Christopher Pearson, Phillip Adams, and no need for mogadon with snakes in the grass ...

(Above: more First Dog to set the mood, click to enlarge, and more First Dog here, and next time First Dog remember to mention that the right wing Phillip Adams must have the same mogadon-powered sleeping effect, so that a mere five minutes will induce a sound night long sleep).

Poor hapless trusting innocent, and perhaps cardigan-wearing Annabel Crabb.

Earlier in the week, she'd written, in Tears, stares and a media frenzy, regarding Julia Gillard's teary parliamentary speech about flood victims:

Within minutes, the weather experts of the internet were charting her tears for sincerity, viscosity and political impact.

Perhaps she had in mind Dennis Shanahan blathering on in his usual inimitable way in Do the PM's tears show the real Julia Gillard?

Except for this:

Now: I'm all for social media and the democratisation of political commentary.

Is she implying that the gutter trawling Dennis Shanahan is somehow involved in social media and the democratisation of political commentary, as opposed to being an over paid pompous prat scribbling for the Oz?

Never mind:

... I have rarely wanted to kick its teeth in quite so sincerely as I did yesterday, watching this hubbub of tear-analysis move in like a horrible cyclone to obliterate the dignity of those whose deaths came so suddenly.

Uh huh. Well Annabel, please feel free to kick the teeth of Christopher Pearson, who naturally puts the most wretched interpretation on the performance as he scribbles today:

Clearly Labor tacticians decided it was time to unveil yet another new Julia, one capable of speaking very softly and all-too visibly choking back tears during a condolence motion. She's unaccustomed to public displays of emotion and this one went on a bit long. Frontbench snuffles from Nicola Roxon and Jenny Macklin might, in Gilbert and Sullivan's famous phrase, have passed for mere corroborative detail. But when Anthony Albanese reached for his hanky, the choreography was obvious.

Yep, for grubby, cynical, vicious, condescending insufferable scribbling, you can't go past Pearson in No danger of ALP being left rudderless.

Perhaps when Liberal Scott Buccholz teared up in parliament, someone passed him a handkerchief so that the choreography could be obvious. Oh wait, he'd attended some seven funerals, because people actually died in the floods. Cue Crabb:

Sure - perhaps the Prime Minister invented her tears to patch up a deficiency in her empathy-rating.

Either that, or she cried because the things she described were really, really sad.

Sad? You see in the world of a myopic cheerleader like Pearson, the only true sadness is that Tony "shit happens" Abbott is in opposition.

How about Mal Farr in Tears flow like floodwater, and not a crocodile in sight?

Julia Gillard also teared up during the debate on the same motion, and there will be many who will claim her brief surrender to emotions was contrived.

This means they believe Gillard used one of the most solemn occasions Parliament has experienced, after one of the most disasterous summers in the nation’s history, to pull a cheap political trick.

That was unlikely to happen, and it didn’t happen. Gillard was genuinely affected. Tony Abbott didn’t think she was pretending.

The Opposition Leader said with great elegance of the Prime Minister: “Whatever political disagreements we have had, she has shown a decent heart.’‘

Farr went on to praise Abbott's speech too. Generous even, lacking in mean spirit.

What a naive person he must be. Pearson's considered opinion?

Playing for the sympathy vote is a high-stakes game when you're affectless in the face of disaster and not naturally lachrymose. The least suspicion in the public mind that these are tears that can be turned on and off at will could prove fatal.

I think she'd have been better advised to stick to her preferred turf as a latter-day Boadicea, with knives protruding from her chariot wheels. She'll need all the steel she can muster to stare down her colleagues and to manage the difficult by-election Rudd's departure is likely to create.

And what a contemptible considered opinion it is too.

Meanwhile, in the week that's been notable for the spat between Tony Abbott, Julie Bishop, and assorted Liberal pretenders who want to wear her Deputy Leader of the opposition crown, Pearson hares off to create a distraction with his special brand of aluminium chaff, designed to fool any radar.

Yep, he produces a column discussing former chairman Rudd and his imminent departure from parliament, which will lead to the downfall of the Labor government:

I doubt that she'll (Gillard'll) be expecting him to vacate his seat at a time of maximal convenience to the party, such as the long winter parliamentary recess, when his vote won't be needed. Griffith, sitting on a margin of 8.5 per cent, is also an electorate where she'll need a glittering candidate, because a good campaign by Tony Abbott and his party machine in Queensland could see the seat fall and, with it, the government.

Yes, with a leap and a bound, and faster than a speeding bullet, Abbott is shortly to take the reins. I guess this might be called the "shit happens" theory of politics.

Pearson's firm and well researched sources for this speculation?

Why it's that infallible Queensland ALP insider, Gary Johns, and never mind that he's gone more right wing than that other Boudica, Maggie Thatcher, and that Nitrazepam of live radio, Phillip Adams, the other snake in the grass, who upped and resigned from the Labor party because of his total infatuation with former chairman Rudd ...

But here's the totally amusing thing. You see Pearson quotes Adams at length while touting for his presence in the weekend Australian magazine, as if that might inspire anyone to actually buy the rag:

Last weekend Adams told us: "Despite casting myself into outer darkness", a reference to resigning as a member of the party, "I still have sources within the ALP. The only thing holding them back from moving against the mediocre Gillard is who's to replace her? Bill Shorten must be rehearsing his acceptance speech, but it's hard to see a major conspirator of such naked ambition getting up. Or improving the situation if he did."

