Paul Sheehan, Rob Potshott, sundry faceless Labor men, and a knob of widgeons ...

(Above: it's time to wax and dust with Mr. Sheen).

To see a group of commentariat columnists swoop and swerve and dance through the air in the morning light, moving as one, like a host of sparrows, a flight of swallows or a parliament of owls, is a truly splendid sight.

The group think, the herd mentality, brings to mind any number of colourful group names for herds of birds. I've always loved a dissimulation of birds, or a siege of bitterns, a peep of chickens or a cover of coots, and you can find more here, but perhaps the one that best suits commentariat commentators is a covey of grouse. Though we would always consider worthy contenders like a brood of hens, or a tidings of magpies, or a deceit of lapwings. We would only rule out such inappropriate notions as an exaltation of larks, when there's much riper comparisons, like a chattering or murmuration of starlings.

Chief amongst the chattering grouses is of course Paul Sheehan, and sure enough here he is in Far from an outsider or innocent, dishing it out, with handy baseball bat, to independent MP Rob Oakeshott.

The resemblance of the piece to the weekend attack dog effort by Piers Akerman is startling, though Sheehan attempts a more elevated kind of language by avoiding the choice use of 'rat' in every second paragraph.

But the effect is the same. A commentariat conservative columnist weeping in a vale of tears at the way an independent betrayed his electorate by joining with Labor. What's always interesting in this kind of analysis is, if the electorate so loved the coalition, why didn't they vote for it? They had the chance via the Nationals and one David Gillespie, who saw his vote drop by 15.8% while the vote for Labor dropped by 18.5%. And the vote for the independent soared 47.1%.

Are people so dumb that they mistake their wife for a hat, and a vote for an independent over a National party candidate as meaning they're actually voting for a conservative coalition government, as opposed to a 'pox on both your houses', I'm voting for an independent kind of vote?

So it seems in the topsy turvy world of Paul Sheehan, who refuses to accept that a vote is a vote, and instead a vote for an independent is an anti-Labor/Green vote of the highest water. Fine, and perhaps in the next vote, the dumb electorate might discover this by not voting for an independent, but instead voting for Sheehan's preferred candidate.

Curiously, unless the English language has changed its meaning in recent weeks, independent in this context means not affiliated with or loyal to a political party or organisation.

The rest of Sheehan's column is a feeble fluttering effort at a hatchet job. His chief strategy is to rush off to the wretched outcasts of the failed NSW Labor government to brood on whether Oakeshott might have asked, as an independent, for appointment as a minister in the Iemma Labor government.

His chief witnesses? Well there's Iemma and then there's Michael Costa, and even Sheehan seems to have a glimmer of the absurdity of consulting Costa, by calling him a 'fiery character' and reminding us all that Costa is certainly no faceless man. More's the pity.

So what's the upshot? Well Oakeshott is caught out saying he doesn't have a recollection of the conversation, and Sheehan is left in high seething dungeon for nil result. On a scale of things, it's about the same as former chairman Rudd having a mental blank about what he did on a trip to the New York strip club Scores.

Oakeshott might or might not have asked for a ministry, but he didn't get one, and now in the federal sphere, he was actually offered a ministry, but he didn't take it.

On the scale of gossamer threadbare conspiracies, Sheehan's effort is a storm in a tea cup. So much energy, simply so he can deny Oakeshott a veneer of innocence.

An innocent politician? The concept is so contradictory, the notion so absurd, as to conjure up notions of honest used car salesmen or commentariat columnists free of a vindictive desire for calumny. But hey hey on we go go to a statement of the bleeding obvious:

In fact, the entire edifice of political innocence that Oakeshott has carefully built around himself is not credible. This self-created mythology reached its climax last Tuesday, during his dance of the seven veils, before revealing his final, crucial vote.

Oakeshott has never been an outsider, or a political innocent.

