Gerard Henderson, John Howard strikes out, and media handling of the socialist rabble known as journalists

(Above: Malcolm Turnbull learning to handle the reptiles in approved Gerard Henderson style).

Steady lads, keep a brave hand on the tiller of the ship of state, and steer into the blustery winds that whip around you from the baying hounds of the socialists.

All will be well in due course, just as it was tremendously well in the old days, and look no further than Gerard Henderson in A fatal dalliance: Liberals who want to be loved, for fond memories of the good old days:

That Australia has perhaps the best performing Western economy is due primarily to the legacy of John Howard and Peter Costello and the Hawke and Keating Labor governments. At the moment that legacy is all the Coalition has going for it. 

Ah yes, the rear view mirror of political practice. Never mind the present or the future, always look back to the glories of the past. Why if you look hard enough and far enough you can get back to the great days of Robert Gordon Menzies, and before him Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar.

But the current band of silvertails and used car salesmen that make up the Liberal party have no sense of history. How else to explain Joe Hockey's abject betrayal of John Howard and his wonderful record:

You get the impression some senior Liberals want the media to love them. How else to explain Joe Hockey's address to the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia in Sydney on June 30? For some reason he agreed to be part of a panel interviewed by the ABC economics correspondent Stephen Long, who put it to Hockey that the Howard government spent too much, taxed too little and presided over a system of middle class welfare.

Hockey did not vigorously contest those propositions. It should have come as no surprise when Long reported his comments on that evening's radio program PM as a "candid assessment" of the Howard government's alleged economic failings. The next day Hockey denied he was critical of the Howard government's economic legacy. But the damage was done.

Et tu Joe? Just because you want to be luuuved? Yet another class traitor, yet another treating the wonderful John Howard carelessly, as if his record was some kind of media spittoon into which you might mindlessly hurl a gob of spit?

Why would a senior Liberal give the impression he was trashing it? Reading the transcript, you get the impression Hockey was trying to be nice to Long and that he might have run a different line had the inquisitor been more kindly disposed to the Howard/Costello legacy.

(By this time of course in any column it's appropriate to delete tiresome duplicate references to the Hawke/Keating legacy, since we all know they did very little and the giants who mounted their puny shoulders did all the heavy lifting).

Well there's one thing certain in all this. John Howard had the measure of the media, and by golly he'd never put a foot wrong, not like "et tu" Hockey and his ilk:

Howard's speech in Melbourne last Tuesday on "Politics and the media: the good, the bad and the ugly" also missed the mark. Instead of the journalistic hostility that swelled during his last term, he focused on media criticism of his misjudgments - appointing Peter Hollingworth as governor-general and his slow response to Pauline Hanson's manifest intolerance.

Missed the mark? John Howard missed the mark? Say it ain't so, not a pigeon dropping on the great man's statue, so assiduously burnished and polished by Gerard Henderson.

Et tu Gerard?

What to do? Well how about building up a healthy dose of paranoia about the left wing media, and the likely treatment Liberals are likely to get from major star newspaper columnists like Gerard Henderson, Janet Albrechtsen and Piers Akerman.

The Liberals need to be more savvy about the media and to prosecute their case with greater conviction, in a coherent, researched form. Some Liberal material is not up to scratch, though there has been some improvement.

Liberals should complain about the lack of political balance in what are presented as forums. On the Sky News program AM Agenda on Friday the former Liberal leader John Hewson said the Howard and Rudd governments had lied over the link between Australia's Afghanistan commitment and domestic terrorism. The former ALP senator Stephen Loosley properly defended Labor, but there was no one to defend the Liberal Party from Hewson.

That's right, whinge and complain and whine about a lack of balance, when we all know that The Australian and the Daily Telegraph are full of rabid left wing journalists, just like Fox, network Nine, Seven and Ten are hotbeds of socialist revolutionary thinking. Providing nests for traitors and class clowns like John Hewson.

And as for that paranoia? Cultivate it, till it, toil in the fields of fear and loathing until dusk each night.

Turnbull and his colleagues should accept that large sections of the media will never love them and adopt a strategy that takes this into account.

Sob, they ain't never gunna be loved. Sorry Joe, sorry Mal, love don't live here anymore.

But what is love, but a cheap perfume and the careless distracting glance of a woman on heat, when a man is a man and has to get about his business, preferably with a Winchester in one hand, and a copy of the Liberal party's policies - as set out in straightforward manner by Malcolm Turnbull - in the other.

Yep, Librals got to do what Librals got to do, and forget the thought that the media might be sympathetic. Upset those journalists, tag them, knock them down, go the biff, knee them in the groin, coathanger the wretched recalcitrants.

Meanwhile, what hope for the immediate future of the Liberal party? Bummer dude, for Gerard has peered into the entrails and found that everything is coming up stinkpots:

On the current evidence, Malcolm Turnbull appears to be best equipped to lead the Opposition to the next election. No federal government has failed to win a second term since Labor's Jim Scullin lost to Joseph Lyons in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression when Labor was deeply divided on economic policy. The best realistic outcome for the Coalition at next year's election would be to gain some seats or at least hold its own.

And on what basis is Malcolm Turnbull the best equipped to lead the Opposition to the next election? Why it seems on the basis of complete and utter disastrous incompetence:

Turnbull's appearance on ABC TV's Australian Story last week was a disaster, primarily because he allowed journalists to present him in the worst possible light. It was no one's fault the crew happened to be filming when news broke of the fake OzCar email. But when this became evident, it was time to clear the office of all but Liberal MPs and their staff. If this resulted in the program junking the profile, sometimes it is best not to be reported. And it does not matter if a politician upsets a journalist.

What to do? Well it seems that the coalition must learn from its current malcontents, who focus on the handling of the media. They know that most journalists are tools in the grip of Labor or Greens ideology, with News Corp to the forefront of this radical revolutionary socialist claptrap, and they construct their media strategy out of this paranoid perception. Sorry, out of this reality, so they can get their message over the heads of the journalists, to the people who count. Like Chairman Rupert.

It's not an easy task, nor is it impossible. And the next time some journalist writes a column about Labor party politicians and modern political parties indulging in the worst of all possible activities - spin - just ignore them. 

Remember the most important thing about spin is that it can only be done by Labor party types appealing to the vast majority of journalists who already prefer Labor and Greens policies. Media management is what Liberals do as they herd the sheep-like socialist minds of the journalists towards the pen of proper thinking and Liberal understandings of the world.

Meantime, if you've achieved any enlightened understanding of how the world actually works from reading Henderson, you're a cleverer duck than me ...

Except maybe there could be a new slogan for the right? Spin baby spin ...

And by golly, if you want a first class example of Malcolm Turnbull spinning on his own axis of paranoia, look no further than last night's 7.30 Report as he joined that den of socialists known as the ABC, headed by that arch Satanist Kerry O'Brien. View it or read all about it here ....

(Below: careful with the journalist fruitloops Malcolm. You squeeze, you bruise, you buy).