Miranda Devine, and paranoid scribbles from a bilious boat drifting in the light of the moon ...

At last the big day's arrived and so an end to all the yammering ... not that the yammering will ever stop, since the pundits and the chattering conservative elite never rest, but at least on Sunday there'll be the muted sounds of an inspection of the entrails following this day's slaughtering of the beasts ...

Must get on the move early, before the lamingtons run out, or I'll be left with a difficult choice between patty cakes and chocolate crackles, neither of which I like ...

As for the other choice? Vote for a man who's scribbled that reintroducing fault into divorce proceedings is a wise move forward? Vote for a man who believes in transubstantiation, and as a result the regular ingestion of actual flesh and blood, which either makes him barking mad or a man with a Papua New Guinea cannibal mind set?

Vote (indirectly) for jolly Joe Hockey to run the economy when I wouldn't buy a used car from him? Vote for a party that blathers endlessly about great big new taxes, then announces a tax on big business and dollops out the result on an extravagant piece of middle class welfarism?

Vote for a mob that proposes to keep the boats down to three a year, and will resign on the spot the day the fourth boat arrives ...? Vote for a mob of tech head dunces who think that a move to the nineteen nineties is sharp technological footwork, and climate change a mere passing fad and fancy? Vote (indirectly) for Andrew Robb, the most boring man on earth, who seems to have got over his recent depression by giving it to me ...? Vote for a mob who shed tears for billionaires while we ship our mineral wealth overseas? Vote for a mob anxious to consign people to guano processing?

In all, I'd rather be bound on a wheel of fire, my tears scaling me like molten lead. But then perhaps I'm of imperfect mind, and a tad bewildered.

As for the other mob, what to make of Conroy and his great big filter, and the single most stupid policy announcement of the entire campaign, the calling together of 150 citizens good and true, to contemplate their navels and climate change ...

And as for the Greens in NSW, what a pity Lee Rhiannon is the top Senate contender.

Could today be the day to ensure that some fellow loon, hapless failed believer in democratic processes, gets their deposit back?

Well vote wisely and vote often, and don't buy the crackles, you'll only regret it later.

Happily for the Labor party, Miranda the Devine produces a column which might provide a last minute swing to Julia Gillard in NSW, as she scribbles Faceless fools scar Labor for life.

Yep, it's another day of blathering on about faceless men. And then she names them:

Take a bow, Mark Arbib, Karl Bitar, Bill Shorten, David Feeney, Don Farrell and Paul Howes.

Which immediately makes me wonder if the faceless men have had an operation in the style of Nick Cage in John Woo's Face/Off, since the last time I saw the likes of Bill Shorten, he still had his face. Or perhaps it's just another contradictory idiotic stupidity from Miranda the Devine?

I know, I know, rhetorical questions with obvious answers are a cheap debating trick, but what can you do with people who blather about faceless men and then name them? While rabbiting on about the amoral trickiness of the faceless men, as if they remain impenetrable and aloof ...

As usual with the Devine the only interesting thing is how she reveals herself in her metaphors:

Still, you have to marvel at Gillard's ability to maintain composure while the Potemkin Village hastily constructed around her ill-gotten office kept collapsing. From day one of her campaign, if it wasn't Bob and Blanche and Paul Keating feuding, it was the ghost of Rudd haunting her in high impact media leaks, or it was Mark Latham crashing around telling uncomfortable home truths.

Yep, here we go with the usual notion of Mark Latham as the village idiot telling uncomfortable home truths, while that other village idiot Malcolm Fraser goes unmentioned ...

But note in particular the use of Potemkin Village, much favoured by conservatives in the United States. If you trot off to the wiki here, you'll find at least an argument that the concept of the Potemkin Village is largely mythological:

According to Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Potyomkin's most comprehensive English-language biographer, the tale of elaborate, fake settlements with glowing fires designed to comfort the monarch and her entourage as they surveyed the barren territory at night, is largely fictional.

Aleksandr Panchenko, an authoritative specialist on 19th century Russia, used original correspondence and memoirs to conclude that the Potyomkin villages are a myth. He writes: "Based on the above said we must conclude that the myth of "potyomkin villages" is exactly a myth, and not an established fact."

But of course a myth is perfectly suited to the mythological scribblings of the Miranda the Devine, whose nonsense on most occasions resembles either a minotaur or a unicorn.

The rest of the Devine's piece is typically an offensive bit of brooding about conservative women and the hapless fate of people with a pugilistic New Guinea cannibal mind set:

As the faceless men had calculated, he had to campaign with one hand tied behind his back. Pitting a tough guy, already pinned with a supposed lack of appeal to women, against a silky female against whom he could not use his pugilistic gifts must have seemed a stroke of genius at the time. As Barnaby Joyce put it in June: "Nobody wants to see you beat up on a chick – it's a bad look."

Fuck off Barnaby. Gee you born in Tamworth clowns are predictable. No wonder I seized the opportunity to avoid kissing some kissing cousins, and settled for kissing horses.

As usual, it's all the fault of the feminists:

Throughout the campaign, Gillard was protected by a feminist praetorian guard of eagle-eyed offence-takers jumping on the vaguest hint of sexism. Thus, Abbott's innocuous "no means no" was reinterpreted as a brute attacking rape victims.

Actually it was just a piece of mindless, if revealing, stupidity, and amazingly the Labor party never exploited Abbott's belief that reintroducing fault into divorce proceedings was a good idea.

The Coalition never exploited the target-rich “living in sin at The Lodge” issue when her de facto relationship with Tim Mathieson briefly became a topic of community debate.

