Tim Blair, Bill O'Reilly, and the virtues of innuendo when it comes to abuse and fear mongering

(Above: painting by Mark Tansey, The Innocent Eye Test. No relevance to anything, except perhaps as a metaphor for Tim Blair, and that I really like his work. Plenty more Mark Tansey on the intertubes, just google his name).

Once upon a time, a friend bought me a T-shirt with an image of Mao on it.

I've never worn it, not even in the privacy of the bedroom where I favor a T during the winter months. Apart from it being hideously unfashionable (a vile green), it did feature the head of a mass murderer.

T's, apart from being easy to wear, tend to be a billboard. Somehow what you wear seems like an endorsement of the content. Which is why I look at bearded youths wearing Che T's and wonder if they have any idea what and who they're endorsing.

I don't mind memorabilia. I have a Mao clock - its telling of the time seems an ironic use for a mass murderer. And I can understand an interest in Nazi memorabilia - after all, SBS as a broadcaster is in some quarters known as the SS broadcaster, such are the number of Nazi orientated programs they show. The Nazis had a great, if grotesque and goth dress sense that put black at the centre of the frame.

But still ... wandering around in a Nazi uniform, as Prince Harry once did, is a step too far. Thank the lord Tim Blair actively campaigned to keep Australia royal, so we could have gits like this at the helm of our great nation.

So ... it's okay to be interested in extremists and ratbags - but to actually fellow travel with them?Announce like Piers Akerman that you've become a Taliban convert when it comes to the matter of Obama?

I guess the problem with moderation is that it's so dull, and so much more amusing to put up images of Obama looking like Adolf Hitler. Or perhaps hint that they're not so bad, and just part of a liberal media hypocrisy test.

How did you guess the conversation was turning towards Tim Blair, and his inimitable linking machine, as exemplified in the item They're Calling our President Hitler.

First chook to feed on that Blair tid bit?

They’re calling Obama HITLER???

That is so totally inappropriate!!

He is a whole lot more like Stalin.

Oh ho ho, and hah hah.

Now how did I stumble on to this topic? Well I was reading Tim Blair yet again, and he was in his usual mode - invective and equivocation - and I remembered the old routine that you can be judged by the company you keep.

Take this little snatch on Bill O'Reilly (here):

I’m no great fan of Bill O’Reilly, but his views on Fox News’s rise – the channel, not given much hope when it was launched, now celebrates its thirteenth year – are instructive:

Fox News is not boring! This, I believe, is the biggest reason for our success. Like us or not, we move things along. We have lively people on the air. We take chances and do things differently. In primetime especially, Americans do not want dull programming. Many news programs simply recite the day’s events. That will not cut it anymore. You have to give viewers something unique and entertaining. FNC does.

Something there for anyone working in media, no matter your politics.

Do you like the dance? "I'm no great fan of Bill O'Reilly but ..." But, billy goat, butt.

So let me quote Bill O'Reilly in an admiring way, and then conclude there's something for anyone working in media, no matter your politics, in what O'Reilly has to say about the wondrous workings of the News Corp empire.

Actually there's nothing for anyone working in media who might want it to be civilized, rational and intelligent, no matter your politics, by following O'Reilly. His foot in the door tactics, pursuit of people in odd places, like the so-called newshounds in local "current affairs" programs, and his bullying, overbearing interviews are a permanent, offensive disgrace.

But that's the classic Blair way of dissembling - pretending to be somewhere in the middle of rational discourse, while actually embracing the extreme.

What next? Wearing a T-shirt featuring Bill O'Reilly, sucking up to the more extreme elements of News Corp, since he's stable buddies with all these ratbags, while pretending that he's not a big fan? No, no, you see, he's not a great fan of Bill O'Reilly, or perhaps even of Glenn Beck ... who knows ... but he surely knows how to embrace their tactics.

Because the way Blair works, he likes to peddle things, link around, hook up to whatever piece of ratbaggery is going around, and thereby feed his chooks a little corn, and then get wildly indignant when someone gets a little agitated at his tactics.

The latest little fracas involves Blair taking a pot shot at a South Australian blogger (for the full story, go here, and follow the links):

It’s a crowded field, but we may have found the stupidest person on the internet. Readers are welcome to attempt explaining to South Australian academic Damian Lataan how creative types will sometimes rework material sourced online ("see, Damian, what they’ve done is take the original MEMRI clips and added storyboards and funny music ...") but be warned: that’s 48 hours of your life you’ll never get back. And there’s no guarantee, even after that amount of time, that Lataan will have any idea what you’re talking about.

