Janet Albrechtsen, and the pond all in a tizz checking whether the world should be made of wood or stainless steel ...

(Above: we've been wondering how to sneak in Mad magazine's tribute to that woman of steel - faster than a speeding bullet - the momma grizzly of steel balled conservatives, and what better way than to introduce a discussion of the virtues of steely empathy over wood).

Faster than a speeding bullet.
More powerful than a locomotive.
Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Look! Up in the sky!
It's a bird. It's a plane. It's Super empathetic politician!

Yes, it's Super empathetic politician - strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Super empathetic politician - who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with his bare hands, and who, disguised as Tony Blair, or perhaps Margaret Thatcher, mild mannered politicians for a once great empire, fights the never ending battle for Truth, Justice and the Empathetic Way.

Surely it has to be noted, it has to be mentioned in despatches.

The last entry in Miranda the Devine's blog was way back on December 15th, and now it's January 19th, and still there's silence. In the meantime? Socialist lefties are on the march, the perfidious greens have fought the damning of Australia, feminists have reduced grown men to hapless tears, gays are on the march and demanding the right to walk down the aisle, atheists have undermined Xmas and the Catholic church, the chardonnay sippers have cleaned out a winery or two, and the cafe late view of the world has reduced a virile society to a quivering wreck. And where is the Devine in all this? Lolling about on a beach somewhere relaxing, taking it easy, and contemplating the imminent end of western civilisation with equanimity.

What happened to the work equity, the bit between the teeth, the ongoing rage demanded by an indecent annual salary pumping out volatile, vitriolic opinion pieces? Has the great Australian lotus land cast its sickening spell once again? Is she no longer a woman of steel?

Well never mind, Dame Slap is on the job, and as usual, Janet Albrechtsen's always ready to tear someone down, and this time it's Julia Gillard, by way of praising Anna Bligh in Woes bring out the best in Bligh.

You see Bligh is the best of leaders, and Gillard the most wooden, trapped by spin doctors within the ballooning spin departments and the insular one liner world of the political classroom.

Who better to evoke this than the down to earth, people orientated, unspinnable Tony Blair, scribbling furiously in his political biography A Journey about the real world in which people live, and so rightly and justly praised by Albrechtsen.

Now there's an adventurist war mongering mass murderer in touch with the real folk and their every day concerns, be it health, sex rock 'n roll or bombing the shit out of someone.

Which reminds me of Geoffrey Wheatcroft's zinger of a review of A Journey for the NYRB, in No, Prime Minister (here, but behind the paywall), wherein particular attention was paid to Blair's capacity for spin:

In September 2002 the first salvo of Downing Street's propaganda barrage against Iraq was fired with the "dossier" of alleged intelligence. Blair wrote the preface: The document discloses that (Saddam's) military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them."

With odious flippancy he now calls this "the infamous forty-five minutes claim," but says that it was "not even mentioned by me at any time in the future." That is not simply disingenuous, it is disgraceful. Like the subsequent grotesque "dodgy dossier", cobbled together from outdated Internet material, this statement was publicized by Alastair Campbell, Blair's mephitic and mendacious press officer, whom he ludicrously calls a "genius" with "clanking great balls." (There's a lot of that, what with Bush praising Blair's "cojones," and Blair also admiring Rupert Murdoch because "he had balls.")

Mephitic and mendacious!

But that's the steel balled conservative way, because liberals are weak and vacillating, powderpuffs really, even though surprisingly they have the capacity to bring down western civilisation as we know it, and that's why conservatives have to have steel balls and be (wo)men of steel and maintain an eternal vigilance against spin.

That's why Bligh is great and Gillard is wrong, or so Albrechtsen assures us, and it has nothing do do with Bligh shedding a tear or two. Gillard has a 'wooden' demeanour and so does former chairman Kevin Rudd, a political robot somehow made of wood rather than aluminium and silicon chips. (But what does that make John Howard? Was he the part of the 101 uses you can make of coconut fibre if you have Pacific Island ingenuity?)

You see, unlike the artless, unembroidered Tony Blair, this pair are carefully manufactured and contrived, and Gillard is a head prefect too often handing out rubbish collection duties for hapless students (oh the joy of punishing the untidy rabble by making them pick up rubbish):

As PM, Gillard is head prefect of the political class. In the real world, her overly scripted words make her seem detached, using safe words as one might wear a safe black suit as armour against mistakes. Is she confused about which part of her is suitable for public consumption after so many years in the political class?

And not just in the real world, we hastily add, but in the real world of deluded commentariat commentators hacking out their penny a word lashings and slappings for the Murdoch empire. Yes, it's the real Julia meme, this time dressed up and trotted out courtesy of the Queensland floods, and Dame Slap is just the latest in line in Murdoch land to deliver the judgement, as charted by that infallible guide to the Murdoch party line, David Penberthy, in Critics swamp Gillard, or guest hack Troy Bramston in Nation needs empathy without spin.