But here's the following line Pearson somehow managed to omit:

If sanity prevailed they could apologise to Kevin and get him back. (Conspirators turn on Gillard).

This produced great chortling in the land of the Dolt - But which K inspired Adams' latest lunacy.

And Adams did try to retrieve himself a little:

Just as they could have kept Keating on, thus sparing us from Beazley, Crean and Latham. But don’t hold your breath for something so interesting, even sensible. (The public might react well – Rudd’s recent and rapturous reception at the Woodford Festival was fascinating.)

The fascinating Woodford Festival? You mean hippies and folkies rulez? Even Pearson can't go this far:

In his coda Adams refers to Rudd's "rapturous reception at the Woodford Festival", a triumph which I must confess passed me by.

As it did most of Australia. But even here he can't bring himself to mention that Adams is in the grip of a serious dementia, involving the triumphant return of Kevin, so instead Pearson must see the Ruddster resigning his seat, and soon, and so bringing on an Abbott government, within months.

And if this scenario isn't enough for you, he also invokes the spirit of Niki Savva to remind us that the vertically challenged, pushy, aggro Bill Shorten fancies himself as the next PM. This hardly passes for news - Shorten has never been short of a rampant ego while imagining himself as the saviour of Labor and Australia - but even Adams, as noted above, realises he's a man of naked ambition, unlikely to get up or improve the situation if he did.

Yes, even for Adams, it's a shortened bridge too far.

But when you're muck raking and dragging your coat, there's no end to possible scenarios of the most delusional kind:

There's been quite a lot of political insiders' chatter over the past week that Anna Bligh might be persuaded to renounce the premiership and stand. I doubt it myself, even if at first blush the prospect of following in Carmen Lawrence's footsteps has some appeal.

Insiders' political chatter?

Was that after the fifth double scotch or the tenth? You'd have to be pissed as a parrot, or passing delusional to see Anna Bligh as the new PM of Australia. If this is what passes for insider chatter in earshot of Pearson, did someone hold a meeting at the dunny stationed a handy fifty yards away from the political infighters doing the real infighting? Because they can't stand the smell of amateurs indulging in amateur chit chat and fancying themselves as insiders ... who've been there before, as long ago as Joh Bjelke-Petersen for PM.

But even for the redoubtable Pearson this turns out to be a blighted bridge too far, as poor Anna will have to focus on Queensland ...

Still that's the whole point of inspecting the gizzards, the innards, reading the tea leaves, and otherwise prognosticating, and predicting, and stirring up shit.

Throw enough stupid ideas into the ether, and one might stick, and suddenly you're a visionary - why indeed and lordy lord, shit truly does happen - and in the meantime the water is nicely muddied, and the debate shifts away from poor Tony, and poor Julie, and the knives in hungry search of her exposed back ...

And that's how you earn your stripes as a political commentator of the cheerleading kind.

Befuddled, wretched, cynical, but with a handsome sinecure, a kind of ecclesiastical benefice without cure of souls ...

Meanwhile, once again, the pond is forced to deny that it's having a rapturous affair with Mike Carlton, who gets the final word on Tony Abbott in Sound and fury of that catatonic silence and also manages to articulate the importance of the Indonesian school aid.

No, we didn't leap out of bed early so we could print Carlton's thoughts a few days before his Saturday column, and any way he says it much better.

And he finds it in his heart to praise Lord Downer, while putting Abbott's proposal in a proper context:

For Abbott to propose abandoning it now is myopic foreign policy vandalism.

Yes, even as a proposal, which is all it could be and ever was, a proposal - unless of course former Chairman Rudd resigns his seat tomorrow, and in a tsunami-like way completes Pearson's dreaming - it was cloth eared, ill considered, cheap, and mean spirited.

But then Carlton's actually been to one of the schools funded by Howard and Lord Downer, and takes a view on the extremist jihad schools run by the likes of Abu Bakar Bashir, the loathsome Jemaah Islamiyah fanatic. Unlike Abbott, who doesn't seem to mind if Islamic fanaticism gets a clear run in Indonesia ...

It turns out that the idea sprang fully formed from the brain of Scott Morrison, the opposition spokesman on immigration, or so you'll conclude if you read Julie Bishop ignites Liberal tensions.

How Bishop can be blamed for Morrison's stupidity beggars belief, but again Carlton has a nice turn of phrase:

As domestic policy, it is redneck populism: what's all our money going to them Muzzy terrorists for? And as diplomacy it stinks ...

Lord help us if that rednecked populist Morrison gets his hands on Immigration, and Abbott allows his cheap One Nation populism to reign ...

But you won't read about any of that in Pearson, because when shit happens, it only happens on one side of the fence, as he goes about the business of proving he's a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

A passing thought:

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.
- Henry Ward Beecher

(Below: still all this talk of fecal matters made me incredibly nostalgic for the dunny we had on our selection many years to go. Talk about snakes in the grass and a fear of the snakes lurking in the dunny ...

If I didn't know it was long gone, I'd swear whoever took this snap had it re-built, because it's a dead ringer, a spitting image, except ours still had a door, and the torn-off wads of newspaper would have been visible hanging from the wall on the left. Perhaps that's why the smell of Australian politics is like the smell of rose petals in the nostrils, while I can conjure up the smell of that dunny in a flash).