Glenn Milne, Malcolm Turnbull, Wilson mad uncle Tuckey and bartender hit that loon with a bottle of Italian chianti

(Above: First Dog in the Moon back in July 2009 when Wilson Tuckey was already running around like a loon giving big Mal a hard time. And it took September for big Mal to respond firmly. Gee, he's got a long fuse).

Over at the Daily Terror, the inimitable Glenn Milne thinks big Mal (grand Mal as some like to call him), and his recent alleged brain snap are possibly due to any one of the following in any combination you might like to imagine:

1. Italy.

2. A bottle of chianti (or several, no one was counting).

3. Lucy Turnbull.

4. A friend's wedding in Italy.

5. Silvio Berlusconi's Italy

6. A focus on divorce and enemies rather than wedding vows and friends.

7. Italy's - or perhaps Caesar's - tendency to cast the die. Or cross the Tiber.

Unfortunately Milne doesn't bother to provide any insights into Wilson 'Ironbar' Tuckey and what makes that particular loon run.

Instead in what is turning into a regular Sunday sorbet treat of ill-informed commentary, this week under the header Turnbull faces hostile climate, Milne quotes Tuckey favorably:

When a party leader, publicly calls his internal critics "smart-arses'', you have to ask: did it have to come to this?

The fact that it did goes to Turnbull's sometimes fundamental misunderstandings about politics - or what Wilson Tuckey has called his "judgment and inexperience''.

Well bugger me dead and stick my head on a pike in a public square, Wilson Tuckey being an astute judge of politics. The bumbling braying jackass from the west being held up as judge and jury on big Mal. Instead of calling the buzzing bumble bee from the west an indolent trouble-maker, Milne uses the noise from the nest to suggest big Mal lacks judgement and experience. Wilson Tuckey as an arbiter of judgment and experience. Why next we'll have Bill Heffernan wheeled out as an exemplary feminist.

With friends like Milne, let's hope big Mal has some kindly enemies

Instead of suggesting that the likes of Tuckey, Bishop and Ruddock immediately get their marching orders in the pre-selection stakes, Milne broods about how they're going to hang around like a bad smell:

Turnbull may prevail on this issue, but it will be at terrible cost. The minority within the party room opposed to him on climate change will harden in the face of his public denigration and become a permanent ginger group.

Ultimately, facing an almost inevitable loss at the next election, they will go for his leadership.

Ginger? Doesn't that imply red hair, intelligence, or at least a bottle of dye? Why not call them a bunch of dodos unaware of their impending extinction?

Because if Liberals think that following a mad uncle like Wilson Tuckey to the electoral grave yard is the way forward, they deserve to stay out of power for an eternity.

To compound that delusion, Milne suggests the following strategy:

Given all this, no one was in a better position, surely, to have declared, on behalf of the Opposition: "I believe in climate change, I hold to this issue utterly, and I believe in the need to fix it".

But he should have added: "Having said that, I do not believe that Kevin Rudd's job-destroying, environmentally untested Emissions Trading Scheme is the answer.

"As Prime Minister, I will give you an Emissions Trading Scheme, but not this one.''

Two outcomes would have flowed from this position: Turnbull's internal critics would have been silenced, and Turnbull would have been given full licence to attack the Rudd scheme.

Neither has eventuated. Instead, Turnbull has found himself in the always unenviable position of being half-pregnant.

As if the die hard loons would have stayed silent the moment that Turnbull declared he was a believer in climate change. Such crazed hardball deniers are true believers, fanatical members of a cult religion as firm in its hold on its members as creatonism is on its adherents. Without fail they attempt to dress up the debate as a religious issue, by constantly labeling scientists as quasi-religious folk in the grip of a serious delusion. They aren't interested in rational debate or scientific inquiry.

The relentless monomania of a Tim Blair is a closed book, and so is the mind, what there is of it, of Wilson Tuckey.

As a result, Turnbull has found himself in the always unenviable position of being half-Tuckeyed and half-Barnabyed.

He's now done the first sensible thing in recent times - attempted to put his own house in order by telling the smart arses he's supposed to be the one running the party.

Milne of course in his usual way finds any attempt at actual leadership alarming, disturbing, frightening, unfamiliar, and problematic.

According to him, big Mal will find himself boxed into a corner by the fiendishly clever Rudd, and when that happens it will all be big Mal's doing.

Well back in the days of ute-gate, it was all big Mal's doings. But when the debate on climate change and the ETS comes around, fair's fair.

The hard-core rump of persistently squawking loons on the right will help produce a piece of legislation - enacting a Liberal party election policy - which will do little for the environment and little for the economy.

And if Chairman Rudd can present that as a triumph to the electorate, the clowns like Wilson 'mad uncle ironbar' Tuckey will have only themselves to answer to for the result.

My conclusion? Turnbull should do a grand tour to Italy more often, indulge in chianti and a decent coffee (but the Italians also do the best hot chocolate in the world).

Sure it might be a mish-mash of Catholicism, socialism, nudity, regressive social values, rampant corruption, the Mafia, a famously perverted and hugely wealthy PM, sexism, chauvinism, and a lax Mediterranean lifestyle, but as an antipodean circuit breaker, it clearly has a lot to offer.

The mere fact that Turnbull has rattled the cages of Tim Blair, Piers Akerman, Glenn Milne and Miranda the Devine on the one weekend shows he's back on track.

Go grand Mal, have another seizure or three. What have you got to lose, except for the company of loons ....

(Below: the rest of First Dog on the Moon's cartoon. You can find more here, and below that is a cartoon by Bill Leake which takes us for a stroll down memory lane to when big Mal was Minister for the Environment and John Howard was a Wilson Tuckey true believer).