Dr. Peter Phelps, Arthur Sinodinos, and reviling ruling elites in order to become the ruling elite ...

(Above: a protest in Times Square in the good old eighties. These days it seems you only need to be fully clothed and holding a condom to send the fundies into a frenzy. See Gay sex. Apparently sexier than straight sex as the ACLers moan and whine about abusive language and cyberbullying. Unlike the notion that gays are Satan's spawn and deserving of a life in hell, damn their evil child-molesting souls. Which isn't abusive language, just the plain unvarnished truth).

Now where were we? Oh that's right, please construe these sentences:

What followed next was a breach of trust, running counter to a long-standing practice between defence ministers and the media. Defence Minister Stephen Smith gave an update of the troubled project during question time yesterday, choosing a time when the full attention of the federal press gallery was focused on parliament. (Defence dodge 'a disgrace').

Shocking.

A full update in parliament to attentive journalists instead of an exclusive to The Australian? What a massive breach of trust, likely to bring about the ruination of civilisation as we know it ...

Meanwhile, the Godwin's Law observers at the pond shifted into overdrive as NSW upper house whip, Dr Peter Phelps, scored a trifecta, managing to drag in Nazism, totalitarianism and Lenin, while discussing evil scientists and the astonishing world wide conspiracy to foist climate science on innocent, trusting punters:

One can see them now, beavering away, alone, unknown, in their laboratories.

Now, through the great global warming swindle, they can influence policy, they can set agendas, they can reach into everyone's lives; they can, like Lenin, proclaim what must be done. (Upper house whip under fire for Nazi slur on scientists).

Thanks to Dr. Phelps, a historian by trade, and so naturally from the humanities, which have always displayed a healthy scepticism for the self-assured absolutism of the sciences, for revealing this extraordinary insight.

What's worse it seems the scientists, now corrupted by government money and political correctness, have become involved in an even grander conspiracy with their newly socialist brothers in the humanities, and totalitarian planning is already well under way.

Naturally, Phelps' speech found fertile soil at the House of Ming the Merciless, where it was reported as a "brilliant" exposé of the great global warming swindle (Global Warming Totalitarians). I guess we should all be thankful that neither international bankers nor the Jews seem involved at this moment of time.

This is the kind of measured discourse we're seeking from raving ratbag loons as a way of elevating the House of Loons to the top of Google hits, as we watch NSW jump from the sweltering frying pan of corrupt Labor to the cuckoo clock fire of maddie Liberals.

Meanwhile, let's pause to celebrate David McKnight's column Role reversal as Liberals belt Labor with class war rhetoric.

McKnight tags the relentless populism of Dr. No and his followers, not least the Murdoch press:

The Australian working class was once oppressed by big business. Today it suffers under the yoke of actors and actresses. Is it just me, or have others noticed that the Liberal Party under Tony Abbott has become the party of class war, class envy and class hate?

In an astounding rhetorical trick, Cate Blanchett is attacked as a symbol of wealth and power for speaking out on climate change ...

Week in, week out, The Australian, and Fairfax fellow travellers like Gerard Henderson take pot shots at inner city elites, educated types, chattering intellectuals and the like, and the pond faithfully records the rhetoric of these blighted souls. It's a thought crime to be educated and live in the city:

Who were the vested interests who oppressed Howard's battlers? It was not greedy banks or ruthless employers. It was ''chardonnay sipping, inner-city elites'', shadowy, all-purpose targets of hate.

If you think McKnight is exaggerating, you simply haven't been reading or listening, and as soon as someone deploys this kind of argument, they are immediately inaugurated into the House of Loons.

The beauty, as McKnight points out, is that by taking over and adopting the rhetoric of class war, old Labor class war rhetoric is degutted:

Today, the firepower of money and privilege still exists. It was exercised brutally in the mining industry's campaign against the mining tax. Yet Labor was paralysed rhetorically. It dared not use ''class war'' rhetoric, even against an industry that employs very few people and whose profits largely disappear overseas.

Today's example of the rhetoric wars is provided by Arthur Sinodinos in Abbott has a window of opportunity:

Punters are not looking to be educated by the Climate Commission, Cate Blanchett or anybody else. They want evidence that someone is listening. Maybe Gillard should have kept her promise to convene a citizens assembly.

Yes, punters certainly (a) don't want to be educated and (b) emphatically not by Cate Blanchett or anybody else.

