60 Minutes, Piers Akerman, and whipping those wretched independents into shape for our forthcoming war with China ...

(Above: Team stupid's deft political analysis).

Now, China is in no way showing any signs of aggression. It hasn’t flexed any of its newly-bulging navy muscle. But the United States is worried, and so is Australia.

So let's do a story about how Australia is preparing for war with China!

What a reprehensible, meretricious load of codswallop Sixty Minutes has become.

From Mark Latham to a sensationalist promotion on why we're preparing for war with China, the connection to actual journalism and considered analysis is as remote as the Yeti is from Big Foot. Which is to say far away in some mythological land above the faraway tree.

Yes I know 'meretricious' refers to tawdry and falsely attractive things, or the superficially significant, or relating to prostitutes or having the nature of prostitution, and therefore its use in this context is seriously defamatory of sex workers, but it's just so you can catch the drift of things.

It turns out that 'preparing for war with China' is just a piece of promotional puffery for a promotional puffery piece about the Australian navy presaged by this piece of promotional puffery by Michael Usher under the header Firepower at the 60 Minutes Team Blog.

Team blog? What are you? Journalists or a bunch of rah rah undergraduate rugger buggers?

It also turns out that Australia's epic preparation for war with China involves four warships attending RIMPAC every two years, and 60 Minutes got embedded for the junket so it could do a bit of mindless rah rah flag waving:

Naturally, no-one from Navy, or Defence for that matter, likes to talk publically about the threat of China. It’d be irresponsible.

Actually it'd be dumbwitted fuckwitted stupidity. So let's leave that sort of irresponsibility to the sloganeering department of Nine's fantastic plastic publicity machine.

Oh dear, did we say war with China?

... it’s very clear that an exercise like RIMPAC is geared toward a big power shift in the Pacific and how to counter a rising Asian super-power. Or for that matter, a rogue power like North Korea.

Whatever the threat, the Navy’s going to have some impressive new toys to practice with in the next few years.

And whatever the stupidity, 60 Minutes will be out there on the edge, practising with whatever toys it can find to claim some kind of relevancy for a desperately irrelevant, old fashioned, tired and humbugging format.

I'd rather join my rural uncle in pulling my teeth with pliers than watch this kind of crap. Stop it, you're ruining the country, you're ruining yourselves, you pathetic excuses for digital fish and chip wrapping.

Phew that felt good, kind of cathartic and they haven't even run the story yet. Not that I'll be watching. Somehow I strayed across Nine's promo, and got caught up with the drivel for a moment ...

As usual, watching Nine for even a few minutes can pose serious mental health issues ...

Meanwhile, speaking of lunar loons, there's good old Akker Dakker aka Piers Akerman over at the Daily Terror scribbling The independent path to hypocrisy ...

In the usual way of things, Akker Dakker's notion of genteel, subtle, nuanced negotiations with the independents, and to persuade them to the coalition side is to abuse the shit out of them ...

Well played Akker Dakker.

It seems Andrew Wilkie is simply a common sordid blackmailing thug of the worst kind, a left wing greenie likely to be infected by the light on the hill and move for the nationalisation of banks, since only then will we have as left leaning a government as once was proposed by Ben Chifley ...

It seems the errant Wilkie once flirted with Liberal philosophy, perhaps by donning steel capped boots and wielding a baseball bat ...

As for the other independents, this hapless bunch of twerps and useless nongs wouldn't know if they were meeting the new Christ, come again to walk amongst us, let alone understand that Tony Abbott is the nation's saviour.

That splendid fellow has bent like a supple, pliant twig in order to meet their outrageous demands, but enough is enough.

Abbot has already outlined a series of parliamentary reforms he would enact should he become prime minister.

There is no need for him to truckle further to the Independents without any guarantees from them.

Yes, enough already with the fawning servile submissive lickspittle routine Tony. Give 'em what for and teach these tricky devious self seeking bastards a lesson. No need to yield meekly when you can run the buggers over, preferably in one of those big Caterpillar tractors ... See how they like those rural oats...

Those rural louts deserve a big bloody tyre print all over their cheeky mugs.

You see, as always, the devious hand of the leftists can be seen stirring the porridge of these simple minded rural folk, who simply don't have a clue ...

