitriol" during the last campaign for Indi, she has "learned a lesson". Yes! I fully expect Sophie to step right in to the "Stand with Adam" movement by relating her personal experiences of playground xenophobic taunts.

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    Replies
    1. What a splendid proposal UC! Sophie for the chair ... wired how you will ...

      Delete
  3. Here is another appropriate Pussyfoot, Dot.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hUW-ar2XbE

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    Replies
    1. How did you know this was the music to the pond's worst nightmares? So many to blame, so little time:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussyfoot

      Delete

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