Miranda Devine, John Pasquarelli, and coming soon, the fabulous fish-head flick for all the family ...

(Above: eek, an anonymous shadowy threatening figure. Quick, look under the bed right away).

In its usual way, The Australian found the space for John Pasquarelli's Once here, they can cause a lot of trouble.

You can see from the header where it's heading. They! Them! The feared unfathomable other! Trouble! The bright purple cookie monster under the bed.

No one sleeps at night. And it's not just the humidity.

Guess it's all those Islamics breaking the alcohol prohibition and rioting in Sydney pubs that are causing the coppers all the heart burn ...

Actually I can't sleep at night, knowing that the faceless, threatening, fear mongering John Pasquarelli is somewhere out there on the streets, stirring up trouble, and celebrating Hansonism in the pages of a rag which claims it's the heart of the nation.

Some shrivelled up, fucked over heart ...

Oops, we understand that rough honest Anglo-Celtic swearwords upset John Pasquarelli. (Holiday reading: John Pasquarelli warns about the evils of Castlemaine Independent!)

Yes in the usual way with the lizard Oz, it's published the controversy, whether it be immigration, climate change, intelligent design, or broadband, because heck, only Pauline Hanson and her acolytes stand in the way of dangerous ethnic forces destabilising more than two hundred years of cultural history.

Hell yes, it used to just be the Catholics v Masons, and the Irish versus the English. Back then the Irish could contribute a cop killer who turned into a national icon and folk hero. Such is life.

And then they started letting in people with Italian sounding names and things started to go wrong. Why even Raffaello Carboni was on hand to stir up trouble at the Eureka Stockade ... Damned insurrectionist anti-tax tea partier that he was ...

Yes, and back in the good old days it used to be the Italian mafia that stopped people from sleeping soundly at night, and a trip to Liechhardt in search of a decent garlic-laden spaghetti marinara (Carlton if you're a wearer of black) had a certain fearsome frisson, resonant of Griffith. Or Calabria ...

Where would Underbelly, or for that matter Roy Billing, be without the Calabrians? Where would Australia be without this criminal source of pride? Take that Coppola and Corleone, we too have our Italian gangsters, and we celebrate them yearly in prime time ...

But, but, you say, is it fair to smear all Italians because of the dirty deeds, done cheaply and sometimes expensively, of a minority of Italian Australians?

Never mind, ethnic slurs are so easy to drop, aren't they, so why not take as an antidote Peter Hartcher's Ugly game of race baiting:

A member of the Liberal shadow cabinet later told me: "We had all been asked to come up with potential issues we could run with. Scott said, 'What are we going to do about multiculturalism? What are we going to do about concerns about the number of Muslims?' He put it on the table like a dead cat."

Yes, that would be the 1.7% number of Muslims that had the anonymous editorialist at The Australian in a righteous frenzy.

And what do you know, the next thing, there's the dead cat, all stinky and smelly, spreading its putrescence in The Australian ... which I've begun to think fondly of as the festering fish head, white eyes glazed, of the nation ...

Hey ho, on we go, and Sunday is the day when Miranda the Devine shines in the tabloids, and today she seizes on the sexual assault of Lara Logan in Frenzied assault on West's values.

And suddenly, what do you know, she's a liberal supporting Western liberal values, perhaps even with a touch of secularism.

At a time when fundamentalist Islam is on the march, why would Western liberal values such as female equality suddenly fill a vacuum left by departing autocrats?

The increasing misogyny and subjugation of women in the Muslim world is the single insurmountable obstacle to democratisation.

Ah yes, those much adored Western liberal values.

Could this be the same scribbler who furiously wrote:

The fact is, Abbott's so-called woman trouble is with a particular subset of female - the aggressively secular, paleo-feminist, emasculating Australian broad, for whom unabashed red-blooded blokeishness is an affront of biblical proportions. (Abbott's real trouble is the sisterhood).

