David Penberthy, Steve Fielding, and our very own Chauncey Gardiner

(Above: looking for an online degree? Want to become part of the smug intelligentsia? The educated university elite? Why not try Colbert University here, they're experts in truthiness and hatred of middle class elitists).

What is David Penberthy's problem?

Well it's the elite, the smug intelligentsia. No doubt they like chardonnay, with the really trendy ones preferring sav blanc from WA and NZ. Certainly they like coffee, but only of the ponce pretentious kind.

Probably they were the ones that told him the Daily Telegraph was a crap tabloid when he was editor of the rag. Never mind, it was a crap tabloid before he came along, and it's been a crap tabloid since he left to do special assignments for Chairman Rupert, like the prize winning in its own lunchtime The Punch.

Every so often Penbo gets the bit between his teeth about the hateful intelligentsia, and unloads both barrels of buckshot in a braying, spraying way which allows him to see ordinary every day people as St. Sebastian style martyrs, victims of the filthy elites. But what happens if being the well paid editor of a tabloid rag puts you amongst the elites? Never mind.

This week Penbo's outraged by the reaction to the news that Senator Steve Fielding has difficulty spelling, as outlined in Fielding may end up an unlikely hero - and not just because Fielding seems to have taken up residency in The Punch, which is run on the cheapskate principal of 'here you play for no pay'. According to Penbo, there's a deep seated trauma in observers of the man:

His detractors went through three stages this week as they examined his clanger.

The first was to declare case closed on the question as to whether he's a dill.

The second, on learning of his learning disorder, was to say that there's no shame in having a learning disorder and good on him for admitting to it, very courageous and so forth, but he's a dill anyway because of the way he's conducted himself in policy terms.

The third, after Fielding decided to offer himself up for a round of interviews and opinion pieces about his battle with the language, was to question his motives and say that maybe the whole thing was just a crafty publicity stunt after all.

Not bad coming in a nation that, in its European incarnation, was settled almost exclusively by illiterate criminals.

WTF? What on earth has the writing and spelling capacity of transported convicts in the eighteenth and nineteenth century got to do with an understanding of current fiskal issues? I mean, I brood about the treatment of the Irish - it's in my blood - but hey, tell the convict story to the free settlers of South Australia. And all the other boring buggers who snuck in after the convicts paved the way. But shouldn't we be over getting antsy about the convicts?

So little you know. The smug hatred of the convicts continues unabated even to this day. Damn you patrician overlords, damn you all:

It's a genuinely hateful kind of smugness from a supercilious core of educated Australians, some of them private people, some of them in politics, some in the the media, and it reflects an insecurity.

None of us are as smart as we would like to think we are. When you see someone falling apart like Fielding did there's a sense of schadenfreude, which at its essence is really nothing more than relief that you're not the one making a fool of yourself

Genuinely hateful smugness? Okay I can grok that. But can I at least get one last broadside away at Fielding before I lapse into my 'there but for the grace of god goes my own foolishness' mode? How about this?

... I'm not going to pretend that my reaction on seeing the footage of his doorstop spelling bee wasn't one of unbridled hilarity. I almost spat out my coffee. And when I'd regained my composure, I called my workmates over to ask if they too had seen the Family First senator blundering his way through a doorstop where, after referring three times to "physical" policy instead of "fiscal", he insisted he knew what he was talking about by offering to spell the word. Unfortunately, as the entire country now knows, he spelled it with a k.

... Fielding is clearly disliked by a good many Australians because, with about 2 per cent of the vote, he's lucked himself into a balance of power position in the Senate and stymied the Labor government's policy agenda on everything from alcopops and petrol surveillance to stimulus spending and the carbon pollution reduction scheme. He's our own Chauncey Gardiner, an accidental politician with the bons mots to match, stuck between two rocks and a hard place, as he memorably described himself over the first stimulus package, on pretty much every issue that comes his way.

Unbridled hilarity! Pleasure in another's faux pas. Oh yes I'm running hot with smug disdain. And do you like the Chauncey Gardiner line? Clever, cruel, just the kind of thing I'd expect from a smug, supercilious educated Australian whose done a bit too much reading, or maybe just watched the movie or read the classic comic so they could sound clever dick and smart arse in print. How I love it.

Oh wait, second thoughts, that's wrong. How I genuinely hate that clever dick hatefulness. Oh wait, didn't write that, that's David Penberthy. I just grokked him.

That's him being kind to Steve Fielding. Because you see being cruel is being kind:

There is a big difference between having this kind of cruel but normal reaction among friends, and seizing on it to mount an impromptu public dissertation on how clearly ill-equipped the man is for public office. Especially when, as he soon made clear, it's the result of a longstanding struggle with a learning disability.

Yep, laugh and snigger behind his back, and then come out in public to say what a wonderful chap he is. Well perhaps Penbo will join George Bernard Shaw in a clarion call for spelling reform which will solve everything:

In the first year, 's' will replace the soft 'c'. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard 'c' will be dropped in favour of the 'k'. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter.

