Piers Akerman, loving the Taliban, and Miranda Devine, loving Peter Costello

(Above: eek, a Taliban lover).

Mark this glorious Sunday down as the day Piers Akerman became a terrorist in mind and spirit.

Under the header Why I'm with Hamas and the Taliban, the fearless, indefatigable Billy Bunter of Greyfriars shows that when it comes to perversity he's up there with the best of the Republicans.

Chicago loses the Olympics? Yaroop, garooah, we hate loser Americans. Oops, we are Americans. Or are we? Anyhoo, darn tootin', we love schizophrenia.

Anyway, here's the fat owl's announcement of his renegade status:

When it comes to awarding US President Barack Obama with the Nobel Peace Prize, I’m with the Taliban!

The terrorists think it stinks (Hamas does, too) and I believe he shouldn’t have come within cooee of the purse.

Now an ordinary average person might think that what upset the Taliban (and Hamas too) might not be such a bad thing. Or they might peruse Akerman for a sense of satirical irony.

But no, he really does stand with the Taliban (and Hamas too), which is why I hope the Taliban nobble him for his treasonous support for Obama sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Can there be any better example of befuddled thinking and confused hate thought?

Sure a prize that's gone to the likes of Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Mother Teresa, Henry A. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho has its ups and downs (you can get the list of winners here).

But to join with the Taliban and Hamas in condemning the recent award .... and then he has the cheek to write this:

The Nobel committee seems to be sending a politically correct affirmative action love note to the Left in the US and elsewhere, applauding voters for electing a black man, albeit, one who has kindled divisions in his own country to such an extent that his opponents are starting to protest against his policies with a vehemence which may one day equal that of Obama’s own more extremist supporters.

Vehemence? You mean announcing that you side with the Taliban and Hamas isn't vehement?Or delusional, or mocking, or hopeless? And then how's this for local patriotism of the most deluded kind?

We have plenty of Australians just as worthy of this award as the new chum in the White House.

Like John Howard, Alexander Downer or Peter Costello?

What a fatuous fat owl. Just replacing George Bush in the White House - anyone you can name, McCain, Romney, Clinton - would have deserved some kind of prize, and now bearing up under the blather of the likes of Akerman, gangster supporter of the Taliban and Hamas, surely deserves an ongoing prize. By golly, Akerman is now the resident David Hicks of Chairman Rupert's News Corp! Think of that.

Next he'll be running verses from the Qur'an on the correct treatment of feminists, women and gays. Well he shares those attitudes with the Taliban too. Yep, he's a one person Taliban cell in Australia ... is it time to be alert, and perhaps even a tad alarmed?

But speaking of Peter Costello, who surprisingly didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize - well surprising to him as he fades from the scene even more slowly than the most expert Cheshire cat - the master of attention seeking has achieved yet another farewell piece, this time from Miranda the Devine, who seems more comfortable these days writing about her mongrel Biggles.

In Costello: the exit of the enigma, she tries her hand at political analysis, and comes up with this description of the man:

Given enough time to lead the Liberal Party out of the political cul-de-sacs John Howard had found himself in, an invigorated Costello - socially progressive, fiscally conservative, a republican, committed Christian and advocate of reconciliation and Kyoto ratification - may have been able to ride the Zeitgeist to a historic election victory, against Kim Beazley or even Kevin Rudd.

By golly that makes him sound just like ... Kevin Rudd, and certainly everything that the Devine usually finds exceptionally problematic, even hateful ... republicanism, mollycoddling the blacks, and taking climate change seriously by ratifying Kyoto! He sounds like an ideal greenie who should be married to a doctor's wife ... (actually Tanya Costello is a lawyer and most recently a banker, but you catch the drift).

What on earth is going on here? Akerman an infidel supporter of the Taliban, and the Devine going all mushy and gooey over Costello's SNAG credentials?

It almost makes me feel that the second coming is at hand, when the first shall be last, and the last first.

The Devine sobs along with Costello in a way that's quite touching, as she celebrates a man more sinned against than sinner, an o possum who can leave public life with head held high but still in sorrow, a quiet tragedy, though politics is full of them. And it's all John Howard's fault:

... Even the most diehard Howard fan must acknowledge the former prime minister's worst political mistake was not giving Costello a leg up.

Instead he gave Malcolm Turnbull a leg up or at least sanctioned his toppling of sitting Liberal Peter King in Wentworth. Political parties always welcome able people but only the disingenuous would not recognise that bringing the impatient, brilliant, ego-driven investment banker on board was going to damage the stock of any successors already resident in the party, most notably Costello. Turnbull did not disappoint, treading on Costello's toes within moments of his arrival by releasing a paper modelling 274 different tax plans just as Costello delivered a big tax cut. This "undermined our political position", Costello wrote in his recently updated memoirs.

So Costello's "quiet tragedy" (if it's so quiet, why doesn't he shut the fuck up about it?) is all Howard's fault, and worse still, Malcolm Turnbull is all Howard's fault too.

Well you know I've spent a lot of time blaming John Howard for a lot of things, but really I think the line should be drawn at the things he's actually done.