Phew, that's more like it. Never forget to put the boot into secular emasculating paleo feminists seeking to put some limits on red-blooded bloke-ishness as a way of celebrating liberal western values. But do go on:

There have been attempts by apologists for Logan's attackers to play down this angle by dredging up statistics showing how prevalent rape is in the US.

But the fact is that the 39-year-old foreign correspondent represented the decadence of the West to a certain brand of Islamist.

Yes, yes, that's why the west trotted off to Afghanistan, to bomb the shit out of wedding parties with drones, to save the women, so how's the moral crusade going?

Not too well, if you read Gayle Tzemach Lemmon's Why Is Karzai Cracking Down on Women?

It seems that safe havens for women suffering from domestic abuse and forced marriage would be an unlikely target for an anti-corruption crackdown from Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s government, which is mired in a number of corruption allegations, including those relating to Kabul Bank.

“Their allegations are baseless, and there is a very political reason behind this,” said Afghan civil society activist Palwasha Hassan of the Afghan Women’s Network. “We are afraid that this is just the beginning of the decline of women’s rights and every day they will take another freedom that women have won.”

.... “The government is getting ready for the Taliban to come in—we can see signs all over the place,” says Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Afghan Women, which runs four shelters and five family guidance centers in Afghanistan. “My biggest fear is that the clock is going to be turned back pre-2001, and we are going to experience everything all over again.” That fear is shared by Hassan and others.

“The Taliban will not have too much work because the government is already working on things before they arrive,” Hassan says.

Uh huh. So this is what the west has been fighting for, in the way of saving the women, for the last decade. (And if you want to depress yourself even more follow it up with Lemmon's Television's Threat to Afghan Women).

But I digress. It's a pity that the Devine's injunction on mentioning rape statistics in the west forbids me from mentioning Kathy Dobie's Tiny little laws: A plague of sexual violence in Indian country in the latest Harpers, but anyhoo it's behind a paywall, so not to worry ...

And of course it's completely impossible to note the relevant data in relation to rapes in Egypt and the United States, as recorded by the U.N.:

This list indicates the number of, and per capita cases of recorded rape. It does not include cases of rape which go unreported, or which are not recorded. Nor does it specify whether recorded means reported, brought to trial, or convicted. Nor does it take the different definition of rape around the world into account.

Country 2008 Count 2009 Count 2008 Rate / 100,000 2009 Rate / 100,000

Egypt 63 87 0.1 0.1

United States of America 90,427 89,000 29.3 28.6 (for the full table go here).

Of course, there are many variables, in relation to definition, reporting, and so on, possibly not the least that the data was collected by men in black helicopters, and of course the incidence of male on male rapes - especially strong in American prisons - is always overlooked. (And to prove we're fair and balanced, and you decide, you might read this cautionary tale of data reporting in Christian Sommers' Researching the "Rape Culture" of America).

All that said, there's nothing like elevating one particularly ugly incident into a righteous universal moral denunciation and diatribe.

Let me have a go at it:

The increasing misogyny and subjugation of women in the western world, as demonstrated by the Boston Strangler, is the single insurmountable obstacle to the United States becoming an exemplar of western values.

By golly, that sounds mighty fine. I might yet become a screeching ratbag minion of Murdoch given to uttering lines like this ...

The subjugation of women doesn't bode well for democracy, but the reaction in the Western media to Logan's assault was nothing to be proud of.

Could I try another variant:

The constant on going assault on women in the media - especially by those with an intense dislike of a particular subset of females, namely the aggressively secular, paleo-feminist emasculating Australian broad - doesn't bode well for liberal secular western values, or an appreciation of the way democracy should be able to celebrate diversity without fear-mongering.

Sadly, I don't think it'll cop a run in the Murdoch press.

Not when there's cookie monsters under the bed to fear, or red-bloooded bloke-ishness to celebrate by the fish heads of the nation ...

(Below: and for a piece of Sunday whimsy, we celebrate the rising phenomenon of fish heads. Click to enlarge).