Miranda Devine, Christopher Pearson, Machiavelli, and more coins in the Godwin's Law swear jar ...

Oh dear. Miranda the Devine has suddenly gone deeply philosophical and sought to apply the lessons of Machiavelli and The Prince to aspirational Chairman Tony Abbott and actual Chairman Kevin Rudd.

You can read it all here, under the header Abbott by Machiavelli's measure, but if you have only a few spare minutes in your life, why not just read the actual work by Machiavelli, available at Project Gutenberg here, and in various other places on the interubes in rather old fashioned translations. Not only will you get to read a better, more incisive mind, you'll probably do a better job than the Devine applying M's insights - instead of the fey whimsy offered up by the Devine, as she pretends to a kind of balance, but in the usual way manages to sputter like a spent firecracker.

It seems if anything a way to defuse the news that Abbott might have thought about approaching a drama coach for advice on how to be an even better Stanislavskian ham, but the tick and cross approach to Abbott and the Ruddster based on The Prince is such a half-hearted romp that if you came across it in a year 12 essay, you'd think about whether it made the pass grade.

Never mind, we have other Abbott advisors to look at, including the proud editor of his literary works, and so it's off to the valiant, intrepid Christopher Pearson, who when not helping drive SBS into the ground as part of the current board's excellent neutering of the broadcaster, is pleased to scribble for The Australian.

Scandals revive Left fantasy, he broods, as he gets upset at Richard Dawkins for this little outburst:

"Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice -- the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gouging, truth-hating, child-raping institution -- while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, around his ears."

A modest, unremarkable summary of the Roman church to many - especially a church designed to celebrate the creator of the genocidal flood designed to wipe out the bulk of life on earth - but Pearson seems to think it shows malice and lack of proportion.

As if mentioning the crime of rape and the sale of offensive kitsch in the same breath is a rhetorical slip, when it might be argued that the use of offensive trinkets is the first part of the seduction and rape of innocent minds.

Pearson proceeds to take a figure offered up by William Rees-Mogg that the proportion of clergy who have ever had sexual allegations made against them is about one in 200:

From my own reading in recent years, I'd say that sounds about right. It's worth noting that the rate of complaints involving priestly abuse of minors in the post-1960s era pales beside that in developed countries for comparable professions such as teachers, not to mention the public at large.

Who knows what Pearson has been reading in recent years, but it certainly sounds like he hasn't been paying attention to Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi, who in September 2009, said that in the past 50 years between 1.5% and 5% of the Catholic clergy have been involved in sexual abuse cases (here). It goes without saying that even 1.5% isn't quite the same as .5%, and in any case there's considerable evidence that Tomasi was also fudging the figures, with other estimates ranging from 6 to 8%. But Pearson is adept at figure fudging himself:

Not even The New York Times, in an aggressively secularist campaign to destroy the Pope and undermine Catholicism, pretends otherwise.

What drives the editors of a once mighty newspaper to compromise its reputation by carrying shrill attacks with very little corroborative detail is something of a mystery.

A deeper mystery, perhaps comparable to transubstantiation, is the way Pearson seems not to have read Decades of Damage; Trail of Pain in Church Crisis Leads to Nearly Every Diocese , which arrived at a figure of 1.8% of all priests ordained from 1950 to 2001 in the United States, which however you cut it, also isn't in in 200.

Back in 2003 when the article was penned, more than 1,200 priests were facing charges of abuse of more than 4,000 minors in the previous six decades. To quote the NY Times:

The survey also shows how pervasive the abuse has been. Using information from court records, news reports, church documents and interviews, the survey found accusations of abuses in all but 16 of the 177 Latin Rite dioceses in the United States.

Every region was seriously affected, with 206 accused priests in the West, 246 in the South, 335 in the Midwest and 434 in the Northeast. (Some priests were counted more than once if they abused in more than one region.) The crisis reached not only big cities like Boston and Los Angeles but smaller ones like Louisville, Ky., with 27 priests accused, and St. Cloud, Minn., with 9.

Seems the Latin Rite has its downside. Put it another way. If that's a lack of collaborative detail for a shrill attack, all I can say is some chicken, some neck.

But then that's the usual way of dissemblers, apologists and ideologues, which is to attack the messenger, rather than worry about the message:

American-style liberalism has long been contemptuous of what it sees as mere superstition -- in much the same style as the Fairfax press -- but caution about antagonising Catholic readers and alienating their advertising dollars has usually prevailed until now.

Perhaps The New York Times's recent financial woes have left those at the helm feeling they've nothing much left to lose.

Anyone interested in the minutiae of the accusations can find them at the paper's site.

Minutiae? Is that like trinkets of an offensive kitsch kind? Is child abuse minutiae?

