Christopher Pearson, Simon Crean, and the deeply perverted fantasy life of The Australian's anonymous editorialist ...

(Above: a Nicholson from May 2003. More Nicholson here).

Every Saturday, it seems, we can now rely on Christopher Pearson speculating on the Labor party, always from the wrong end of the telescope and always with the fate of dear opposition leader Tony Abbott firmly in mind.

It's like a priest or a nun speculating about sex (well hopefully these days priests and nuns are suitably chaste so the metaphor will stick), but however you cut it and what metaphor you use, it's charmingly removed from reality.

Take the header: Early poll could save Labor from total collapse.

Early poll? Save Labor from total collapse? Head off to the abattoir now and save yourself?

Only in Christopher Pearson and Tony Abbott's dreaming.

But it gets better.

In the space of a week the online betting odds on Simon Crean becoming the next Labor leader have shortened from 100 to one down to eight.

This may or may not mean anything, of course, and the sums being wagered are not huge, but let us note it as a straw in the wind.

In some ways Crean's the obvious choice.

Simon Crean the obvious choice?

The sums aren't huge and it may not mean anything, but hey, the wolf's outside, so piggies, let's build a house of straw ...

Only in Christopher Pearson and Tony Abbott's dreaming.

It will be remembered, by the few who care, that Simon Crean bored the pants off everyone back at the start of the noughties when he was elected leader of the opposition in November 2001, and eventually he got rolled without even contesting an election, to be replaced by the mad Mark Latham. Crean then continued to bore the world as Treasury spokesperson for Labor, got the boot from that job, ended up shadow Minister for Trade, and thereafter has bounced around in various positions. He now damps down any enthusiasm and passion that might be found in regional Australia or in the arts (the Hon Simon Crean MP).

The notion that the Labor party would dredge up Crean and catapult him back into the leadership is such a masturbatory fantasy that it makes the use of conventional pornography seem like research into realistic female behaviour.

Only Christopher Pearson could manage it, and what's worse, in public, without benefit of concealing rain coat ...

Pearson has his reasons of course:

I cannot imagine Crean winning the next election against Tony Abbott and neither does anyone else. His real job would be, as the saying goes, to save the furniture. His hardest decision would probably be deciding when to call the election, unless it's decided for him by the exigencies of a hung parliament.

His hardest decision would be when to call an early election, so he can hand over the silverware to Tony Abbott while clutching at some of the furniture? Unless the hung parliament decides they can't stand being bored witless by Simon Crean, it'll be up to him to call said early election?

Uh huh. Waiter, give me some of what that chappie Pearson is on, because egad, it looks like exceptional stuff.

Of course Pearson is simply channeling Tony Abbott, as he seems to on a weekly basis these days:

Despite the view inside the beltway - and in Johns's thesis - that there are at least two more years of the present term still to run and that no government willingly surrenders the Treasury benches, the assumption that the election will inevitably be in late 2013 seems to me mistaken.

The recent experience in NSW, where there are fixed four-year terms and the Keneally government's position just kept deteriorating, is one Labor will think long and hard about before repeating.

Uh huh. Of course according to the polls, if the lemmings jumped off the cliff right now, a lot of the lemmings would go down hard, and it's hard to imagine the position deteriorating any further.

Unless of course you happen to be political pundit Pearson:

A primary vote of 27 per cent with no relief in sight poses the grim question: are the longer-term interests of the party best served by clinging to office?

Whoever next leads Labor may well decide they're not.

And so Simon Crean gallops to the rescue of the Labor party, cuts his losses, and presides over a rump which allows Tony Abbott to rule for a minimum of three terms, perhaps even longer than John Howard, perhaps for all eternity ...

Well when dealing in a rich fantasy life, it's the pond's belief you should cultivate the very best fantasies. Why settle for second best, and the drudgery of maintaining constant rage and Chicken Little routines for the next two years, when you can imagine Simon Crean coming to the rescue?

Pearson's best hope would be to pray for the death of an independent or two, or a Labor party member in a vulnerable seat, but I guess such explicit prayers might sit a little oddly with a dedicated Christian.

But soft, we're interrupting Pearson's dreaming:

Maybe the best course of action would be to provide six to nine months of stable government to show the party's still capable of it, to reclaim its traditional heartland and then take the electoral drubbing it's expecting with as much grace as it can summon.

So there you go, Labor party hacks, anoint Simon Crean and take your whacking, and so fulfil Christopher Pearson's wet dreams of a Tony Abbott rampant ...

There's more - who can resist the sight of Pearson quoting that Labor party luminary Gary Johns, who dared to suggest that changing leaders might be a bad strategy, and so interfered with the Pearson dreaming - but can we just leave these two devotees of the Labor party contemplating the fluff in their navels.

And so leave just enough room to contemplate this morning's contribution to the heart of the nation's fantasy life from the anonymous editorialist in The Australian.

In Only when the tide goes out ... the anon edit offers up this, like the wise Solomon adjudicating on the best way to cut up a child:

Thankfully the tide seems to be turning in the climate change debate.

Where once there were polarised camps -- with one side creating panic and alarm about soaring temperatures and rising sea levels, and the other denying any evidence of change -- now we are beginning to see a more rational debate, with the scientific facts being discussed in a dispassionate manner.

Uh huh. The anon edit then goes on to flail Fairfax journalists, left-wing commentator David Marr, ABC presenter Fran Kelly, for failing to discover that The Australian is at the cutting edge of climate science, and - it seems - for introducing politics into science, a crime the lizard Oz would never commit.

It seems, according to the lizard Oz, that the entirety of the climate science debate can be reduced to one paper and one concurring expert:

His (Phil Watson's) work has been endorsed by Macquarie University climate researcher Howard Brady. "In all cases, it is clear that sea-level rise, although occurring, has been decelerating for at least the last half of the 20th century," says Dr Brady.

All part of the ebb and flow of debate.

Uh huh. And remind us who this Dr. Brady is again?

Well why not head off once more to Paging Dr Brady and see what you can find, and why the lizard Oz places such deep obdurate faith in the opinion of one man.

Offering up such unseemly detail seems too arduous for the fatuous fat-headed anonymous editorialist, preening and posturing and indulging in a self-congratulatory fantasy as deep and as silly as any indulged in by Christopher Pearson.

The Australian as the home of rational, dispassionate discussion of climate science? While at the same time abusing everyone left and centre as Fairfax dissidents and ABC trouble-makers, cardigan wearers and conspiracists? While at the same time endorsing the notion that personal observation constitutes science and so if you stare off to the horizon and can't see any bend in the earth, then surely the world is flat ...

That's surely some kind of deeply perverted fantasy.

Hey, if that's your thing, why not head off to the local second hand book store, and pick up some old Playboys ...

It almost goes without saying, purely for the rational, dispassionate interviews you'll find inside ...

(Below: we keed, we keed. See Climate change: Playboy called it in 1980, which is a damn sight sooner than the anon edit called it at the lizard Oz).