Spiked in the finger again by sundry loons and clowns, and so the blood must flow ...

(Above: cue a little talk of blood).

Allow me to nibble on a little piece of mushroom.

That's better. I'm terribly sorry that Kristina Keneally is terribly sorry that her government, which somehow behind her back, has made a mess and a hash of everything. It seems it's self-indulgent and has lost its way. Public transport costs are rising, stamp duty is a bandit's dream, and so is land tax, and she's shocked by motor vehicle taxes and rego and license costs ...

Pass the sackcloth and ashes please, and listen to the moaning and the keening, and what joy that once she regains control of her government, everything will be fixed.

It seems her government, somehow behind her back, has increased charges on everything, and in future she's going to ensure that her naughty, nasty government will only increase charges according to increases in the cost of living. Happily with the cost of living rapidly increasing, her government will be able to increase its charges at a handy rate.

And happily, her government will hand over $250 bucks to anyone who votes it back into office, thereby providing a concrete measure of the value of a vote to NSW Labor. Oh it's dressed up in finery, so we wouldn't dare call it a a bribe - there's no brown bag involved, as there was in good old days of the Askin government - so let's call it an "energy rebate". There, that's better, and it seems it's going to be L.A.W. Just like Paul Keating in the good old days.

Even better, she's devised a four year "Fairness for Families" package, first announced back in 1991 as a Labor strategy and never implemented, and now designed to hand over $913 million to give family budgets a break. And of course it's fully funded and fully costed.

And who can we thank for this? Why it's Bob Carr, the man who devised and never implemented the 'fairness for families' way back when. Instead Sydney copped the panem et circenses of the Olympics.

Bob has recently discovered the intertubes, and as well as harassing Keneally with bright ideas about how to save the government, now furiously blogs at Thoughtlines with Bob Carr, explaining how terrible the Greens are, how wonderful his government was, and how Kristina Keneally should be voted back into power ...

Must be quiet days in the millionaires factory of Macquarie Bank for Bob.

Meanwhile, all I can see is that scene from The Shining. The blood, the cascading blood and the horror. Bummer dude, never trust mushrooms or caterpillars or the NSW state Labor party.

And think of the cost of dry cleaning if caught in the blood bath on election day. Might just leave the country ... while any stray reader in another state or country can carry on regardless, without the pain of a truly terrible Labor party advertising campaign ...

Meanwhile, it wouldn't be a good day in The Australian if we didn't have nonsense trotted out in the form of commentary, and so it is with Brendan O'Neill in Palestine an obsession of radical West, not Arabs.

With the Palestinian people somewhat deflated, the Palestine issue can become perfect political fodder for the victim-oriented, fancy-dress radicals of the modern West.

Fancy dress? Well I guess it makes a change from coffee and chardonnay. And since we're always up for a sophisticated debate, yah yah, why don't you teach your grandmother to suck eggs ...

As for the rest of the O'Neill piece it's a standard kind of diatribe of the most pathetic kind, illiberally dressed with the usual fetid metaphors and silly similes, as he talks of blacking up, the politics of pity, wives of old Victorian colonialists, Christianisers, African tribes, moral adventures as missionaries and revolutionaries, victims and pity tourism ... until you start to wonder if he's ever seen a real conservative colonial Victorian English Christian in action.

Egad sir, we knew how to treat the fuzzie wuzzies in those days. Talk about an empathy tour, we showed them empathy and what for.

Here's how it always ends up in this kind of gabfest:

Palestinian pitiers have no time to think about the inconvenient fact that Hamas is an intolerant political entity that has no time for gay rights or women's equality.

What? You mean they're just like conservatives and fundie Christians banging on about the evils of feminism, and the nonsense of gay marriage?

O'Neill himself can be found doing exactly this when he defended the right of street harassment as a freedom of speech issue. Because after all the right to shout 'nice tits' and 'cute arse' and 'do ya wanna fuck, girlie?' are key elements of male freedom of speech:

Feminism used to be about liberating women and now feminism has become about policing men. Policing men in the workplace Policing men on the streets. Policing men’s speech. Policing men’s thoughts and attitudes. This is actually what you’ve called for. I think it is a great tragedy that feminism has sunk from demanding liberation and equality for women which I 100% support to demanding the closer policing and the authoritarian control of men. (found here in a very funny piece about O'Neill and the comedy stylings of Spiked, as a trained squad of contrarians marching in unison).

Spoken like a first class, paid up member of Hamas.

Spiked, O'Neill's usual home, is equally fond of running pieces about gays, as in Thou shalt not criticise homosexuals:

Today, criticising gays has, as Wendy Kaminer recently pointed out on spiked, been turned into a secular form of blasphemy.

Which is (a) not true but (b) a valiant attempt to allow Hamas the right to berate homosexuals. The poor lads in Hamas have, after all, just been accused of a kind of religious form of blasphemy by O'Neill, when all they want to do is shout in the streets 'hey gay boy, nicely hung, tight bum, wanna fuck'. And who knows perhaps score a night with Lawrence Durrell ...

