David Penberthy, and the answer lies in the fluoride in the water ...

(Above: quick, rush off to get your free copy explaining how the Queen and Adolf Hitler are Darwin cultist greenie soul mates, here).

It's the proud boast of the pond that it's never belonged to any political party, not even in student days, and it's never followed any ideology or theology, not once it escaped the enforced indoctrination of the Catholic church in childhood.

This immediately raises the hackles of true believers, zealots and ratbags fuelled by causes and beliefs, who insist on dividing the world into left and right, right and wrong, and the big end of the egg versus the little end of the egg (oh Jonathan Swift, how you ruined the pond).

The trouble of course with being in the middle and getting carried along by the flow of life is that it's dull. It lacks the apocalypse, the catastrophic, and an assorted bundle of conspiracies designed to spice up the daily routines.

Catastrophe comes along soon enough - one day or another, one way or another, we all die, and the middle is really hard to find in a war zone.

Catastrophists come in all shapes and sizes.

A couple of nights ago you could listen to Phillip Adams, who made his fortune out of advertising, who has spent a fortune collecting Egyptian relics, and who according to his own admissions spends a fortune in petrol travelling between farm and studio, deploring the effects and impact of consumerism, and looking forward to the great disruption that's about to descend upon the earth (The Great Disruption, in company with catastrophist Paul Gilding).

And catastrophe and conspiracy are the friends of the lower form of political life, with paranoia used as a way to herd the sheep.

Point this out and you're likely to get into trouble, as David Penberthy is likely to find with his fine piece of trolling for the gin-soaked The Punch, Tony's flawed friendship with the freaks and flat-earthers.

Trolling? Well you see the readership of The Punch, judging by its comments section, is actually made up of freaks and flat-earthers, so Penberthy is poking a stick at the regular readership.

And he pokes the stick in hearty style as he looks at the people who turned up to the Canberra rally, and notes that along with the salt of the earth:

Many of them were also barking mad.

Not just a little bit wacky, but card-carrying, rolled-gold, fully paid-up fruitcakes who may well have thought they were being followed to the protest by black United Nations helicopters. Maybe they were. Hmm. Cue the theme from The Twilight Zone.

Indeed. Well we'll accept for the moment the use of "rolled gold", which is an inferior form of gold you can read about in Gold filled jewelry, and shouldn't be confused with good quality gold, where the better the carat the better the gold (waiter, bring me some of that 24 carat stuff).

In any case the pond would prefer to think of diamonds (yes, it's not just blondes who think of diamonds), or perhaps fruitcakes of the first water:

The first water in Diamonds means the greatest purity and perfection of their complexion, which ought to be that of the clearest drop of water. When Diamonds fall short of this perfection, they are said to be of the second or third water, &c. till the stone may be properly called a coloured one. (here).

So who were the fruitcakes of the first water attending the rally, and the placards they carried?

But also this: “Only LaRouche’s Homeowners and Bank Protection Bill can save Australia: Act Now!”, Lyndon La Rouche being an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist in the US who holds that Israelite usurers have enslaved the world.

Ah, Lyndon LaRouche and his intrepid band of true believers. You could spend a lifetime - if you had a lifetime to waste - studying the deeper eccentricities of LaRouche, and somehow the cult has extended to the antipodes in the form of the Citizens Electoral Council.

It's easy to tell his followers are mad because every so often - like Mormon missionaries tackling the worst of the heathen cannibals - you can find them setting up a card table in King Street, Newtown to sell their gibberish to the trendies, the hippies, the vegans, the tattooed and the anarchists.

It must be some rite of passage. Ah yes comrade, we got into King street and told those greenie vegans they're soul mates with Adolf Hitler and the Queen of England, and explained how Charles Darwin is a fraud and ...

The pond has a ready explanation of how this cult took hold in Australia. It started just after they put flouride in the water!

But back to Penbo and Abbott, and Penberthy's final point:

... this is the baffling thing about Abbott’s conduct.

He has at his disposal the most extraordinarily rich seam of mainstream discontent over Gillard’s performance, yet he has thrown in his lot with the freaks, fascists and flat-earthers who think Ju-Liar is Bob Brown’s Bitch and should be burned at the stake. Some have accused Abbott of a lapse of judgment. Perhaps he has no judgment on this issue at all, happy as he is to associate with people who regard scientists as evil, and believe invisible international forces have enslaved our nation. As things stand we are set to get rid of a government which has opened itself up to ratty left-wing influence for one which is in bed with the ratty right.