Sheehan marshalls some wonderfully goofy evidence to prove that Oakeshott isn't a political innocent. No doubt Philip Ruddock donned his caring, sharing Amnesty badge - lock that refugee up behind razor wire - before delivering this damning insight:

He grew up on Sydney's north shore, where his father was a prominent doctor, and he attended Barker College. While still a student he went to work for the federal Liberal MP Philip Ruddock, who told me last week: ''Oakeshott did work experience with me in my electorate office. It was unpaid work. He was a student. It was well before he went to work for Mark Vaile.''

Unpaid work! For Ruddock! Say no more. Screwed by Ruddock to lick stamps for free, and so the innocence is shattered and the fresh peach cream virgin cheeks are tainted forever.

On and on Sheehan rants about Oakeshott's career, but the funny, and unhappily for Sheehan, the comical thing is that at the same time, he has to report every now and then during his tirade how Oakeshott keeps on getting re-elected, thumping National party candidates, achieving easy victories, and getting re-elected with a commanding majority.

As an independent ... Some politician, some innocence ...

The real, and only crime of Oakeshott? Acting like an independent, he turned down Tony Abbott's offer, in his own self-interest, and thinking also that this might be the best way to pork barrel his electorate. According to Sheehan:

It was an offer both much larger and with less contingencies than Labor's counter-offer.

If Sheehan believes that load of old cobblers, that load of tripe, there's only one innocent in the room. The man scribbling Paul Sheehan's column. In much the same way as Sheehan and Piers Akerman and a dozen others have gone after the independents, a Liberal government would have gone after the independents in a bid to dislodge them.

The end result? It'll be a long hard road back for commentariat columnists should the Labor government get the wobbles and Tony Abbott desires to form an illegitimate minority government reliant on the support of the perfidious independents.

Meanwhile, the hatchet job continues:

From all this, Oakeshott conjured for himself a mandate to create a Labor-Greens government. It is exactly what his electorate had just rejected. Oakeshott then stage-managed his vote as the climactic vote, delivering a speech presenting himself, like Jimmy Stewart in the classic, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, as the loveable cleanskin who took on the machine and won. But Oakeshott was actually delivering power to the ultimate machinists.

Um, would that be the ultimate machinists, the faceless but somehow fully faced men, who happen to run or ran the NSW Labor government, and provide some fodder and filler for the first half of Sheehan's column? What to make of a commentariat columnist quoting the ultimate machinists as if it actually meant something?

To continue Sheehan's Mr Smith Goes to Washington metaphor, why am I reminded of corrupt political boss Edward Arnold wanting a handpicked stooge and dishing the dirt, and hoping that Smith will be easy to manipulate, easily malleable, because of his naïveté. Tough luck, Tony Abbott ... and Paul Sheehan ...

The problem with the plot, you see, is that Oakeshott didn't jump on demand the way the commentariat press expected and demanded. So it's out with the slashers and the muck raking, and the epithets, Akker Dakker's 'rats' being one of the tidier words to evoke the commentariat mindset.

Sheehan takes a more sedate course. A joke about Oakeshott's name.

That was six days ago. It seems longer. It must seem so to Oakeshott, who has discovered that the media world beyond the adoring Port Macquarie News is a very different place, a place where Oakeshott has become Potshott.

Um, Mr Sheen, oh Mr Sheen, that's the sort of cheap joke we deliver here at the pond in a quest for mindless stupid humour, as we clean and wax and polish as we dust our way through the day. Oh Mr Sheen ...

He has spent nearly 20 years working towards this moment, his time in the national sun. But with the glow comes the heat.

Heat? Does Sheehan think his column's delivering heat? By golly, you'd keep in more heat with a tea cosy, and even then you'd still end up drinking luke warm tea, and probably with too much sugar and milk, in the Australian style.

I've got it. Scrub the pitying of turtle doves, let's just settle for a descent of woodpeckers, an ostentation of peacocks, a knob of widgeons, and a rafter of turkeys.

(Below: oh Mr Sheen, where do all these independents come from, they're way worse than dust. What can we do about them? Take it away Mr Sheen ...)