The stupidest person on the internet? Well there's a rational way to start a conversation, right out of the Bill O'Reilly play book. For having a go at Blair linking to a heavy handed "satire" about "the Palestinians" handily lodged on YouTube?

All good fun in a clever dick smart arse way?

Well surely the stupidest person on the internet can be found amongst Blair's readers, because of course the frolic is designed first of all to have fun in the usual way at the expense of Palestinians - as a collective - and of course Blair's readers rally to the cause in the usual way, heaping whatever collective shit they can muster on Palestinians.

Fair and balanced and you decide? More like unhinged obsessive monomania and the decision is already made.

But there was one funny aside in the comments section, which brings us in a circle back to Blair's desperate attempt to bolster the credentials of Bill Orally and Fox News:

Having said that, I think Rupert may have gotten hold of some of Damo’s stash. These days he seems to roam the world, like Ahmadinejad or Chavez, giving crazy-arse speeches, for no discernible reason other than to wind people up. I’m not sure where the greater irony lies in his “Google is evil” speech, the fact he told a hall full of Chinese that they were going to have to start paying for content, when most of them haven’t paid for the software they’re using, or the fact that he was banging on about News Corporation’s ‘violated rights’ in the presence of the Chinese politburo.

Actually, I do know which is more ironic.

Anyways, here’s a helpful tip for the News Ltd/News Corp executives:

Google doesn’t force Web sites to be included in its search listings. The people who run any site can remove it from Google’s results with a few keystrokes. All they have to do is go to the Web site’s robot.txt file and type this:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Poof, the site becomes invisible to Google. Their stories will no longer show up in Google searches. It will be as if they don’t exist.

Well here's hoping that Chairman Rupert brings on his bamboo curtain quik stix, and Comrade Blair is put behind a paywall, and then we can see how well Blair's game of linking to peurile cheap half assed satirical skits on YouTube will last as a business model.

Because that's the real point. A hell of a lot of Blair's content comes from borrowed sources, plundered and linked to on other parts of the full to flowering intertubes. Whenever Chairman Rupert goes on about violated rights, I wonder if he actually reads half the staff that travels out under the mastheads he owns.

Blair is just a bower bird, a collector of gee gaws and gimcrack jewellery to feed his punters, with an extraordinarily limited range of interests, ranging from the "delusion of climate change", through motor sports to the consistent monotonous smearing of Obama as he recycles extremist Republican fodder from his United States sources (with Malcolm Turnbull now turning up regularly as a piñata who keeps on giving as he tries to wrestle with the likes of Wilson Tuckey, who sounds like Tim Blair might, if equipped with an iron bar and a fog horn).

How absurd does this get? Well take Avoid Delay, a piece borrowed from Mark Steyn about a gay bar in Amsterdam seeking to appeal to Islamics. This gives Blair a chance - by sly innuendo - to have a bash at poofters and Islamics in a double whammy. Remarkably, he only got four comments for his trawling - Blair loves his comments and his hits - but as usual he knew how to feed his chooks, and as usual they responded:

Not the Orange men. They’re giving up their longheld openness and supergay support? In teeny increments? That ain’t right. Why can’t the homo hotel stay homo and just invite Muslim homo’s to join? That way homos and Muslims are catered for and no one has to capitulate.

Something there for anyone working in media, no matter your politics? Only if you're a loon, and want a regular spot in loon pond.

Actually, Frank Zappa makes more sense:

(Cheesey, Cheesey)
(This is a song about vegetables, they keep ya regular
They're real good for yo)

Call any vegetable Call it by name
Call one today When you get off the train
Call any vegetable And the chances are good
Aw, The vegetable will respond to you

(Some people don't go for prunes...I
don't know, I've always found that if they...)
Call any vegetable Pick up your phone
Think of a vegetable Lonely at home
Call any vegetable And the chances are good
That a vegetable will respond to you

Rutabaga, Rutabaga,
Rutabaga, Rutabaga,
Rutabay-y-y-y...

(A prune isn't really a vegetable...
CABBAGE is a vegetable...)

No one will know
If you don't want to let them know
No one will know
'Less it's you that might tell them so
Call and they'll come to you
Covered with dew
Vegetables dream, Of responding to you

Standing there shiny and proud by your side
Holding your hand while the neighbors decide
Why is a vegetable something to hide?

(Below: the News Corp family of vegetables, or a post card from Ken Brown? You decide, but check here before you answer).