Pauline Hanson, Hal Colebatch, Andrew Bolt, Peter 'the smirk' Costello, and oh joy the pond is full as a goog ...

(Above: and now let us never mock Pauline Hanson's dress sense again. Better still, let's not speak of Pauline Hanson again).

The voters of NSW should offer an apology to the rest of Australia.

The trauma, the despair, the emotional and mental scarring of having Pauline Hanson in the local upper house, squawking away about whatever came into her mind, for eight long years, would have been too much to bear ... though it's possible to detect a deep unhappiness and sorrow in the media, who could have looked forward to easy stories and simple-minded scandals for an eternity ...

Meanwhile, her one time accomplice John Pasquarelli, in Punters despise pollies' stunts, has advised that the new 7.30 team on the ABC, are the good oil:

Chris Uhlmann and Leigh Sales on 7.30 should be given a fair go, as to date they have proved to be objective.

Pasquarelli? Uhlmann? Sales? Objective? I knew there was a reason I no longer watched the ABC but couldn't put my finger on it ...

I thought it was the hideous set, and the standing up and posing, and the wretched Uhlmann interviews, but now I know that it's the objectivity ...

Moving right along, Hal G. P. Colebatch makes a welcome return to The Australian with No forgiving cruel Viet Cong, explaining how brutal and evil the Viet Cong were in the way they went about their business.

Perhaps Colebatch has a relative in the Agent Orange business, or perhaps in the munitions line, given the thousands of civilians who died in the conflict, and seeing how the United States managed to drop a million tons of missiles, rockets and bombs during the Rolling Thunder campaign to achieve this - a figure right up there with the bombs the US dropped during the second world war. But then I guess it's easy to talk about how terror from the sky isn't the same as terror on the ground.

Still sky pilots are just another form of brave warriors fighting according to the codes of chivalry, so they can be invited to march on Anzac Day. And while we're at it, since we're talking of civilised death and civilised fighting, why not invite along Second Lieutenant William Calley, and all those involved in dropping nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the eminently civilised matter of the fire bombing of Dresden.

Meanwhile, since Colebatch is intent on maintaining the rage about the evil Vietnamese, it's a good model for those who want to maintain the rage about those who promoted Australia's participation in the entirely futile and pointless adventure, usually by babbling about the domino theory ... and who even now can't bear to admit that it was a totally futile exercise.

Naturally, Colebatch still, after all these years, wants to have his cake and eat it too. Here's how it's done:

The Australian and allied servicemen who fought and suffered in Vietnam did so in a noble and by no means wholly unsuccessful cause.

They bought the fragile nations of Southeast Asia time to strengthen their economies and democratic institutions so as to turn the region into one of the modern world's great success stories: nothing to be ashamed of.

Now by any normal reckoning Southeast Asia would include the likes of Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Brunei, and if you like you can hunt up and down the region for democratic institutions, but it would take a truly bizarre interpretation of the word to discover genuine democracy in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, or for that matter Vietnam - ostensibly the point of the war in the first place. But that depends on a belief in the domino theory, and more to the point, that Richard Nixon's bombing of Cambodia had nothing to do with what happened to that unfortunate country, or others around it ...

Not to worry. If you want to draw a long bow, you'll find no better English yeoman than Robin Hood or Hal G. B. Colebatch ...

Moving right along, the smirk is back in form with Born again Gillard on the old fogy bandwagon. In a classic case of kettle calling out the pot, the smirk berates Julia Gillard for following the polls and turning into a social conservative.

In the process, the smirk demonstrates a tremendous insight into climate science:

She has found faith, the environmental faith. In an evil world burning fossil fuel a great warming catastrophe awaits us (as hot as the fires of hell itself) which can only be averted through repentance, and the good works of an emissions trading scheme. This is a faith that needs no god. It is a faith for progressive atheists and Christians alike.

Could this be the same pompous sanctimonious soul who delivered a speech to the National Press Club on the 2nd April 2007 sounding an alarm bell to the future in his Intergenerational Report 2: Frameworks for the Future:

One important issue that the IGR covers is climate change and the environment.

Our physical environment in Australia faces significant problems of global warming, water shortages, desertification and soil salination.

Australia is the hottest and driest continent on earth, and it is not in our interests to become hotter and drier.

A deterioration in our physical environment will lead to a deterioration in our economic conditions, not to mention our quality of life...

... There is a consensus around the fact that significant levels of global warming imply losses in GDP over the longer term. While the exact estimation of the economic costs of environmental degradation are extraordinarily difficult to assess, they are costs that we as a government must avoid transferring on to future generations. We must steward our environment between generations just as we steward finances.

Strange, no mention of hellfire back then. Yes, in those days, the smirk talked the climate change and global warming talk, and walked the ETS walk. And not just in one speech, but in many ...

And now he has the cheek to talk about Gillard changing her tune.

Well to use his metaphysical meanderings as a guide, it seems he has lost his faith, his environmental faith, a faith that needs no god, a faith that is useless in helping politicians suffering from dementia and a lack of memory, putting them in a category of hypocrisy to which progressive atheists can only aspire ...

Finally, just to complete the virtuous circle, and complete the Pauline Hanson cycle, there's just time to drop in on Luke Foley punching on in The Punch with Red, Green and Pauline: How Hanson was held back, wherein Foley takes credit on behalf of NSW Labor for stopping Hanson's march to the upper house, via preferencing the evil Greens, who refused to return the favour to Labor (clearly he hasn't been reading David Penberthy, or he'd realise Hanson failed to get up because the Greens had actively preferenced her. Oh yes, Penbo the logic machine at work).

Inter alia, Foley delivers up this remarkable line about Bob Carr ... the greenest Premier NSW has ever had.

It explains in a single line exactly why the Labor party got such a rubbishing at the recent election, and it made the pond's day ... but they'll have to drop these comedy stylings, richly funny though they are, if they want to make the long march out of the wilderness in best Chairman Mao style ...

Still Hanson's disappearance from the barricades will surely bring a tear to the eye of one supporter. Yep, there's Andrew Bolt scribbling Pauline ahead, which means voters got it right this time. Followed by Hanson pipped, the shame is that she's lost to the Greens.

This from the man who said he loves ABC viewers (yes, he actually said it, as quoted here), and who will do his best to ruin Network Ten's appeal to the under thirty demographic on a Sunday? Yep, the very same ...

Well television's never been the same since B. A. Santamaria left the scene, and now we have a modern variant ... a man who'd rather see Pauline Hanson sitting in junket city than the dreaded enemy. Of such stuff are fanatics and fanaticism made ...

(Below: I'm voting for this branding for the show, but you can find others here. Perhaps you might like So you think you can rant better).