Miranda Devine, Caroline Overington, Helen Thomas, communists and a dash of Dilling and Beck ...

(Above: essential reading for Australian miners, for some strange research discarded by the research library of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Discarded? Is that why communists are in control of the United States?)

Oh dear, has it come to this in the land down under?

Billionaires down to their last desperate squillion forced out into the streets to join demonstrations, radicalised and calling for revolution, and muttering darkly of communism.

Not since the nineteen fifties has communism been such a dire threat, and we toss and turn at night wondering what we'll do when our beds are burning.

Happily Glenn Beck has recently revived interest in a key text of the nineteen thirties by Elizabeth Dilling, entitled The Red Network, a "Who's Who" and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots, handily available here for free at the Internet Archive.

Unfortunately Elizabeth Dilling also happened to be, as well as an anti-communist, an anti-semitic Nazi-sympathizer.

This, by my understanding of contemporary debate in America, makes her clearly a liberal. Or barking mad. Or perhaps a barking mad liberal, and therefore worthy of being quoted by Glenn Beck?

Meanwhile, that stern reporter Caroline Overington is ready to sink the slipper into Helen Thomas, in Thomas goes from White House to dog house.

In order to boost the column from being a simple recycling of the Drudge Report gotcha, Overington berates Thomas for daring to ask outrageous questions:

In January 2003, as the US prepared a strike on Iraq, Thomas lost her grip on what it was that she was supposed to be doing in the presidential briefing room. On one occasion, she opened the questioning by asking: "Why do you want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis? Is this revenge, 11 years of revenge?"

She also asked: "How do you bomb people back to democracy?"

Thomas should have known there's an easy answer: by strategic targeted carpet bombing of a finely tuned kind, and whenever the bombing goes astray, as sometimes happens with canny bombing, you apologise to all the dead people. And talk of higher principles, like how they'll at least get a vote in heaven, in the way of all the best democracies, and then have the freedom not to exercise their right to vote.

Naturally it wouldn't be a good week if Miranda the Devine couldn't sink in the slipper and join the baying wolfhound pack, such is the offensiveness of seeing a doddery eighty nine, going on ninety year old doing the rounds and being anti-semitic and in need of a public lynching. Payback is a blessed thing, and Acid tongue sinks the scribe who swam with anti-Israel sentiment.

As usual, it's a treat to read the Devine putting on the steel capped slippers, and then slipping into a defence of Israel and damning anti-semitism to high heaven, even if there's been a little downside recently:

Strategically, according to impartial analysts inside and outside Israel, such as Stratfor's George Friedman, Israel blundered in not anticipating the violence its commandos would meet when they were lowered from helicopters onto the flotilla vessels. It allowed itself to be provoked and further alienated from the global community.

Well at least we know what the Devine does for reading, and so can you if you trot off to Friedman's Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion.Whether you might want to dub Friedman an impartial analyst is another matter.

Certainly, the initial analysis in much of the media was hysterical and unfair. Since then, coverage has been balanced by footage of the "peace" activists attacking Israeli commandos with iron bars and knives as they landed on deck.

Golly, nine people dead and all it produces is hysterical and unfair coverage. Almost as shocking as billionaires being forced to march on the streets, singing the La Marseillaise.

But it's when the Devine reaches for her capper that things get sticky:

But the logic or fairness of Israel's position will never matter to Helen Thomas and her fellow appeasers, who see Israel as the sacrificial lamb.

There were 6 million Jews murdered in Germany and Poland whose silence is an eloquent answer to Thomas's solution to the Middle East's problems.

What, if a German Jew went back to Germany right now, the Nazis would get them?

I keed, I keed, when it comes to fellow travelling, I'm reminded of Denise Martin's defense, as presented here:

“In the first 10 minutes of my meeting with Jon, I made some kind of Holocaust joke—and by the way? It’s always too soon—and he died laughing. He was like, ‘Wow, you open up with the Holocaust?’” Munn recalled. “I said, ‘No, no, it's cool. I dated a Jewish guy!’” (That would be actor Bryan Greenberg of HBO’s How to Make It in America.)

“See I date different guys of different religions and races so I can always make the joke,” she continued. “I date the blacks, I date the Mexicans. I date 'em all for comedy. You can't buy that kind of gold. Having sex with a guy once is worth it.”

As you can see, we're a little light-headed today, what with the communists creating chaos, and we'd never suggest reading Paul McGeough's analysis A shift in Arab Street's dynamics as Turky and Israel fall out, as a way of balancing the puffery of the Devine.

Not when you can find Leo Shanahan in The Punch equating a trip up the Swan river by Kevin Rudd to the trip up river in Apocalypse Now, and the smell of napalm in the morning.

Campaign countdown: Visit to the heart of darkness is the header, and our worst fears were realised with this quote from Twiggy:

As Michael Gordon reports in the SMH today, one of that motley crew was Australia’s richest man, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest”, who speaking on the back of a truck in his work gear (the mining tax has already hit Twiggy’s wardrobe) accused Australia of being more communist than China.

“I ask you: which communist is turning capitalist and which capitalist country is turning communist?”

Well I guess when Gordon has already led with It's Commie Kev versus the Bolshie Billionaires, there's nowhere else to go than up the river with Apocalypse Now. Up the river and far away.

Waiter, bring me a verbal machete, I can see a cow-like Shanahan nearby coated in river mud.

Meanwhile, we provide links to such Sydney Morning Herald stories with great reluctance, because of their forced play, forced ad policy, which involves a fleeting 'don't play' button before you're whacked over the head with an advertisement and a feeble audio-visual element to the story.

Do advertisers have any idea how they build resentment with this kind of torture test, as the Herald builds up its hits? Yes, it's you Woolworths, you're the ones that suffer, when all we want to do is read about billionaires suffering under the communists. I've banned your fresh food section for a week as payback.

Meanwhile, John Hepburn asks an interesting question: Why are taxpayers paying for coal trains?

One of the interesting things that stood out in the transport section of the QLD budget was $864.2 million for coal network track works and new and upgraded locomotives and wagons to support coal haulage across Queensland. There is also $40.2 million to continue capacity improvements and upgrades at the RG Tanna coal terminal at the Port of Gladstone, at a total estimated cost of $95.3 million.

Hmmm…why are taxpayers paying for coal trains? Isn’t that something that coal companies should be paying for? We don’t buy trucks for woolworths to transport veges, so why on earth are coal companies getting special handouts?

Silly goose. There's dangerous communism, and then there's beneficial socialism, and who has ever in this wide brown land thought it wrong to suck on the government teat when it suits ...

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to reading Elizabeth Dilling. Any book endorsed by Glenn Beck must be worth reading, and you can read about Glenn Beck here in Why is Beck promoting an anti-Semite on the radio? And More on Glenn Beck's new favorite anti-Semitic author, Elizabeth Dilling. And Glenn Beck promotes book rife with anti-Semitism and racism. And Historican criticizes Beck's "ludicrous" embrace of anti-Semitic author. And Glenn Beck's new book club pick: Nazi sympathizer who praised Hitler and denounced the Allies.

Silly old Helen Thomas. She should have got a job with Fox.

Meanwhile, seeing as how they're greatly exercised by anti-semitic remarks, we're momentarily standing by, waiting to report on Miranda the Devine and Caroline Overington's ongoing indignation about Glenn Beck, and perhaps also providing a damning indictment of Fox ...

Please be patient. It could be a long momentarily ...