Miranda Devine, and the delusional scribbling about the delusions of the delusional ...

(Above: nothing to do with anything, street art from Vastergotland, Gothenburg, Sweden, here).

Miranda the Devine scribbling about the delusions of the delusional in Loose lips among the tulips? Can it get any richer than this, the delusional rabbiting on about the delusional?

Which delusional would win the day? we wondered.

Could it be evil nanny state bureaucrats, with their perfidious insistence that backyard pools should be made safer?

Could it be wretched pram drivers and jay walkers, part of an increasingly familiar pattern of inexplicable behaviour?

Could it be lycra clad louts like Tony Abbott making the roads unsafe for behemoths with their cycling ways? Let's not go there, we could be caught in a cul de sac with a 4WD for months...

Could it be greenies, who should be strung up from the nearest lamp post, since they're to blame for everything wrong with the world?

Could it be ratbags who strangely think the Catholic church should practise what it relentlessly preaches to others, especially on matters such as child molestation?

Could it be young people, who caused the great global meltdown because of their addiction to screen culture? (We're losing our minds over technology)? While shortly after they came to inherit the spirit of Anzac ... (The spirit of Anzac lives on in Gen Y).

Could it be climate scientists, deludedly thinking that there might be something to climate change, when Miranda the Devine, an expert climatologist and scientist, has effectively demolished all their saucy doubts and fears?

Could it be the Murdoch press, for promising they'd yanked the Devine away from Fairfax, yet still here she is as bold as brass and scribbling like a feral dunce in the usual way?

There now, just a few Devine hits and memories to get you warmed up for her discourse on the delusionals.

Why not start with the last first?

Delusion 12: It was a sexist election, with Gillard ''pilloried for her 'deliberate' childlessness, her clothes, her morals, her looks, her undeniably unimpressive boyfriend". That was Germaine Greer, writing for London's Daily Telegraph from her Essex home.

She must have been watching a different election.

Or she might have been reading Janet Albrechtsen, soon to be the Devine's sister in arms at Murdoch land, as they jostle for the right to be the most extreme commentariat commentator in the land:

... if you look closely at Gillard's career, it has been a conscious rejection of the milestones many young women want. In the past, Gillard has talked about "the things we [women] have in common, experiences, choices, fears and hopes that our male colleagues may sympathise with but will never share". Yet she cannot share most of these things either.

The sisterhood should stop reading right about now.

Most young women want a career, they want to get married, they want a family life with children racing around their ankles and driving them nuts. As brilliant as Gillard's achievements are, she is no role model for girls who want more than a career.

Ah yes, the hits and memories of the commentariat, as paraded in Let's be honest about Julia's free gender leg-up.

Of course what's got the Devine agitated is the presence of a single Green in the house, talking about a carbon tax, or an ETS, or anything else that caters to the delusion that climate scientists might know more about climate than Miranda the Devine channeling Ian Plimer.

And all her other pet fears and alarums have come out of the election woodwork to haunt her ...

... the four independents holding court at the National Press Club at a press conference organised by Get Up! complete with applause ...

The shock, the horror, the dismay! Then there's the delusion that ...

... The Coalition would have won a majority if Malcolm Turnbull had been leader instead of Tony Abbott. This is persistent, whipped up by Wentworth fantasists and doctors' wives ...

Those damn doctors' wives, speaking of delusional cliches, back into the woodwork with your Readers Digests and your mincing, posturing, stupid Woollahra ways ...

Now for a little delusional alternative 'what if' history, though we can never know for certain how well that alternative history prediction might have turned out:

Rudd has been vindicated, at least in his own mind, no matter which way this mess goes. Of course, no one will ever know for certain how well or badly a Rudd government would have done, but it wouldn't have been the first time a first-term government had weathered bad polls and managed to win.

Amen to that, who knows anything, and all the more reason to scribble who knows what about nothing, or delusions, even when we remember those sad days when former chairman Rudd had few cheerleaders left:

Perhaps the best assessment of the Prime Minister this week comes from the Roman senator Tacitus, via letter writer Harry Gelber, of Hobart: ''Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset.''

Roughly, it means: everyone agrees he would have been thought capable of governing, if he had not already governed. (Greatest moral challenge turns out to be Rudd's dearest folly).

Not to worry. As a compendium of all that's delusionaly dear to the elitist chattering class of right wing commentators, the Devine's latest effort is an exemplary full moon hashtag twitter aware effort.

Tony Abbott is naturally wonderful, Nick Minchin a splendid hero with goldleaf medal of honour, Malcolm Turnbull an epic ruinous failure, and those wretched free thinking independents the ruination of us all.

In the coming months, the independents are going to cop plenty of stick from the likes of the Devine? Collegial polity? Isn't that just a polite way of saying get fucked?

Here's a taster:

Delusion 11: Tony Windsor is a moderate. Sure, if calling for the death penalty and opposing gun control is moderate.

Well I guess that would make Windsor fit right in with an Abbott government:

Mr Abbott says execution may be a fitting punishment for those responsible for mass death.

"Well, you know, what would you do with someone who cold-bloodedly brought about the deaths of hundreds or thousands of innocent people?" he said.

"You've got to ask yourself, what punishment would fit that crime? That's when you do start to think that maybe the only appropriate punishment is death.

Lordy lordy, what a clever dog whistler he is.

"I have always been against the death penalty," he said.

"I sometimes find myself thinking though that there are some crimes so horrific that maybe that's the only way to adequately convey the horror of what's been done.

"But look, it's not my policy to reintroduce the death penalty. If the matter ever came before the Federal Parliament, it would be a conscience vote." (here).

As for gun control, Windsor should fit right in with cutting edge Liberal party thinking, not that you'll be able to discover their advanced thoughts on their discussion site in relation to "carry concealed weapons permits" or it being time "for evidence-based gun controls", because once the shooters and the greens picked up on the ruckus, those postings promptly disappeared into the digital ether, remembered only by the shooters (here) and the gun controllers (here).

Oops, where was I? Seems that I got so caught up in the Devine's FUD routine that I got sidetracked into looking at Tony Windsor on capital punishment and gun control, only to discover that he and Tony Abbott are peas in the very same pod.

Which brings us to the real extremist who favours public executions ... and it's Miranda the Devine of course:

... it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.

Roll on that much treasured collegial polity:

"I make the point that I think we can have a kinder, gentler polity," Mr Abbott told reporters.

"I think we can be a more collegial polity than we've been." (here)

Yes, and the way he's been head butting the independents this morning about Treasury budgeting Liberal party costings shows he's an adept at compromise ...

If Abbott has his way, we'll be back at the voting box soon enough, with the independents set up as the fall guys, supporting a 'failed government' and copping the blame, and Miranda the Devine cheering him on ...

Polity? That's just another word for get fucked.

Which brings us to George Eliot:

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

You have to hand it to Miranda the Devine. She's no still fowl. An addled column a day adding to the addled delusions of the world ...

Take it away Ambrose Bierce:

DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters.

All hail, Delusion! Were it not for thee The world turned topsy-turvy we should see; For Vice, respectable with cleanly fancies, Would fly abandoned Virtue's gross advances. --Mumfrey Mappel