Of Joe Hockey's circus, and a little clowning around with Greg Sheridan ...

(Above: please, all stand, stand up, stand up, and join in the singalong:

Stand up, stand up for Tony;
The strife will not be long;
This day the din of battle,
The next the victor’s song.
The soldiers, overcoming,
Their crown of life shall see
And with the King of glory
Shall reign eternally.

Oh okay it's by George Duffield, and he was a Presbyterian, and so it might sound odd for a couple of Jesuit educated lads, but you get the drift).

You could have heard a pin drop.

There's Miranda the Devine, and she's agitated, and Wrong buttons get pressed all round.

Oh sure, she slags off the Labor government as usual in the second half, but she almost sounds bipartisan in the first crucial half, as she accuses the grubby, fear mongering Scott Morrison of scoring a spectacular own goal, wading into a radio talk-show quagmire, alienating allies and sounding heartless. And at the same time the Devine finds centre forward jolly Joe Hockey struck the right note. (And more on Morrison's gutter crawling here).

And over at The Australian, there's Peter van Onselen clucking and tutting about Trying to score points from tragedy, and mentioning One Nation and shame and how jolly Joe presented a "stark contrast in styles", and now Tony Abbott and Morrison were about as compassionate a couple of conservatives as Gengis Khan.

Well actually I made that last bit up, but golly it was fun to see van Onselen stoke the fires of leadership speculation:

For the sake of stability, the opposition Treasury spokesman won't want to fuel tensions any further, and that will be the view of a majority of his colleagues who want to keep the pressure on the government rather than descend into internal bickering. But we now know one man will put politics ahead of all else while the other has a bottom line below which he isn't prepared to stoop.

Go on, keep stooping, what fun to see a leadership challenge. You see, the Liberals are streeting the Labor party, but Abbott is trailing Gillard by a substantial margin. What's the problem? What's the solution?

Why as Oliver Goldsmith might have said in He Who Stoops to Conquer:

The man recover'd of the bite, The dog it was that died.

Oh, and if you happen to stop by Mal Farr scribbling for the punch drunk Punch Ugly asylum seeker spat sparks Liberal tensions (naturally he got the Neanderthal readership all agitated and a-twittering), you might find a reference to a Menzies house column by a "Liberal Party staffer", a "senior adviser for a member of the Shadow Ministry", and subsequently withdrawn because it was written by an anonymous "Liberal Party staffer", an anonymous "senior adviser for a member of the Shadow Ministry".

Weep not, because lo and behold, it is to hand, here, and now amongst other places, thanks be unto Peter Martin, and let's just select a couple of the senior adviser's bon mots as he berates jolly Joe for undermining poor precious Scott Morrison:

... despite being touted as the popular choice by numerous two-bit internet polls, there can be no doubt that Hockey would have proven to be the one contender monstrously worse in the role (and not just worse than Malcolm – worse than Brendan Nelson, worse than Alexander Downer... possibly even worse than John Hewson).

... Given the ongoing issues that having Joe Hockey in such a vital portfolio presents, it has naturally meant that murmurings have begun within certain, key Liberal circles that with a new Parliamentary year should come a new Shadow Treasurer.

It is no secret that many Liberal MP's desire a new Shadow Treasurer who does not activly attack the Party line; Someone who does not seek personal attention at every waking turn; Someone who can stay true to Liberal values of small government when formulating policy.

... We are beyond the point of backbencher despair - we are at the point of open revolt. While Shadow Cabinet can continue to put on a brave face, there can be no denying the panic that is spreading through the ranks as members view the destruction Hockey is causing. There can be no doubt that there needs to be a mechanism found quickly within the party to replace Hockey as Shadow Treasurer without resulting in a wider bloodbath [Ed: Give him Health?].

... The replacement might be messy, but the public have come to expect something a lot better from the Liberal Party in such a vital area.

Enough is enough. The Joe Hockey circus must come to an end. The Australian people deserve more. The Liberal Party deserves more. Hockey must go - and soon.

And so on and so forth at much greater length. Talk about a circus ... and panic spreading ... and shit happening ... and the dour Andrew Robb, who makes the average Puritan seem like a hedonistic Australian tourist in the fleshpots of Bangkok, is touted as the ideal replacement.

Go for it.