Sadly no. Senator Fielding is really just a drum on which Penbo can bash out his anti-intelligentsia message. Now what we need is a big bass drum that will really resonate. How about Pauline Hanson?

Say what? Well, clearly you've forgotten that Pauline Hanson was also all the fault of the intelligentsia:

The great modern benchmark for the middle-class hatchet job on a linguistically challenged public figure who dared to get above her station is, of course, Pauline Hanson. Having witnessed her term of office at close quarters in the Canberra press gallery, and having interviewed her on several occasions and seen her in full flight on her pet race-based issues, whacking on about foreigners taking "our" jobs or blackfellas living high on the hog, I'd say the departure of Hanson from the national stage is one of the happier political developments of the past 15 years.

Yep, it's the schizophrenic pleased to see her go, but hated to see her bashed around by the intelligentsia routine. As if bashing the intelligentsia gives Penbo a free go to bash Hanson. But not until he's blamed the intelligentsia for everything:

But I'd also say that her departure was, if anything, delayed by the ridicule that she endured from the Australian intelligentsia, turning her into a martyr in the eyes of less educated people by poking fun at her intellect, her speech, even her employment status as a fish and chip shop owner, as if that of itself was a sign that she wasn't cut out for public office.

Actually - and understand I'm not trying to get the hateful impossibly smug and supercilious intelligentsia off the hook here - but her departure from the national stage was delayed by the good electors of Oxley, but not for long, then by the voters of Queensland offering up One Nation a quarter of the vote and eleven seats in the state assembly, a Queensland court offering her a stay in Her Majesty's prison, and worst of all the producers of Dancing with the Stars offering her a gig which saw her advance to the final, only to be beaten by that smug superior supercilious Bec Cartwright.

Of course she was cut out for public office. She certainly wasn't cut out for the running of a dull, prosaic, plebeian fish and chip shop. Not when she could dance like that.

Thankfully it's not just the smug intelligentsia in Penbo's sights. No, it's the media, and their cheap antics (never ever on display in the Daily Telegraph):

The killer moment in that campaign of ridicule came courtesy of 60 Minutes, with the cooked-up "Are you xenophobic?" question eliciting the response "please explain?" from the rattled member for Oxley.

Setting aside the fact probably one-quarter of the staff at the Nine Network didn't know what xenophobia was either, or at best whether it was spelled with an X or a Z, this cocky journalistic party trick would have gone down like the proverbial lead balloon around Australia's lounge rooms that Sunday night.

Sob. So it's channel Nine's fault that Hanson hung around. But I thought Dancing with the Stars was on Channel Seven?

Most viewers would have thought: that poor woman, I don't know what xenophobia is either, and if all these university-educated showponies are giving her this much grief, maybe she's worth voting for after all. Which is exactly what a million Australians did at the 1998 federal election.

Oh no, now it's all the fault of the university-educated showponies who fell for the cheap trick played by Nine. No wait, is it actually the fault of the dumb fuckers who thought voting for Hanson would somehow prove something to the university-educated showponies?

Whatever? Could it actually be that Penbo has a massive chip on his shoulders, something to do with a university education? Does he need therapy? Could buying a swag of degrees from an online university help?

Because deep down he sounds just like a smug supercilious snob:

I'm not suggesting the much more isolated ridicule Fielding has endured will result in any significant kick-along for the Christian senator and, personally, I hope it doesn't, speaking as a believer not in God but climate change who enjoys the occasional alcopop.

That's right, he sniggers in private about Fielding, and hates his policies. Just like a smug member of the intelligentsia.

Next thing Penbo will be telling us over a chardonnay or a latte that he doesn't believe in god. Oh wait, did he just do that in a cryptic way, by announcing he was a member of the church of the latter day satanic politically correct zombie vampiric greenie climate change believers? And a drinker of alcopops?

Quick, how to recover lost ground? Well praise Fielding no matter what you might think of him or his motives:

Whatever you think of him, and even his motives, Fielding has done a few million Australians a service this week by putting his hand up as a sufferer of a learning disability. For all the campaigns we've seen on breaking down the stigmas associated with mental illness or HIV, suffering from a literacy disorder is one of the last taboos.

Well who am I to mock literacy disorders, or my very own trial, known as maths disorder, but can someone explain to Penbo just how smugly dismissive and supercilious and superior his whole piece is - worthy of a university graduate - especially as it ends this way:

Be it by accident or design, Fielding has lightened the load for all these people this week.

By accident or design? What on earth does that mean? The dumb klutz has done it again, without even realizing what he's done? Well if Penbo is going to write in praise of Mr Magoo, he should do it without one hand taking away what the other hand has offered up ... only a smug member of the intelligentsia can manage that kind of intellectual dishonesty.

Phew, after all that, I feel like an alcopop.