Piers Akerman, the perfidious Chairman Rudd, and the pleasure of hypnotised chooks ...

(Above: a Labor party die hard in training at the hands of an Akker Dakker acolyte.

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world - Werner Herzog).

What I love most about the commentariat is the regular deployment of "when did you stop beating your wife" rage.

Akker Dakker, lovingly celebrated on these pages as the yaroop garoah fat owl of the remove of Billy Bunter fame, provides an excellent example in PM's political ticker has ground to a halt.

Having relentlessly campaigned for days, months, weeks, years against an ETS, he is now outraged that the ETS will not come to a vote.

You see, it doesn't matter if you stop beating your wife, because that doesn't show a new civility, it just shows a lack of manliness, of courage, of ticker.

Never mind climate change, it doesn't exist. Never mind the environment. After all as the immortal Rush Limbaugh says, Oil-covered birds on fire. Another name for dinner. Or to give you the full and proper quote: RUSH: Oil-covered birds on fire are just another way to describe dinner. It's called barbecue pits. Grills. (here).

But back to Akker Dakker and his rage that nothing is being done about global warming when he's spent all this time explaining that nothing should be done about global warming:

Since he came to office in 2007 Rudd has been using the threat of a double dissolution to bludgeon the Opposition but his lack of political courage has shown that menace to be no more than bullying intimidation.

It worked against former Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, a political naive, but it hasn’t resonated elsewhere and appears to be just another gutless attempt at coercion.

Indeed. Drill baby drill, or should that be fucked baby fucked.

Akker Dakker spends his entire column ranting and railing at Labor's spin merchants and broken promises, and since the list is entirely predictable and familiar, we pause only to ponder the way he achieves ecstatic levels of abuse:

Labor figures from Rudd down uniformly speak in monotones, sound authoritative even as they deliver nonsensical phrases, maintain a flow of conversation with their interviewers and avoid hesitation at all costs, even though their answers bear no relation to the questions.

Where this leaves the likes of Julie Bishop and Bronnie Bishop (the clerical liberals) or the braying Sophie Mirabella I'm not quite sure - could it be that all politicians uniformly speak in tongues, while Akker Dakker celebrates the monotone chant of Tony Abbott rabbiting on about great big new taxes? Except when he urges his own great big new tax on business.

This is the problem with the one eyed barracker, from Akker Dakker to Manly to Collingwood supporters. A dull monotone would be a relief ...

Well happy days Malcolm Turnbull is back and he still believes in an ETS! Strange days indeed, and if Tony Abbott's sullen response on camera to the news is any guide, things might turn a little ugly down the track.

Never mind, there was one thing that struck me as piquant, and that's Akker Dakker's flourish in this line:

Labor’s spin merchants, Hawker-Britton, seem to have hit on a formula to keep the die-hards mesmerised like hypnotised chooks.

It reminded me of the good old days back in the bush when one of my father's few party tricks was to hypnotise a chook.

It was only when I saw Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, which features chook hypnosis, as does his film Signs of Life, that I realized that this was a world-wide phenomenon.

It turns out that Herzog has a deep seated, irrational fear of chickens, in much the same way as Akker Dakker has a deep seated, irrational fear of Labor party chooks. What this says about their upbringing - in a Freudian or Jungian way, take your therapeutic pick - must remain a mystery, but it does produce a bizarre level of hysterical rhetoric.

I'm indebted to the geeks at QuickSilverScreen for this list of Herzogian chooks:

* Game in the Sand centers around a chicken
* Signs of Life features a chicken buried up to its neck in a mound of sand
* Signs of Life and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser feature chicken hypnosis
* Aguirre, The Wrath of God chickens are thrown over a cliff
* Even Dwarfs Started Small features cannibalistic chickens, and several sequences of dwarfs throwing chickens
* Stroszek ends with a long shot of a dancing chicken
* Invincible features a tale about a man who thinks himself to be a rooster
* The White Diamond features a Guyanese man who adores his pet rooster and wishes to bring it up with him when offered a ride on an airship

Sadly when I recently watched Herzog's re-make of The Bad Lieutenant (sub-titled Port of Call New Orleans), wherein Nicolas Cage chews up drugs and the scenery, I didn't see any chickens, though one astute critic has claimed that the hallucinatory iguanas are actually a stand-in for chooks.

Could it be that Herzog is cured of his fear of chickens? Is it possible that Akker Dakker might at some point be cured of his irrational fear of and phobia for all things left of Genghis Khan?

Who knows, but truth to tell, writing about hypnotized chooks is way more interesting than writing about Akker Dakker scribbling furiously about Chairman Rudd.

And as always, Wiki comes to the rescue with an item about chicken hypnotism.

Now what I suggest is the next time you meet up with a member of the commentariat at a party (as you regularly do), you hold his or her neck down to the ground, and then continuously draw a line along the ground with a stick or a finger or a piece of chalk, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the commentator chook.

Alternately stroke the commentariat commentator while making soothing clucking sounds, and if this fails, take the commentator's head and tuck it under its wing (nee armpit), while gently rocking the wild bird back and forth. (My father's guaranteed way to produce a result).

The result? A party blessed with silence, as the garrulous one contemplates their navel or their beak or a mysterious line in the dust leading off to the infinite void, in a manner of speaking.

While there are plenty of hypnotised chicken routines available on YouTube - yes it really does work and you haven't lived if you haven't seen a hypnotised chook or commentariat commentator - I thought it better to end with Herzog's dancing chook sequence which wraps up

Stroszek.

Somehow it evokes the effect of reading too much Akker Dakker.

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a commentariat commentator and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world - Werner Herzog.