Because then they would have been totally fucked. Which of course didn't stop the likes of Janet Albrechtsen trawling through the barren gutter, or others tittering behind hands about the hairdresser partner, and living in sin in the Lodge, and the need for a marriage quick stix.

Not to mention both sides failure of nerve when it comes to gay rights and marriage.

In fact, four of Abbott's best political assets, his photogenic wife and daughters, were fairly low-profile this campaign, compared to wives and children of previous elections. No Women's Weekly covers for them. The feminine angle was monopolised by the Prime Minister.

Lordy, lordy you mean they should have dressed Tony Abbott in a frock and stuck him on the front page of the Weekly to get the cross dressing vote? Not that there would have been anything wrong with that, it would have lifted the campaign out of the rut of tedium.

Such delicate treatment cannot be said to have been afforded Abbott, who was pilloried throughout the campaign as a sexist, old-fashioned, untrustworthy, extremist, Catholic jock, in snide asides, low blows and a barrage of distasteful attack ads. In one, a cartoon showed a scrawny Abbott prancing about in a pair of red budgie-smugglers and a sumo-style Joe Hockey with pendulous man-boobs.

You mean they didn't put Joe Hockey in a dress? Oh wait, that's right, Joe prefers a tutu:

Abbott sailed through the bile, remaining good-natured and unrattled.

Perhaps like the owl and the pussycat when they went sailing?

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

Meanwhile, the brooding Devine shows how easy it is to write a column that mounts not one single political argument, but instead prattles on about personality attacks, having herself embarked on the process by berating faceless men who just happen to have faces:

Perhaps he adopted Margaret Thatcher's attitude.

“I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left,” Britain's only female prime minister once said.

At this point of course it's beneficial to drag in matters of extreme irrelevance:

Thatcher, of course, was subjected to the most vile personal attacks, just as was, more recently, the US Republican Sarah Palin and her daughters. Even Barack Obama disparaged Palin obliquely with a remark about putting “lipstick on a pig” during the 2008 US presidential campaign.

Yes, what an outrageous denigration of pigs who like lipstick. As opposed to dummies in possession of a tweeter:

(Sarah Palin's First Amendment Confusion Deepens).

Now how about a dash of paranoid spice, resentment, fear and loathing?

No man making such a comment about a female politician from the left would have escaped unscathed.

And Gillard would never have had such an easy time as a Liberal, because it is open season on conservative female politicians.

Open season on conservative female politicians? Julie Bishop's death stare has surely been one of the campaign highlights. But you know how it is, once a paranoid's got paranoia firmly in the teeth, like a bull terrier all it knows how to do is shake it to death:

The left has no scruples because its women consider conservative women to be traitors, who must be punished with special savagery. In their world, conservative feminists are simply not permitted to exist.

On what far fetched deluded paranoid bizarro world does the Devine live? Perhaps it's a world where with a flick of the pen, she can call for the hanging of greenies, and they're simply not permitted to exist?

Well clearly it's a world where she can manage one last mangling flourish as she broods about Gillard getting caught out speaking off the cuff, in the manner of a Sarah Palin carrying an ink-scribbled note on her hand. Does she brood about the media's strange fascination with it, and the strange way that it echoes Palin's experience, and how it might have been better to dwell on the substance of what was said, rather than the manner of the delivery, and so avoid the relentless tedium of all the squawking about how Obama uses teleprompters (remember all that stupidity, so long ago and on another planet?) As opposed to being a stumble bum like George Bush?

No such luck:

Who cared whether she had notes, if she spoke well? But what was deadly about the episode was what it revealed about the Labor campaign's automatic reflex to gild the lily beyond belief, with no mind to the truth. It is the way lawyers work, twisting reality and logic to create a new truth, and moving forward quickly before anyone notices the trickery.

Yes no one noticed the trickery and so Miranda the Devine didn't scribble her column and I didn't read it and so we moved forward to a new truth ...

But you see it's really wheeled out so that the Devine can deliver a rhetorical flourish to round out the piece:

Today is the moment of real truth - not the manufactured one. Either way, it won't be pretty for the faceless men.

WTF does that mean? If the faceless men with faces win, then they'll have won, and it'll be pretty. There might be a few casualties, but as any conservative knows if you send any of the lads out of the trenches to face the machine guns, you have to expect a few losses for the greater cause. Just don't send the senior officers over the top, and all's well.

If the faceless men with faces lose, then Australia will have voted into power its third or fourth practising cannibal, after James Scullin, Paul Keating, and the ambivalent Rudd, raised a Catholic, given a good Marist belting, and settling for a waffly Anglicanism which didn't stop him scoring some blood and flesh at the mass to commemorate the canonisation of Mary Mackillop. (here).

In case that happens, perhaps I should buy a large sponge cake, and stock up the cellar, because when it comes to practical economic matters, Abbott continues to show he's the child of B. A. Santamaria ...

But how will it go? How does our fearless braveheart scribe call it?

History will decide whether the Coalition went too easy on its opponent.

Well damned if history will decide whether the pond ever went too easy on the Devine. I've never read a more eloquent piece in favour of voting the Labor party back into power, and thereby pissing off the Devine for another paranoid three years as she scribbles for Chairman Rupert ...

Hang on, she's still scribbling for the Herald. Will the promised day of the 'Devine free' rag never come to pass? When is she going to leave, and close the door firmly behind her?

To answer that, we offer the end of Edward Lear's poem:

II
Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?'
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

III
'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Yep, some day I'll dance with delight by the edge the sand in the light of the lovely moon ...