Meanwhile, who are we to criticise a keen mind who likes to capitalise after a semi-colon. When the Fate of the Nation is at Stake, we must Capitalise Everything. And Discover Someone who can Lead instead of Someone who indulges in Treachery and Treason ...

And now, as they used to say in Monty Python, way back before the war when we could all enjoy crispy bacon, it's time for something completely different.

Already it seems like an eternity ago, but back on Monday, in the Pilger v Sheridan showdown on Q & A, there came this little testy exchange:

JOHN PILGER: Greg Sheridan's support for Suharto's murderous regime in Indonesia is on the record, as is much of the media in Australia and to compare and to set up the model of the Indonesian state where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, where a third of the...

GREG SHERIDAN: I said Indonesia after Suharto.

JOHN PILGER: No, well...

GREG SHERIDAN: I said Indonesia after Suharto.

JOHN PILGER: No, well...

GREG SHERIDAN: I don't mind you talking rubbish as usual but don't tell lies about me. A simple request.

JOHN PILGER: No. No.

CRAIG EMERSON: It is Valentine's Day, guys. (more comedy stylings here)

From this you might get the distinct impression that Greg Sheridan didn't think much of Suharto or his murderous regime, which in turn led Andrew Crook in Crikey, in Sheridan and Pilger punch on in Q&A brawl, to remind everyone that Sheridan has long been a shill for Suharto, and sometimes in quite a shrill way.

So today what does Sheridan do? Lead with If only Mubarak resembled Suharto ...

Indeed. If only Mubarak and his regime had resembled Suharto's murderous regime where hundreds of thousands were killed, where a third of ...

I keed, I keed.

Actually Mubarak does resemble Suharto. Suharto's family made out like bandits, with an estimated value in 1999 of US$15 billion (here), while some reports recently suggested Mubarak might have assembled a tidy US$70 billion, and thereby turned himself into the richest man in the world (though if the HUN reports it here, who's to say the figure is true).

Meanwhile, Sheridan waxes lyrical abut the success of Suharto:

... in the late 1960s he handed over the running of the economy to the so-called "Berkeley mafia" who produced one of the most successful economic stabilisation programs the world has seen.

It introduced the classic East Asian development story. Loads of foreign investment poured in, factories, especially in electronics, proliferated and millions of people moved beyond subsistence farming into a commercial-industrial middle class.

Great days indeed, unless you happened to be killed by Suharto's state police and military machinery, or happened to live in East Timor.

Oh sure, Sheridan mentions a "bad record of human rights abuses", but for the most part, Sheridan does the full gibbous moon thing about how Suharto ensured Indonesia had quite a lot of things going for it, and how it's all turned out tremendously well, and yes ... if only Mubarak's Egypt was like Suharto's Indonesia ...

Which is why you reel away from reading his piece, wondering why on earth he got upset with Pilger and agitated to the point of accusing him for lying about his, Sheridan's, love of Suharto's New Order ...

Perhaps it's because Monday seems like an eternity ago.

Oh well, never mind, thanks to a reader, I can now go off and devour once more Sheridan's incredible man love for mamma grizzly in Conservative of the future, which is wonderfully uxorial about the many charms of Sarah Palin:

... Palin's effect on the campaign could be explosive. She is a huntin' and fishin' kinda gal. She loves Alaska's great outdoors. Famously, she won one beauty pageant and came second in Miss Alaska 1984. This kind of thing drives the left-liberal mind absolutely nuts. With all the good, and the many challenges, in her life, Palin exudes the optimistic, sunny, distinctive personality of the great American west.

That's before Sheridan went on, in Politics of celebrity takes over , to scribble how the United States presidential campaign was the worse he'd ever seen. Vacuous, fatuous, misleading, dishonest, trivial, at times unhinged in its disconnect from reality.

Yep, the vacuity of celebrity politics ruined everything.

Aw shucks, and there we were thinking the reporting of beauty pageant wins and the doings of a huntin' and a fishin' kinda gal was roughly equivalent to reporting on a speech by Abe Lincoln ...

Which leads us to ask: is Greg Sheridan the most Conflicted, Contradictory, Uncomprehending foreign editor going around in Australia?

Just asking of course ...

(Below: never mind, it's out with the .222 today, and a hunting we will go. Or should we wear the .308 today? Or would the .243 go better with my dress?)