Naturally the fruitloops and fruitcakes at The Punch were outraged. LaRouche somewhere out of the mainstream, Pauline Hanson not still at the centre of politics, except when turning up to a Tony Abbott addressed rally?

Naturally they managed to skew their comments in to a comfortable divide they could handle:

How dare you call hard working aussies freaks. I know a few of these people who went to the rally. They are your every day working class citizens. Your column is sickening. Typical Labor supporter. You don’t agree with them so you just sledge them.

...go back to your labor paymasters and tell them they’re gone mate
can’t wait for the next election to see your smug smile wiped off your face pal.

Penbo, from the way your article is phrased it is obvious that you are a Labor supporter, perhaps you should have declared this in the caveats.

And so on and so forth, except for the odd comment that the silent majority might have been absent from the rally because they couldn't afford to take a day off work (no, I wasn't at the rally, not even for sociological reasons).

Perhaps the most comical thing? The notion that David Penberthy is a died in the wool Labor party supporter ...

But here's the thing. Exactly why would Tony Abbott be comfortable about getting into bed with the ratty batty right?

Well if you look at the commentariat in the Murdoch press, they're quite happy to be associate with people who believe scientists are involved in an international conspiracy in relation to climate change.

Cue Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, Janet Albrechtsen, Piers Akerman, Miranda Devine, The Australian, the tabloids, and that legendary tourer of the antipodes Lord Monckton (the lord that's not a house of lords lord). Happily Monckton is rolled gold of the first water, what with his disdain for climate science and his fervent evocations of international conspiracies, and at one point or another, he and his chums have all collared praise from various Murdoch publications.

The Murdoch press is in fact a haven for the ratty ratbag fruitcake right, and it's got worse these past few years as the Liberal party feel robbed of its birthright to rule and feather bed for its mates, and Tony Abbott yearns for his preciousss ...

The baying from the bleachers has been relentless, and immoderate and nowhere near the middle, and that's part of the reason why Abbott feels empowered to play the demagogue.

And at the heart of it? The denial and traducing of climate change science with the Murdoch press front and centre, and Tony Abbott diligently following from the rear, such that Deltoid now can now boast of having reached The Australian's War on Science 68: getting your science from a chain email.

68! And that's not counting all the bits time and chance have made him overlook.

If you want to see why the world is genuinely fucked, try reading number 68, Jane Fraser's Plainly Jane These Earthly matters, and then put it up against its dissing by Deltoid.

Before she rounds up her piece by worrying about being hit by a cyclist, Fraser does the usual 'I can see the horizon, the horizon isn't curved, therefore the earth must be flat' personal experience routine:

Fraser also has this argument against global warming:

I am not a fan of the idea of global warming, especially after this Sydney winter. It has been the coldest I can remember.

To which Deltoid responded:

Not only is she confusing weather with climate, she's wrong about the weather. June, July and August have all been warmer than the average for the past 30 years.

Aye indeed, shiver me timbers and the blasted parrots came early to feast on the confused flowering cherry this year.

Dearie me, must go and have another drink of fluoride ...

So where does this leave us?

Well of course in due course, if Craig Thomson has anything to do with it, we'll end up with a fearless new leader, quite happy to bay at the moon and the LaRouchians.

Not that there's anything wrong with consorting with hookers, though it might be construed as unseemly for a politician. As the Murdochs are finding with the NOTW scandal, it's the cover up that really counts.

But let's say they manage to ping Thomson, and Abbott gets hold of his preciousss.

Will he straighten up, and turn to the middle, and prove competent?

Well his time as Health Minister for the Howard government was singularly inept, and he remains best remembered for his role as a parliamentary attack dog, a bull pit hound of the feral kind. A role he continues today, absent of any genuine policies, and with a very mixed bunch behind him, content to let him savage the government.

The upside? Well we won't have to endure speculation by Christopher Pearson about Simon Crean becoming PM, or his further explanations of how climate science is wrong.

Instead we'll have the bizarre sight of Tony Abbott proposing to institute a Marxist Leninist solution to the problem.

Oh and if you think this might be a catastrophe, and that the minions of Murdoch, David Penberthy included, can take a fair share of the blame, never mind, we have the perfect solution. Indeed it might be the only solution, and yours for a mere ten smackeroos:

What's that? You believed me?

Hmm, can I interest you in a course of fluoride tablets? You get whiter, stronger teeth, and a ten point increase in your IQ ...

What's that, you've been reading up on fluoride and discovered it's part of a vast conspiracy?

Oops, sorry, how about I send a comment in to The Punch, warning the people ...