Miranda Devine, and a short guide to loon behaviour ...

I know, I know, here at the pond, we're supposed to be able to offer expert guidance in the matter of loons, and we've noted the disturbing signs which occur when you approach a loon - the alarm calls, the agitation, the rearing up and thrashing about in the water, the cry that sounds like crazy laughter or the ranting of a mad person.

But still we found ourselves drawn to Miranda the Devine's Children won't be left to drown ... how about Gillard?

The ostensible subject involves rednecks and boat people and the joys of the Howard government's policies in relation to "boat people", but how's this for a rearing up?

Gillard's speech was astonishingly patronising, even from someone who jokes about wearing pearls for a "dress like a Tory" outfit.

Oh dear, you can lock children up in detention, but make a joke about poils, and it's just too much m'dear.

You see, all that fuss about barbed wire, and locking people up, and unseemly people stitching up their mouths, and the great fuss that led to the original decision to shift it all offshore, because it all got too much, was part of a vast international conspiracy to make Liberal party people hapless, helpless suffering victims. They were somehow transported to a mental cage in their own minds, and made pariahs.

Which brings us to that second piece of advice about paranoid loon behaviour:

Yes sinking as low as you can go is an important part of the grubby common loon, at which point you can discover all kinds of retrospective vindications:

Peter Reith, the Howard minister who negotiated the ''Pacific solution'' with Nauru, rang ABC radio in Melbourne yesterday to make the point. "For years the Labor party belted people like me around the head with what we did with Nauru [and] the Pacific solution and now we find they were just playing a game … Talk about the ultimate vindication. They used this politically, they hit us for ages, called us liars everything under the sun and now we find when they're in government it's OK."

Oh yes, he of the 'send in the hounds and run the bastards over' school of political thought is back, and talking of ultimate vindications. But the poor long suffering possum isn't the only one.

Why there's that poor old Amnesty loving - remind me again why I'm not a member of that club give its membership - Philip Ruddock, and he too is another long suffering victim. It was all working so terribly well, and then it wasn't the boat people who were victims, it was Ruddock:

Reith was hounded out of office, maligned almost as much as his colleague, the former immigration minister, Philip Ruddock. Even as Coalition policies stopped the boats, emptied the detention centres and damaged the people-smuggler industry, it was open season on conservatives. It was a shameful episode of organised bullying by Gillard's ideological brethren.

Why there was barely a boat person in sight, except for those 85 Sri Lankans who turned up on February 24, 2007 (Deal to send boat people packing). And sundry others, but we wouldn't want to use the issue as a battering ram.

Now we see, as we always knew anyway, the bullies couldn't care less about asylum seekers. They were using the issue as a battering ram against their opponents.

And it worked.

Say what?

In November 2001, after trailing badly in the polls for months, Mr Howard stormed to victory in the federal election in the wake of the Tampa crisis. During the campaign, he declared: "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come."

Yep, it surely worked.

But now we have a new problem. Just when you thought it was all the fault of inner western latte sipping chardonnay swilling elites, thanks to Janet Albrechtsen, it turns out it's the fault of an entirely different class:

Nice, well-meaning people started to believe there was something wrong with conservatives - they were hard-hearted and cruel. Thus came the rise of the doctors' wives.

Damn you doctors' wives, for making the inner urban elites take the rap, and damn you especially for your love of New Yorker cartoons. Shape up, or ship out.

And who have rallied to the doctors' wives flag of convenience, as they pursue their piratical ways? Why the usual sinister suspects, with squatters nee former Liberal leaders right up there:

Now all the usual suspects who pummelled the Howard government are lining up to support Gillard. Malcolm Fraser called in to Melbourne ABC radio yesterday to praise Gillard: "I think the Prime Minister needs to be given credit for her speech", and saying her policy was "quite different" to the opposition's policy that "takes people and drags them off to Nauru".