Naturally Albrechtsen casts around for other political examples, to compare and contrast, and so denigrate Gillard, and lights on Franklin D Roosevelt, channeling a piece about him by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal:

Speaking on radio, FDR asked Americans to find a map and follow as he referred to specific battles across the globe, the status of those battles, the enemies' aims and so on. He wanted Americans to understand the worst of what they faced. He treated Americans with respect. As Rabinowitz mentions, after Roosevelt died, a man was found weeping when the funeral train passed. A passer-by asked him whether he knew Roosevelt. The man replied: "I didn't know him. But he knew me."

Oh dear, this is all very well, but it has to be said it's an epic fail. It should almost go without saying that Roosevelt is one of two twentieth century presidents we should hate. Perhaps Dame Slap should enrol in Beck University immediately (from as little as US$6.26 a month, please pay only in gold), and study up with Professor Burton Folsom, Professor at Hillsdale College, as he examines how Roosevelt was infested and ruined by the original satanist, Woodrow Wilson:

Professor Folsom returns to teach this fascinating class on the policies and principles that shaped FDR into the progressive we not... and hate today (here).

Let's hope someone enrols the website spin merchant in an English course. And second thoughts I believe I can pick up a degree very cheaply on the web, certifying my endless capacity for stupidity ...

Perhaps you can instead pick up the thoughts of Folsom and Beck for free, through the ether as in Glenn Beck on FDR: In 1945, Americans Were "Glad He's Dead":

BECK: Roosevelt...Am I wrong by saying there was a good portion of people that thought, "Holy cow, I'm glad he's dead. He was turning into a dictator."

FOLSOM: Well, there were a lot of people who thought that. As you pointed out, we immediately had a constitutional amendment to prevent any other president from serving longer than two terms...It had not worked well with four terms under Franklin Roosevelt.

Never mind the man weeping as the funeral train passed, and a nation mourning, and once again we have to say a big thanks and shout out to Glenn Beck, and of course Rupert Murdoch, who has via Roger Ailes helped make Beck what he is today.

But back to Albrechtsen, who has by now finished denigrating Gillard by comparing her to the dictator Roosevelt, perhaps the most evil progressive ever to stalk the world, a new Hitler in the making, and instead scrounging around, she finds the ever so populist and popular Margaret Thatcher as a key contrast.

Now some might brood about the rioting the Baronness's poll tax produced (here in her wiki) but we should remember that she was dubbed the Iron Lady in the Soviet Union, which is almost as good as being a woman of stainless steel (yes cold rolled stainless steel has a fine UTS):

"The fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed but that all attempts to destroy democracy will fail." The words do not do justice to Thatcher's steely determination.

Steel! Which leads to steely determination! That's what's needed and lordy did Margaret Thatcher have some steely cojones.

It was about this point in Albrechtsen's piece that I began to wonder about signs of a dangerously complacent attitude to liberals, because her final choice for denigrating Gillard turns out to be none other ... drum rolls and silence please ... Barack Obama, who showed true grit, just like Anna Bligh, in his recent speech about the shooting in Tucson, Arizona.

It seems the detached Obama suddenly re-c0nnected and even Peggy Noonan praised the speech, but it made me wonder if Albrechtsen had been taking her daily dose of Fox News - essential, along with a multivitamin and an iron tablet as a way of defeating the tendency of liberalism to sap precious bodily fluids and introduce a kind of benign woodiness, or sappiness.

Why at the very end she begins to sound alarmingly like a liberal, or even worse, a progressive:

Great leaders understand the import of a crisis. It's not expressing emotion that matters, although that counts.

I recall a wise history teacher once telling his 15- year-old charges that those who learn most from history do so by marshalling empathy, not sympathy, for people and places. The same is true of the best leaders.

Empathy? I wonder how much empathy Blair and Albrechtsen feel for the dead in Iraq, whether soldier or innocent civilian?

Never mind, Janet Albrechtsen and Troy Bramston are as one, and empathy is all the go, but before we get tear stained, and empathetic to the point of bathos, or before we turn into bundles of steel surging towards the Turks:

Jack: What are your legs?
Archy Hamilton: Springs. Steel springs.
Jack: What are they going to do?
Archy Hamilton: Hurl me down the track.
Jack: How fast can you run?
Archy Hamilton: As fast as a leopard.
Jack: How fast are you going to run?
Archy Hamilton: As fast as a leopard!
Jack: Then let's see you do it!

Yes, before we harden the fuck up and turn into steel-gilled warriors, albeit with a popular and common touch, capable of manly tears like John Boehner, unlike sordid liberal pine wood with a thin veneer of apparatchik chipboard, it's about time we celebrated the return of Jon Stewart for the year, and what better way than his celebration of Fox News's coverage of Obama's speech (and yes here's hoping you too can spoof the site and watch his shows in full and so watch the seemingly endless plugs for HBO's new series Funny Or Die Presents):

"It's not a show! He didn't open up a show! It's 'mourning' with a 'u'! You're confusing a morning show, which you are on, with a show of mourning which this is."

Memo to Julia Gillard: make sure next time to choke back a tear, as proof that women of iron know how to rust ... It's the empathetic thing to do ...

Oh and get yourself ready for an attack by Murdoch hacks for a lack of control and a distressing tendency to public emotionalism ...

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