David Burchell, Malcolm in the middle, hypocrisy, and making sure you cast the first stone with sufficient force to win the game

Hypocrisy, according to Cicero, was the death of friendship, "for it destroys all truth, without which the name of friendship can avail nothing".

Yet he thought it pretty well universal:

For every man's nature is concealed with many folds of disguise, and covered as it were with various veils. His brows, his eyes, and very countenance, are deceitful, and his speech is most commonly a lie.

Cicero lived between 106 and 43 BC, and it's a tad troubling to realize he said things with more wit and insight than managed by David Burchell, in Let him who is without flaws, as he seeks to redeem Malcolm Turnbull from the charge of hypocrisy.

As if it were possible to redeem any politician from that charge, since that vice is exercised every day in every arena where you might find a politician.

What's exercising Burchell's mind is the way over the weekend it was revealed by various Labor players that Turnbull had sought safe haven by way of a seat via the Labor party. Well they would do that wouldn't they, but Burchell isn't having any of it:

Often it's in accusing others that we, unwittingly, reveal the most about ourselves. Over the weekend it was revealed that Malcolm Turnbull is not merely a clumsy political tactician and a painfully imperfect concealer of frustrations, but -- that darkest of all moral crimes, alas! -- a confirmed political hypocrite.

The man who now leads the Liberal Party, we're told in hushed tones, once aspired to join Labor's shadow ministry. Worse still, he approached senior Labor figures not once, but on a multitude of occasions, thus exhibiting a veritably biblical predilection for being led astray. On account of this, the moral adepts of the press gallery inform us, Turnbull is self-evidently a man of no principles who can no longer be trusted.

Well yes, it's not a major crime, but it also doesn't need the convoluted, tortured defence that Burchell attempts to muster by referring us back to the Calvinists, the Romans, the great Christian bishops, the Lutheran revolution, Pascal and Moliere, and the pious humbuggery that infests the holy Roman church.

Whenever we start hoisting up our cassocks, striking grand postures, and accusing our foes of hypocrisy in this fashion, necessarily we're channelling the ghosts of the early church fathers. After all, it was back in the failing light of Rome's universal empire that the Roman civic notables found themselves eclipsed by a new set of political rivals, rivals whose moral watchwords were truth and authenticity.

Well yes but what a relief if Malcolm hadn't made a career out of hoisting his cassock and striking grand postures - after his flawed work on the republic that never was, and climate change policy that changed like the seasons, perhpas the most notable and the most fatal being his attempt at manufacturing a scandal by way of a fake email and utegate.

In that one flourish he fatally wounded himself way more than any of the latest revelations regarding his incipient membership of the Labor party might manage - after all, former Liberal leader Brendan Nelson took his wild side even further by briefly joining the ALP, wearing an earring and gasp, riding a motor bike.

In the end, this is the best defence that Burchell can muster:

We're told that it was Bob Hawke who first revealed the secret of Turnbull's dastardly political inconsistency. Clearly, this can't have been the same Hawke who spent his entire adult life co-dependent on the fantasy that he was everybody's best mate down at the local bar. Nor, surely, could it have been the same Hawke of whom, it is said, Paul Keating used to complain that he was called on to lie on his behalf every other day, the better to maintain the illusion of the faithful husband.

When it comes to political accusations, I would have thought, the soundest rule is: let him or her who is without hypocrisy cast the first stone.

Well yes but you'd have to look at the extremes of the universe to find a better example of a pious banality dressed up as a feeble defence of hapless Malcolm in the middle.

Of course politicians are hypocrites, and to suggest they stop throwing stones is a bit like suggesting boxing should be a noble pugilistic sport in which no one is allowed to throw punches.

When Malcolm hurled that gigantic gooley called utegate and it swung back and struck himself on the temple, he produced one of those spectacles country people accustomed to using sling shots will know only too well, when the rubber breaks and the gooley goes the wrong way (gooley - a stone, short dictionary of Australian slang on Project Gutenberg here).

If you wanted to find a more decisive stone thrower over the weekend, it was Barnaby Joyce who threw a stone hard at the Libs by saying the relationship was just a business one, and it was time for the Nats to regain their own identity.

After all, the whole point about politics is casting the first stone, and hoping you can hit Goliath in the temple first shot and bring him down, and if not, aim a flurry of stones, like a horde of deranged religious fanatics intent on punishing a woman for sexual crimes while any man involved walks free.

So when Burchell rabbits on about hypocrisy through the ages, he treats us once again to what seems to be his house style - a load of pretentious portentous musings which amount of a lot of sound and fury, but very little by way of meaning.

Turnbull's real problem is that he fatally wounded himself, can't organize his hapless chooks into a coherent farmyard meeting any day of the week, and consequently doesn't know how to organize a decent alternative set of policies with which to club the government around the head. At least not a set of decent policies the likes of mad uncle Wilson Tuckey will find acceptable, or the Libs ostensible partners the Nats, or any of a dozen other crazed individualists who can't even find a commonsense party line, let alone toe it.

It's only when he gets to Turnbull's present predicament that Burchell begins to sound like he has half a clue, and then it's more about the noble agony of a brave Roman patrician brought down to earth by the plebeians:

There is something awful in witnessing the present spectacle of Turnbull's public political agony. Instinctively a man of the reasonable centre, he is being forced, first this way and then that, in a veritable frenzy of political abjection - and all in order to satiate the animal requirements of a party that, devoid of any other sustenance, has started to feed on its own blood. In the process, Turnbull is being required to morally humiliate himself by pretending to views that we know he cannot possibly hold, and others - such as the Liberals' present disgraceful and incompetent opportunism on China - that no reasonable person could hold if they wanted to sleep nights. Inwardly, we must all be begging that he simply speaks from the heart. (After all, behind their political masks Rudd and Turnbull might as well be twins.)

And yet we know that Turnbull could hardly be in such agony, if he were in reality the hardened political hypocrite his opponents purport him to be. Nor would the government be devoting such effort to blackening his political character, unless they believed that there was something worth blackening. Turnbull's error is not to pretend to be other than what he is, since at that rate every leading politician would probably have to plead guilty. It is that, in having prostrated himself so often and so abjectly in his sorry party's self-imagined interests, he no longer knows when and how to tell them to get lost.

Sorry, but they're blackening his character, because that's what you do with an enemy on the floor. Kick him if it seems like he still might be moving. Heck kick him even if he's not. And it's not just one side taking pot shots.

Sadly it was Turnbull's self-destruction over utegate - his ambitious hope for a nuclear weapon that would blast him to power - that's led to the current turmoil. When he hoped to besmirch Chairman Rudd with evidence of crony capitalism and deals for mates ... and instead came up with a face covered with egg.

So let me propose a corollary, or perhaps an alternative theorem to Burchell that isn't so besotted with the past, or at least the Roman and early Christian past.

Let's take politics back to the old testament...

Since everyone lives in glass houses, and we all love to throw stones, and we're all hypocrites, in small or large measure, make sure the stones you throw get thrown ahead of the other stone throwers, and whatever you do, use a sling shot for your gooleys, and always aim at the temple, and pray for no kick back from broken rubber, and above all, for the love of the lord, make sure they're real stones you're throwing, not ones made out of papier-mâché ...

As a bonus then you won't have to worry about why we invaded Iraq and didn't bother to do anything about North Korea, Burma or sundry other evil empires ...

(Below: that's the way you do it, money for nothing, and your chicks for free).