And then of course there are the lawyers. Yes, yes, we know Janet Albrechtsen is a lawyer, and so were many in the Howard government, but there are lawyers and then there are cruel lawyers, especially those who wonder about using a hugely expensive hammer to crack what compared to the rest of the world's problems in the area of asylum seekers is a walnut used almost exclusively for political gain by both sides, now that Labor has caught on to the notion of using the East Timor wedge to wedge the Pacific solution Nauru wedge:

And there is Burnside, who said in February, "The idea of reopening Nauru as a place of detention is unnecessary, absurdly expensive and morally bankrupt.'' He slagged off Abbott as a "utilitarian", who would be shunned by priests at St Patrick's seminary and had a "pretended devotion to Christianity".

You see, he's on the side of poil wearers:

She (Gillard) can't honestly believe they will be grateful for her patronising defence of them as not being the racist, bigoted "rednecks" refugee advocates such as Julian Burnside say they are. Especially while she bent over backwards to praise him as: ''Prominent Australian, Julian Burnside, QC, an eminent lawyer, much respected in our community.''

Oh it's so hard. The Nauru shell game was a dismal failure, and the East Timor shell game will turn out to be the same, but how tricky and sordid for the Labor party to play the shell game at all. It means there has to be talk of backward looking vindication, when in fact backward looking yearning for the Nauru solution just isn't going to work.

Never mind, a loon knows when there's talk of prominence and respect about a lawyer, it's downright disrespectful to rednecks, but worst of all, it's despicable to wonder how a Liberal government might actually catch people in the act of tearing up their papers, or turning around boats on the high seas:

It's despicable to imply Abbott would leave children to drown on the high seas. But of course that was what the chattering classes all claimed about Howard and SIEV X. It's more of the same bile.

Yes of course. It's so much more positive to lock children up with people behind barbed war, then watch them go quietly mad. A much better solution than turning the boats around on the high seas. Not that the Howard government ever managed that, as the navy has the unseemly habit of respecting the law of the sea, and dealing with unseaworthy boats and their passengers in the ways required by international law.

Of course, the doctors' wives have also infiltrated the ABC:

The ABC is similarly well disposed. On the 7.30 Report we heard how Gillard had given a "a masterful landmark speech to the Lowy Institute" and had "moved to seize the initiative on the asylum-seekers issue … This was Julia Gillard at her best and most convincing."

Shocking. But what's this? A feeble, insidious attempt at balance?

In a new spirit of fairness, the ABC found an academic who supports offshore processing of asylum applications (something I don't ever remember they managed to do in the Howard era).

But stay, you're wondering how this bears on an observation of loon behaviour. Remember how we discussed the way paranoids lurch around muttering about how they're not paranoid?

You can't, of course, mention bias at the ABC because that's just a neo-conservative conspiracy theory ...

Most important to the paranoid is to see aliens everywhere, especially aliens in the grip of the ABC:

... like the strange phenomenon observed recently on ABC-TV of Tony Abbott's face looking as yellow as Bart Simpson's. It seems, as a television producer friend put it, as if someone has "turned up the chroma" on the Opposition Leader's skin tone in the editing suite.

It's at that moment that I knew that I was in the grip of a barking mad loon, poils and all. I mean there's legitimate concerns about balance on the ABC and then there's just straight out chroma key catatonic incoherence.

Naturally, a paranoid rant wouldn't be complete and replete, without a final attempt at glory, vindication, paranoid dreams of revenge, and a bearing of grudges, which of course will ensure that boat people will continue to be kicked around as a political can for the next decade, and never mind the war in Afghanistan, or putting pressure on the Sri Lankan government, or wondering how the boat people smuggling business can flourish in Indonesia:

The generous view is that all those who vilified conservatives as racists and bigots during the Howard era have realised they were mistaken. They will never have the grace to admit it. But those who were vilified and treated as rednecks are not so easily conned. Voters have long memories, too.

So there you have it. From poils to paranoid talk of the ABC turning Tony Abbott into Bart Simpson, when he manages that quite well all by himself, and all the fault of doctors' wives.

Damn you doctors' wives, damn you all. Don't pretend we know nothing about your furtive, sordid activities. We know all about them: Debating the "doctors' wives" phenomenon.

Well we have one last piece of advice if you happen to stray anywhere near Miranda the Devine. We noticed that having sunk as low in the water as she can, she seems to have adopted a head-down posture! Back away, and quickly about it, especially if you're pretending to wear poils like a Tory, or happen to be the wife of a doctor ...