The manoeuvring that the Independents have engaged in has borne the fingerprints of the Labor Party’s marginal seat strategist Bruce Hawker, Windsor’s cousin, a master at disclosing less than the full story.

Ah yes, they're tribal these buggers, and you know what happens when you find a close kissing cousin close to hand. It's so sordid I feel faint already ...

Not that we're hinting at incest, so much as how outrageous it was for them to talk of Liberal party budget black holes filling the Albert hall, when there was a real shortfall to explain:

If the Independents had any courage they would have demanded Labor explain the multibillion-dollar shortfall in the mining tax Gillard rushed to negotiate with the big three multinationals, Xstrata, BHP Billiton and Rio in the week before the election was called.

Now never you mind about the shortfall for Tony Abbott, who in his pious support for billionaires simply refused to tax the poor old buggers as they held on their last few billion, and took to the streets to protest the outrage ...

Why we can get along handsomely without the help of the billionaires ...

And we wouldn't be destroying the very fabric of society at the same time, unlike the wretched useless independents:

They would have demanded costings from the ALP on its secret deal with the Greens for their preferences ...

Yes, a deal so secret that the Liberal party felt the need to provide fake how to vote Green cards come election day (Dirty tricks target Greens).

... or will the Greens’ demands be restricted to such culture-destroying policies as same-sex marriage and open borders?

Culture destroying! Australia's simply going to be flooded by homosexuals and Asians or quite possibly gay Asians and what a gay old time the Flintstones will be forced to have ...

But worse still, these simpletons, these rustic fools, can't understand the simplest matters of science:

Oakeshott and Windsor have shown an amazing lack of intellectual curiosity in believing the global warming spin preached by the economists Nicholas Stern and Ross Garnaut and ignoring a raft of Australian climatologists and geologists who have produced empirical evidence exploding the flawed claims brandished by the IPCC.

Oh dear. There's a raft of them with empirical evidence exposing brandished flawed claims.

Is now a good time to bring Akker Dakker up to date with the roll over of Bjorn Lomborg. (Former Skeptic Offers Ideas On Climate Change)?

A pity. They were such good mates only a year or so ago:

According to Danish enviro-economist Bjorn Lomborg, candles are about 100 times less efficient than incandescent light globes and more than 300 times less efficient than fluorescent lights. And they produce 10 to 100 times the level of indoor pollution created by almost all man-made sources, including cars, industry and electricity production. (here)

So there! That's why you need to read an expert like Akker Dakker on climate change. Watch a real scientist and statistician do his thing.

Those bloody independents and their plans to convert Australia to candle power is exactly the kind of boofhead thinking we all must fight against. That Andrew Wilkie's campaign to convert the entire Tasmanian power grid to candle power has to be stopped in its tracks ...

We must pay more attention to the empirical science led by the well credentialled Akker Dakker, who knows a good quote when he can find one in the ether (Akermangate: Piers Akerman fabricates some more).

Yes, Akker Dakker and the noble Swede were such good mates and fellow travellers, until people began to discover that the flip flopping Lomborg was a warminista all along.

It seems the independents are similarly Swedish, or at least European in some parochial way:

The longer these Independents remain in the spotlight, the more parochial their demands seem and the more hypocritical their claims to be acting in the national interest prove to be.

Yes, fuck you and the equestrian centre horses you rode in on, you useless dingbats hypocrites and rural wankers, pathetic parochial fuckwits, fighting against the national interest in the most sordid ways imaginable.

Oops, sorry, went a little over top there, and far away.

It's not quite what I meant to say. I say old chums, good chappies, splendid fellows, sterling buddies, putting all that aside, forget I even mentioned your dingbat stupidity and hypocrisy, how about you get together and form a coalition government with that nice Tony Abbott?

Sure you'll go down in history as a bunch of hypocritical ignorant parochial rural deadheads, but what's a little jocularity between chums?

Remember, the fate of Australia is in your hands.

Do you want homosexual Asians flooding the country as we prepare to fight China in our very own version of the mouse that roared?

Just another quiet Sunday in la la land, the giant pond known as Australia...

(Below: exclusive stills from the 60 Minutes coverage of Australia's fantastic fighting forces getting ready for war with China, available only on the pond).