Sinodinos also delivers another beauty with this:

No wonder politicians have embraced second and third best options in dealing with carbon. That is Abbott's point. He is trying to do something while seeking to assuage public anger at rising energy prices. He is buying time for a global agreement that will galvanise local action.

Yep, that valiant climate science warrior Tony Abbott has adopted a third rate half arsed big government solution to climate change because he's buying time, until he and his party can join in a gigantic global crusade which will galvanise local action.

And if you believe that, why haven't you donated to the international conspiracy of climate scientists?

Sinodinos is a clever class warrior, who deploys more seemly language than the likes of Phelps:

The punters understand that and are willing to do their bit as long as other countries do not get a free ride on our efforts. They instinctively understand that it is complicated for an energy exporter such as Australia and that the burden of adjustment will fall on them rather than the authors of these reports.

The sub-text of course is that the authors of the reports are well-heeled tertiary types, while the hapless punters, lacking any education - or the need for education - none the less have an instinctive understanding, like any rube, of snake-oil salesmen and city slickers with coffee stains on their white suits.

I used to read fairy stories at night, but golly that pitch makes the Brothers Grimm seem like a couple of neo-realists.

These rhetorical tricks have been imported from the United States, where it's now accepted that you can be dumb and proud of it. The trouble of course is when you accept Republican rhetoric and then discover they really do intend to dismantle Social Security and Medicare. That's dumb and dumber.

None have grasped the art better than Sarah Palin, who is currently on a One Nation tour (is Pauline Hanson going to sue?), trailed by a desperate media who don't quite understand why they're trying to follow her on her eclectic, unannounced trail, but follow her they must.

The mystery tour, allegedly an attempt to remind Americans of their past, and their magnificent history, including the Liberty Bell and the Bill of Rights, recently touched down in Times Square for a pizza with Donald Trump (Sarah Palin and Donald Trump's Pizza Summit), which makes you wonder exactly what bit of Times Square history Palin was attempting to discover and celebrate.

Could it be the eighties?

(More nostalgia featuring Times Square here).

As a result, actual conservative conservatives such as George 'blue jeans hating' Wills have begun to ask questions about Palin, and quite fundamental ones which would once only be whispered behind closed doors. George Will: Everyone Knows Sarah Palin Should Not Be Trusted with Nuclear Weapons.

Jon Stewart has naturally caught up with this zeitgeist:

Which brings us back to Australia.

So long as the commentariat keeps on celebrating ignorance and the intuitive understanding of ignorant punters, and berating educated well-heeled report writers who seem to bear an uncomfortable relationship to Lenin or the Nazis, and who are somehow involved in a gigantic international scientific conspiracy, the more desperate Abbott sounds in his quest to sound intelligent on policy matters, especially climate change.

At the moment, everyone knows - somehow through the ether, like rustics aware that a city slicker is in the room - that Tony Abbott should not be trusted on climate change, or a number of other policies, as the loons aggregate around his party.

Sinodinos deep down knows this, and so puts forward a most astonishing and radical proposal:

Abbott has a window of opportunity to trumpet a more positive agenda, building on his budget reply. He must become in the voters' minds the default choice for national leader. This will strengthen and not detract from his attack on the government.

A positive agenda for Dr. No? National leadership? Viable new policies? Won't that mean mingling with intellectuals and inner city dwellers and report writers and city slickers in general?

Which brings us back to Peter Phelps and his choice of words when conducting debates:

Once again the populist wing-nuts have been unleashed ... the laughing hyenas of hysterical populism just couldn’t resist baying at the moon ...

It’s good to see that the loony Left have refilled their tanks of froth and bile. (and so on and so forth here).

And here, as reported in Media Watch when working for that advanced thinker from Tasmania:

It may only be a “pub view”, but we who have to live in the real world (unlike academics) consider that if you’re not fit to walk the streets, then you’re not fit to vote for people who make the laws of our nation for the next three years.
Dr Peter Phelps

A PhD then serving the Minister for State presenting a pub view?

So what's left? Or right?

Perhaps David McKnight could next prepare a column on schizophrenia as it afflicts Liberal party members, torn apart as they are by their insatiable desire to become the chattering class ruling elite, right this minute ...

... and their implacable hostility to the chattering class ruling elite ...

Of such is madness made, driving punters and Parker crazy ...

(Below: the final word to Jon Stewart).