The commentariat, and beware creeping socialism or possibly the Under Toad ...

(Above: click to enlarge, any brain damage the responsibility of the clicker).

So many distressing things in the news of late.

There was BHP making a cool $22.5 billion profit in a year, around half the cost of the NBN, (a project designed to have a lifespan a little longer than a year), as a way of proving once and for all to all those leftie greens out there that the mining industry is having the most miserable time, with the suffering beyond the imagining of these pitiful unempathetic wankers. Roll back the mining tax, roll it back now.

Naturally The Australian came out with the correct spin for such a dire situation, as Matt Chambers produced Sting in BHP's $23bn record


Yep, Chambers delivered a blunt warning - much more effective than a sharp warning - that rising wages are fuelling inflation, proving once again that when examining the entrails, always look for the bad news as a way of distracting from the gigantic, ginormous size of the profit.

Indeed where would we all be without Harry Potter's magic cloak of invisibility and dire warnings that rising wages are fuelling inflation and could hold back an economy already suffering from falling productivity.

Oh it takes a special skill to produce doom and gloom, and urge the hamsters back in to their cages to increase productivity in the dire circumstance of a record profit.

Then there came a most dreadful thought, inspired by Bernard Keane's musings in Shadows of '75 creep across the political landscape.

As we all know, Malcolm Fraser, suffused with guilt over the way he seized power, in time came to be the most insufferable bore of any retired PM, full of sanctimonious righteousness and sounding like a pompous member of the landed gentry any time an issue crossed his path.

Even when he was right, it was easy to maintain the rage. If there was a cause worthy of guilt, you could find Fraser hovering like the ghost in Hamlet, or Banquo looking to join the evening meal ...

Could it be that Tony Abbott, after his recent displays of insufferable boorishness, attains power, turns out to be an extremely indifferent PM, much like Fraser, and then spends his latter years boring us to death with his Macbeth-like guilt for the way he seized the throne, scored the precioussss, and then didn't have a clue what to do with it?

Well stranger things have happened to Catholics who pretend to have a conscience. It's fair to say the average rugby league thug would shrink from the thuggee behaviour currently on view in the Liberal party, and possibly would have more nuanced plays in mind than Abbott, who can only think of coat hangers and knee caps and fingers up the bum (there, and you said we know nothing of sport).

Why it's sent poor old Malcolm Farr, token centrist at the gin-sozzled Punch, into a tizz in Scent of an election fuels Tony's faux outrage.

But enough of this. Today we announce a serious problem confronting the commentariat, the Murdoch press, and the world at large.

Creeping socialism!

This needs to be rooted out and expunged before the creeping socialists ruin record profits with high wages and falling productivity and declining profits, and it needs to start now, and our first port of call is the anonymous editorialist at The Australian as he or she scribbles Grounding a Qantas takeover.

The anon edit is alarmed at the prospect of normal capitalists going about their duties, performing a private equity takeover and degutting Qantas, the national airline which happens to be a private airline but somehow still gets called a national airline.

Where's Mitt Romney when we need him in the antipodes? Why he'd have it gutted and jobs cast to the four winds in a trice.

So we have a first class example of agrarian socialism:

Whatever undertakings might be made during a takeover bid, the inevitable asset stripping and scaling down of less-profitable arms of the airline would leave many Australians in regional and rural areas without comprehensive services.

As any decent member of the commentariat would know, the correct answer is 'well let them walk.'

Or if Brendan ' if you don't like the Murdoch press, start your own newspaper' O'Neill were writing the piece, the correct answer would be well let them start their own regional airline - or perhaps revive East-West Airlines, that noble business once based in Tamworth the heart of western civilisation (and they still have a pretty good pilot school at the 'drome).

But it gets worse, as the nutty anon edit preaches even more heresy of a fruity socialist kind:

... private equity firms have little interest in the core businesses of the companies they take over. It was no surprise, for example, that those who bought the Nine Network sacrificed the quality current affairs program Sunday and The Bulletin magazine. Unlike traditional capitalists who took risks in the marketplace to build long-term wealth by producing goods and services and paid dividends to shareholders, private equity mavens tend to be risk-averse and more interested in applying sophisticated accounting techniques to grab quick profits.

Oh dear, how dire and dreadful. Traditional wealth-nurturing capitalists versus parvenu johnny come lately nouveau riche capitalists. A distinction worthy of Trotsky warning us against capitalist profit-takers.

Perhaps Qantas should revert to government ownership?

Qantas has benefitted exponentially from its privatisation.

Yes, yes, that would be a step too far for creeping socialists. Must be canny in our creep.