But then if you want O'Neill in full flight defending the Pope because, quite rightly, the old devil doesn't support gay rights or feminists - between the Pope and feminists and gays, always chose the Pope - you only have to trot off to his 'Pope Benedict is an enemy of the state' for a jolly laugh.

But where's this heading? Well, as always, and sssh, don't mention the wall, and whatever you do don't compare it to the Berlin wall, you end up with this kind of babble:

Instead, everything gets reduced to a Narnia-style story of wicked witches v happy fauns, because this is ultimately about providing vacuous-feeling Westerners with some much-needed momentum in their lives, not about untangling a messy political reality.

Uh huh. As if O'Neill hasn't indulged in plenty of vacuous babble right up to the last moment, when he suddenly discovers a messy political reality. And at that point naturally stops writing, since there's no cheap, easy points scoring by way of abusing liberals, if forced to actually scribble something sensible about a messy political reality.

Now here I have to borrow again from others as to the Spiked strategy:

The masses, working class and sturdy proles are useful bricks which Spiked always keep at hand to hurl at the dismissive liberals. I haven’t yet come across a piece about the liberal fear of and contempt for the EDL only shows how cut off they are from the English masses, but it must be out there somewhere. The history revisionism wing of Spiked is working on very short monographs with the following sub-headings:- “Liberal dismissal of lynch parties as “outrageous and murderous bigotry” only show how cut off they are from the Southern states masses” and going back to the nineteenth century, “Abolitionist dismissal of slavery as “vilely unjust” only shows how cut off they are from the secessionist masses.”

There's plenty more there on the Spiked contrarian persona, at the link above:

5) Waffle at length about how out of touch with, like, working class concerns and shit the libs are by pretending that belligerent stupidity is a class issue.

6) Round it all off with a spurious declaration about how, if only those godawful libs weren't so obsessed with political correctness, they would somehow magically squash the controversy by focusing instead on some unrelated horseshit.

But enough already.

The bible had it right. It's possible to think and argue like a child, but at some point, it's wise to put away childish forms of argument, or else you end up squawking away like one of the more demented loons in a corner of the pond reserved for loud mouths.

O'Neill once fancied himself as a Marxist libertarian - perhaps he still does - which proves if nothing else that he was once a terribly confused puppy. And he still is ...

The problem with contrarian arguments is that in the end it's just a form of self-serving fancy dress rhetoric. Or what some Australians call wanking in public ...

Especially as in this particular matter events in the middle east are outside the control of westerners, liberal or conservative, or anxious bystanders like Israel, and sometimes outside the control of dictators now under siege ...

No wonder O'Neill hastens to assure everyone that Arabs don't care about the Palestinians and that Israel's got nothing to worry about, and somehow it's all the fault of liberals.

Come to think of it, he could be running the NSW state Labor party because here everything's the fault of the Greens ...

But then O'Neill is just one of the spear carriers who turn up with monotonous regularity in the pages of The Australian. Yesterday it was Melanie Phillips rabbiting on about the 'bien-pensant world' in On Egypt the Left are all neo-cons now, and political and defence elites, and the stranglehold of the multicultural victim culture, and the influence of revisionist scholars, and the Islamification of the entire world.

To go through it all, and attempt to reverse her hyper-ventilated arguments and hysterical fear mongering would be to induce the kind of ennui suffered by Macbeth:

I am in blood
Step't in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er ...

It's only when you revert to Phillips' website, here, that you realise she's a full blown loon given to this kind of statement:

It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible that gave us our concepts of reason, progress and an orderly world-the foundations of science and modernity.

And not the pagan multiple god worshipping worlds of the Romans and the Greeks? Oh go pray to a passing burning bush, that should fix everything.

But as usual, confronted by this bunch of British tossers, it's the anonymous editorialist at The Australian who wins the day hands down, as he or she, in It's enough to make us cringe, bemoans the way the ABC gives star billing to celebrity expatriates, and in particular to John Pilger, who got into a dust up with Greg Sheridan (and the hapless Sheridan came off second best).

Today's Australians are comfortable with who they are, proud of their heritage but confident in their place as an independent, sovereign nation.

If the ABC's expatriate talking heads spent more time listening, they'd know that.

Yes, and they'd know that's why The Australian regularly publishes tosh from the likes of O'Neill and Phillips, imported fresh into the antipodes from Britain.

What a load of bollocks. Now pass me a glass of Newcastle ale ...

... and ssssh, whatever you do, don't tell Channel Nine and Ben Elton, or talk about a ratings bloodbath, or mention to the editor of The Australian how we feel about dear old England, its gormless, impotent, writhing and wriggling commentariat commentators, or even its wayward irrelevance and pending bankruptcy ...

(Below: between liberals and Britain making a mess of the middle east, choose Britain. Every time ...)

(And below what news from the Egyptian president, as found here? Well it could be worse. They might yet end up with Nick Clegg and David Cameron, or Kristina Keneally).