Whatever, I guess that Pearson didn't have time to catch up on the latest angle in defense of Rome, which is to compare coverage of the abuse allegations with the "more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism", mounted by no less a personage than the pope's personal preacher (here):

Cantalamessa, in his reflections for the pope on the Catholic church's most solemn day, said he was inspired by a letter from an unidentified Jewish friend who was upset by the "attacks" against Benedict.

Jews "know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms," said Cantalamessa, a Franciscan priest.

Quoting from the letter, Cantalamessa said his Jewish friend was following "with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful of the whole world."

"The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism," he said, quoting from the letter.

Oh dear. Talk about Godwin's Law, Holocaust sub-section. Time for Benedict to dust off the pre-Vatican Council Tridentine Mass which includes a prayer for the conversion of Jews?

But back to Pearson, who after defending Benedict's record for removing filth from the church, cheerfully goes on to conflate pedophilia with homosexuality:

It's instructive to compare that record with the response of Andrew Sullivan, a gay liberal Catholic who wishes the church would hurry up and concede that homosexual acts and same-sex marriages are wholesome and all part of the divine plan.

Like a lot of gay activists, he's incapable of seeing the world through any prism apart from his own experience or imagining that most Catholic clergy are well-adjusted, heterosexual and celibate. Sullivan is also usually one of the first in the American blogoshere to deplore "hate speech" and one of the first to resort to it, especially when describing the church's hierarchy.

Yep, it's instructive to see how homosexuality is dragged into a discussion of the criminal act of pedophilia. Strangely Pearson quotes Sullivan at length, in the hope that somehow this will bring him into disrepute:

"They cover up for one another, they fear that if one of them falls they will all fall; even those who are not totally screwed up about sex are eager to prevent the church's secret from being exposed. But the more they cover up the bigger the calamity when it all emerges.

"And when it's clear that at the centre of this kind of pathological secrecy is the current Pope, then it is clear that the institution is corrupt from the top down.

"These men are too objectively disordered to run a church.

"They bask in self-denial while they wage a culture war against gay men who have actually dealt with their sexuality, who have owned it and celebrated it and even found ways to channel it into their adult relationships and even civil marriages.

"We all know this game is now over. The current Pope is now found directly responsible for two clear incidents of covering up or ignoring child abuse and rape.

"As head of the organisation that took responsibility for investigating these cases for so long, his complicity in this vast and twisted criminal conspiracy is not in dispute. If he were the head of a secular organisation, he would already have resigned and be co-operating with the police."

Why that sounds unnervingly like the persecution of the Jews, doesn't it? Poor Pearson is shocked:

In more settled times, a flight of fancy so virulent and so unmoored to observable reality would probably have disqualified a writer from further participation as a member of the commentariat, at least in a paid capacity.

However the times are anything but settled and Sullivan has a blog, The Daily Dish, with a large and loyal following.

Oh you wretched large and loyal followers of Sullivan, when you could be noble followers of Pearson and Benedict (and you can catch the Daily Dish here).

But wait, it wouldn't be a Pearson column, if after having slagged off liberals, Fairfax, the New York Times and homosexuals that he couldn't find a little room for leftists and Marxists:

Fantasies about the church finally imploding because of its internal contradictions or committing collective suicide have preoccupied the Left since well before the French Revolution.

Marxism has never known quite what to make the world's oldest and most resilient institution.

Just Marxists? Who on earth could know quite what to make of the world's oldest, most resilient, and perhaps most eternally corrupt institution? Why it's more peculiar, in the grand old southern way, than thinking bread can turn into flesh, and wine into blood, and that cannibalism is a fine way to get in tune with god.

But back to Pearson getting upset about the Marxists:

Here, for your Easter edification, is the latest bout of wishful thinking on the subject from Guy Rundle, a gifted comic writer for Max Gillies and Arena magazine pundit.

"The church has already suffered a catastrophic moral collapse and been hollowed out from within, and that is its accommodation with the Holocaust, for political reasons . . . the only moral course of action would have been to risk the physical destruction of the church in Europe by calling on church members to oppose the process. Practically speaking, this would have had a real chance of stopping the process, especially as much of it was happening in Catholic Poland.

"Had the Nazis then turned on the church, as they may well have done, [it would have] been destroyed in Europe, but the process would have destroyed the Holocaust in its tracks.

"The church could have been reconstituted in Latin America and returned to Europe after the war."

Words clearly failed Pearson at this point, not because of Rundle's clear breach of Godwin's Law, but because he was rendered speechless by Rundle's notion that Christ's followers should follow his example, as requested by Christ, and stand up for their beliefs, even if it might mean a fine old crucifixion at the hands of the Nazis.

Steady on old chap, no need for extremism, not when there's some nice young lads waiting to be inducted into the Hitler Youth, and taught the Ayran way (which of course didn't include homosexuality, as noted here, but did include one Joesph Ratzinger).

Contemplating the Roman Church this easter, along with its defenders and apologists doesn't remind me of The Prince so much as Alice in Wonderland.

'I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.

'I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!'

Or pedophiles.