Sophie Mirabella, and could Colonel Gaddafi produce such predictable mind numbing rhetoric?

(Above: Sophie Mirabella).

Shocking. Appalling.

There's Sophie Mirabella scribbling furiously in Labor's tax cuts just bread and circuses, and someone in the comments below dares to call her an attention seeking harpy.

A harpy?

In Greek mythology, a harpy ("snatcher", from Latin: harpeia, originating in Greek: ἅρπυια, harpūia) was one of the winged spirits best known for constantly stealing all food from Phineas. The literal meaning of the word seems to be "that which snatches" as it comes from the ancient Greek word harpazein (ἁρπάζειν), which means "to snatch".

A harpy was the mother by the West Wind Zephyros of the horses of Achilles. In this context Jane Ellen Harrison adduced the notion in Virgil's Georgics (iii.274) that mares became gravid by the wind alone, marvelous to say.

Gravid by the wind alone, marvelous to say?

I'm sorry, that's elevating Sophie Mirabella up the mythological totem pole way too far. What's worse, the ancients were divided:

Hesiod calls them two "lovely-haired" creatures, perhaps euphemistically. Harpies as ugly winged bird-women, e.g. in Aeschylus' The Eumenides (line 50) are a late development, due to a confusion with the Sirens. Roman and Byzantine writers detailed their ugliness. (and there's plenty more on harpies at their wiki, here).

Still, the term resonates because of Mirabella's use of bread and circuses in her piece, though being part of the inner suburban elite determined to ruin western civilisation as we know it, we prefer the original poncy Latin panem et circenses.

It was Juvenal who first noted the trend towards pleasing the outer suburban masses:

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

What's comical is the way Mirabella forgets that John Howard was the master of bread and circuses for the middle class, and nothing wrong with that if you yearn for cheap wheat and a little entertainment.

Instead she runs off by rote the standard check list, the litany. There's the free fluff in roofs, the school halls, the illegal entrants (as opposed to the asylum seekers fleeing Liberal party adventurists in Iraq and Afghanistan), tax reform, and so on and on.

The trouble here is that a litany of negativity is about as effective as the current NSW Labor party's campaign against Barry O'Farrell.

I swear if I see another bunch of dumb women inveigled into a dramatic, depressing television commercial, chatting at the water cooler about how he'll ruin the state, or hectoring their obtuse partner about how he'll ruin the state - and never mentioning how the Labor party has already ruined the state - I'll throw a six inch heeled stiletto at the television set. It's bad enough that women are caricatured as the snide bossy ones in the relationship, but caricatured in the name of those nattering naboobs of negativity, the state Labor party ...

Yep, it'll be shoe time and a broken television. That'll learn them, teach 'em a lesson. Oops, can I send the Labor party a bill for the broken TV?

Meanwhile, let me throw a verbal shoe at Sophie Mirabella.

Simple regurgitation of standard offal doesn't feed the average owlet, let alone an interested voter. Perhaps you take your inspiration from Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream:

First, rehearse your song by rote,
To each word a warbling note.
Hand in hand with fairy grace
Will we sing and bless this place.

But it's not enough. There's no warbling in the notes, just a leaden predictability and a grating turgid monotony. No spritely fairy grace at all.

There needs to be a little fibre, along with the corn and the routine diatribe, because diatribes just leads to ungrateful churlishness in the reader.

Try, for example, to outline what you and your party might actually do in relation to climate change, apart from Jensenist and Minchinist denial of its existence, or what kind of panem et circenses you prefer to offer, or perhaps what you might do in relation to tax reform.

Because reading a panoply of adjectives like "desperate, directionless and laughable" is simply tiresome ... if not laughable.

Who knows, unkind people might end up comparing your meanderings to the empty bombast and rhetorical nonsense of a Colonel Gaddafi, which some would think a tad unfair ... since no thinking Australian would compare Australian politicians to a tin pot middle east dictator currently enduring some stress. Though perhaps there's a few unthinking, dumb Australians out there ready to resort to idle-minded abuse ...

You might even sound as silly as Barnaby Joyce getting agitated about today's Newspoll showing that Labor has clawed back the result to 51/49 2PP, with Tony Abbott taking a dive from 36 to 31% in the satisfaction stakes. Poor old Barners thought it was a rogue poll, like the crocodile in the back creek. Even though it came with an astonishing headline in the lizard Oz: Carbon plan gives Labor bounce in support: Newspoll, and even Dennis Shanahan reluctantly confirming the claw back in PM's two-pronged attack wins over voters. That must have hurt Dennis 'the colourful tie' ...

Come on Barners, you can't go on about polls being rogue this week, while the tribe was happily chortling about the very same pollsters doing their very same thing the week before. Never talk about the polls, because there's only one poll that counts (and a thousand and one other political cliches to wile away long rural nights).

You see Sophie, there's nothing so ennui inducing as constant negative political campaigning, as the NSW Labor party is shortly to find out.

And there's nothing so tedious as reading about panem et circenses from a politician who can't seem to produce the most elementary insights into how the clowns in the circus plan to deal with climate change ...

Positivity - yes

Have U had your plus sign 2day?

Positivity - yes

Do we mark U present or do we mark U late?

TAFKAP

(Below: a harpy. Political plans undisclosed).