If Costello had had the guts, the Paul Keating balls, he could have taken on Howard and departed to the back bench, there to devise his accession to the throne. But he never had the guts, and feeble talk of unity and keeping things running smoothly merely establishes that he was the Kim Beazley figure in the Liberal party.

He never had the ticker, and the more he carries on like an elderly Hamlet, somehow still alive to brood on what went down, the more he sounds like an inert patsy who in the end ran out of steam, and lost interest in the game, having been nobbled by a better player.

And now they're thinking of installing another Kim Beazley - jolly Joe Hockey - to run the show like a game of sporting hockey!

Oh it's all a hoot amongst the unhappy out of power elitists, but the funniest line comes from the Devine regarding Malcolm Turnbull, whom she clearly doesn't like. For the full benefit of this payoff, you have to remember that Peter Costello is (for the moment) the member for Higgins, which includes South Yarra, Toorak, Armadale, Malvern and Camberwell within its boundaries, as well as the more remote areas of Prahran, Windsor, Carnegie, Murrumbeena and Hughesdale.

A more solid and respected aggregation of the rich, doctors' wives and greenies and small-l and big-L liberals you couldn't imagine amongst Melbourne's finest (only poor old Hawthorn misses out, as it always does).

It's one of the fondest and proudest boasts in my humble life that I too have lived in Toorak, and fought in the supermarket for an inch of space to gain access to the most articulate, polite and refined check out chicks in the land. But to the pay off in relation to poor old Malcolm in the middle:

Perhaps the Liberal Party should think twice about choosing leaders from difficult marginal seats such as Wentworth, packed with doctors' wives, greenies and small-l liberals whose cultivation is destined to alienate the party base.

What, so they don't elect a socially progressive, fiscally conservative republican, an advocate of reconciliation and Kyoto ratification? Like Peter Costello from Higgins?

Well you can never expect coherence or logic from the Devine, so let's pass over her celebration of Peter Costello's record, which is as generous as Costello's own assessment, culminating with these lines:

He must want to bay at the moon as he watched Rudd and Wayne Swan take credit for Australia's resilient economy.

Want to? He's been baying at the moon since Chairman Rudd ascended his rightful, robbed throne, like someone anxious to do an impersonation of Sir Laurence Olivier playing Richard III.

But just when you think the Christmas cake can't get any richer, the assortment of fruit and nuts soaked in rum any more juicy and tasty, the Devine unfolds her corker of a conclusion:

... he (Costello) always knew if he accepted the leadership after the last election, he would suffer the same fate as Brendan Nelson, who never stood a chance against Turnbull's ambition, despite his skill at unifying the party. Nelson was criticised for emoting but he worked the backbench like a maestro. He knew, as Howard did, that the backbench are the franchisees of the political business and if you ignore them they will get stroppy and you will lose the constituency that underpins your party.

There seemed to have been a certain amount of pique involved yet Costello did the only rational and dignified thing by refusing to take the leadership, although it must nearly have killed him. He was simply being realistic about the prospects of leading a demoralised opposition party with Turnbull stalking him day and night. It would take all the energy needed by a new leader to combat a triumphal Labor just to fight a rearguard action against the guerilla within.

It says a lot for Costello's judgment, humility and self-restraint that he chose not to engage. It is not cowardice that prevents a man from stepping into an unwinnable fight, but prudence.

Rational and dignified by refusing to take the leadership that was thrust at him. Being realistic! Judgment, humility and self-restraint! Oh please, pass me the kidney dish because I feel a faint nausea in the stomach.

He didn't have the ticker. And fair enough, if you don't want the fight, don't do the fight, but he was offered the leadership on the plate, and if he couldn't tackle Turnbull, he was never due the leadership.

Somewhere lurking in Costello's back brain is this realization - that he never had the ticker, just like Kim Beazley - and somehow his exceptionally elongated farewell has been an attempt at retrospective self-justification for his failure to grasp the nettle. A kind of pathetic rationalization, for which bilious newspaper columns can only be a poor substitute, but still, therapy of a kind.

The Devine does him no favors with her attempt to celebrate a man coming from the green fields of Toorak as somehow different and more worthy than a man from the eastern suburbs ...

Instead let's celebrate the passing of Costello with the final verse from our favorite poem, Sir Henry Newbolt's Vitaï Lampada:

This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind -
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

And when you're out, or retired hurt, for god's sake leave the pitch quickly, fling to the host behind, so others can get on with the game. (The rest of the poem and a picture of the close in which the breathless hush was heard can be found here).

So there you have it, Akker Dakker off with the Taliban and Miranda the Devine thinking Toorak is a hard edged nitty gritty kind of electorate without any of the sense of delusional self-privilege and pious self-regard exhibited by the self-pitying and now - huzzah - soon to be departed Peter Costello ...

What could do you do without Akker Dakker or the Devine for laughs? Sure a few might weep, a few more sob or cry or wail, but really, always look on the bright side of life, and tuck into the verbal feast the silly old blighters deliver each week ...

(Below: Billy Bunter tucking in, as drawn by Eric Roberts in the nineteen fifties. You can find more here, but if you have a fondness for old comics, you might enjoy going to the latest entry here).