So what to do? Perhaps call on the government?

Any significant ownership change, however, must be subject to a strict national interest test.

Yes, yes, let's call on the government to act.

Creeping socialism with agrarian socialist tendencies, and accompanying hypocritical cant:

The Australian supports the free market and believes that, generally, takeovers are not the business of government.

Talk about having your free market cake made out of socialist eggs and flour ... along with a hearty vote of confidence in Alan Joyce's "good management". By golly, that Barnaby Joyce is an inspiration to all.

Now how long before The Australian joins in the cry to make vegemite Australian-owned so we can all sleep soundly at night?

Meanwhile, there are other examples of creeping socialism, as Miranda the Devine pitches a product in Pouring cold water on a red-hot issue. It seems a mob called FireWatch have the perfect technology to reduce bushfires ... and even though some tests of the product didn't go so well - they were set up to be a flop, according to the owners - all it would take is for the government to drop a cool $300 million on a FireWatch network and all will be well. Well sort of well, because results comparable to Germany can't be guaranteed.

Yep, once again, it's all down to the government.

The answer lies not in the soil but in the federal government dropping a cool 300 mill all on Miranda's word - bugger the trials, let's have another one - and it leads that eminent socialist Miranda the Devine to ask Has Australia gone mad?

Well with so many covert and overt socialists in the Murdoch press, there can be only one answer. Yes Australia has gone mad, and creeping socialism is to blame ...

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Farrelly has only just realised that she's in love with Penny Wong and that Miranda the Devine writes repressive gibberish, as revealed in Let's shoot straight on gay marriage:

Never mind that we don't yet have a demographic breakdown on the London rioters, or that same-sex marriage is not actually legal in Britain, or that legalising gay marriage is unlikely to increase the incidence of fatherless families, or that fatherlessness by itself has never been shown to cause ''Hobbesian chaos''.

Never mind that Spain has legal same-sex marriage, and no such riots. Never mind that polygamy was standard Old Testament practice, that the church is demonstrably rife with paedophilia or that Jesus had two fathers. Never mind the sheer illogic of arguing that straight people must be married in order to nurture children but gay people, even when procreating, must not.

Hah! As if logic has anything to do with it!

For me, the question is this. Why do people feel this need to run my life, as well as theirs? Why do they feel dissent as a form of attack? The answer is not God, per se, or even belief. It's this sense of chosenness.

It seems reasonable to me to fight for the right to run your life your way; to marry and procreate and worship by your own lights. But it is entirely unreasonable, absent some genuine threat to social order, to force these values on others.

What's this? Liberal values with a small 'l', quite possibly verging on the libertarian?

Well the socialists in the Murdoch commentariat will have a thing or two to say about that ...

After all, we need rules:

Hang on, hang on. These rules are too simple. Let's sex them up a little. For starters:

No animal shall drink alcohol TO EXCESS
No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets
No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE

Four legs good, two legs BETTER! Four legs good, two legs BETTER! Four legs good, two legs BETTER!

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

The government shall do nothing except when the commentariat demands it do something.

The government is to blame for everything, especially when it does something in response to the commentariat, who demand it do nothing, except when it should do something.

Capitalism is good, except when it is bad.

The NBN is outrageously expensive, but BHP is just making a living.

Agrarian socialism is true and just, except when it is wrong, but it is right when Miranda the Devine and Barnaby Joyce say it is ...

Oh yes, and great profits mean any mining tax is bad ...

And a huge profit shouldn't mean the hamsters/rats/squirrels get more than a half hour break from their work in the cage ...

Meanwhile, for those who came in late, and were puzzled by the reference to the Under Toad in the header, let John Irving explain:

In The World According to Garp there is a summer scene by the ocean, an episode wherein little Walt, so very young and vulnerable, is repeatedly warned by his parents to beware of the undertow along a stretch of dangerous shore. The undertow, they remind him, is very wicked today. Look out for the undertow. One morning they spot their small son alone on the beach, staring intently at the incoming waves. When asked what he's doing, he says, "I'm trying to see the Under Toad." All along he had mistaken the correct word and mythicized the fear it signaled into a creature of invisible but monstrous being. And Walt is right. Arising as if from the sea, the Under Toad squats upon the world's rim, bloated and watchful, the sign of a new star under whose baleful dispensation life must hence-forth proceed. (here)

For Under Toad, insert creeping socialism.

Put it another way:

Golly, the Devine is right, the whole world, and the pond along with it, has gone mad, and creeping socialism, or perhaps toads, the cause of it all ... and it's still only Thursday!