Miranda Devine redux, a dash of Savva, and a burst from that latte loathing anti-protectionist Trotskyite Gerard Henderson ...

Amazingly, Tim Blair has come up with a very clever insight into the Miranda the Devine debacle still resonating through the full to overflowing intertubes.

The more extreme the circumstances, the more certain it becomes that someone from the conservative Catholic right will write or say something indefensibly stupid.

Yep, to suggest that London rioters can explain their irresponsibility and exercise a 'get out of jail, pass Go, and collect five hundred dollars in looted electronic goods' card, by blaming their absent father, or excusing themselves because of a fractured family, or pointing to lesbians like Penny Wong having children in the antipodes, or to gays wanting to get married down under is surely as indefensibly stupid as it can get.

Aah, that's our man Tim, calling it as it happens, without fear, favour, bias or mindless prejudice.

Oh wait, I see his piece was headed Stupidity of lefty riot apologists.

Damn you hack Murdoch subbie, please get it right, he wasn't talking about the stupidity of right wing Catholic conservative riot analysts at all. He wasn't even thinking of Miranda the Devine's The Problem of a Fatherless Society.

I guess it's left to the bigots to go on abusing and verballing Miranda the Devine for respectfully voicing a truly intolerant, hateful, bigoted, abusive, ignorant, silly, verballing opinion that somehow managed to conflate the London riots with gay marriage and parenting down under ... and they'll have to do it without the helpful, level-headed, evenly-balanced thoughts of Blair.

Well I guess the Devine has been suffering from relevancy deprivation syndrome since jumping from Fairfax to the Daily Terror, so there's method in her madness, even if it means alienating single mothers along with the gay community.

And there's Niki Savva proposing in Both leaders let a crisis go to waste, in today's Australian that her methodology is sound, as Savva praises Julia Gillard for her talk about hard work, decency and effort:

They were forceful messages and they rang true. They are a more pertinent response to the events in England than the bland expression that she was "disturbed" by the scenes. There is an opportunity to say more, without pretending to be expert on what happened there, and to talk about her values, Australian society generally, and to reprise her welfare reform agenda.

Yep, no need to pretend to be an expert on what happened in the UK, no reason to have the first clue, no reason to have lived or studied there, or to back experience with research.

Just draw appropriate lessons from your cluelessness and blather on endlessly about the values to be drawn from abject utter cluelessness.

Or some such stupidity and banality.

Ah well enough with the riotous silliness, let's head off to a high end broadsheet, and the benign company of Gerard Henderson, a hoity toity high minded conservative not given to the wretched stupidities of Blair and the Devine, and his latest outing Ex-blacksmith may be needed to hammer out Senate deals.

Oh dear, the ghost of B. A. Santamaria has emerged from the grave and now stalks the corridors of power in the shape of DLP Senator John Madigan.

Naturally this induces a warm glow of nostalgia in Henderson, as he cultivates a fantasy that after the 2014 election, Madigan might become the go-to man, and at last a decent social conservative of the Brian Harradine kind might have the final say on legislation in the senate, instead of those dreadful greenies:

Last month Madigan addressed the Inaugural Jack Kane Dinner at North Ryde. Kane was the DLP senator for NSW from mid-1971 to mid-1974 and a former DLP federal secretary. The audience was anything but inner-city latté´ types. Madigan addressed the dinner with one of his children on each side of the podium.

Yes, damn you, you inner-city latté´ types, damn you and your taste for good latté´to hell.

And so the slow drip of routine stereotyping continues, until a feisty brew is boiled.

What's that you say? There's no reason a blacksmith and boilermaker can't enjoy a decent coffee? I have a nephew who's a welder and boiler-maker who quite enjoys a good latté´? Sorry, only a Nescafé please, one spoon, and three spoons of sugar and lashings of milk because my sensitive stomach can't stand the taste of strong coffee ...

Where were we? And so what sort of policies can we expect from the latté´ loather?

On economics, Madigan was very much old Labor - of the kind advocated by the likes of Ben Chifley and Clyde Cameron. He told an enthusiastic audience that ''a country is what a country makes''. In short, Madigan believes in Australian industry, even if it has to be sustained by a degree of protection.

Uh huh. Well we look forward to a long series of columns from Henderson attacking Madigan for his primitive cargo cult understanding of economics. When the pond googled Henderson and protectionism, what should bob up but this strange document here:

Almost since European settlement in 1788, Australia has been a trading nation - trading goods and services on world markets. However in the 20th century, we went down the protectionist route and we protected our least efficient industries at the cost of our most efficient industries. By the late 1980s, early 1990s, the Labor government led by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating realised that this was damaging the Australian economy. And they were supported by the likes of John Howard and Peter Costello, who continued to dismantle protectionism when the coalition came to office in 1996.

Who knows if this is by Henderson, but he did take the time to put a black mark against his idol Bob Menzies in The way we were: quiet, maybe, but certainly not dull:

Menzies led the Coalition to election victories in 1949, 1951, 1954, 1955, 1958, 1961 and 1963. He can be criticised for failing to dismantle protectionism.

Oh no, not Ming the merciless protectionist.

Back to Madigan:

On a carbon tax, however, Madigan is not new Labor. He spoke movingly about old people in his home town of Ballarat who frequent shopping malls in the city's hot summers and cold winters because they cannot pay rising energy bills.

Of course back in the fifties, the way we were, when we were quiet but certainly not dull in the bush, we simply endured the heat - who could afford an electric fan - and in the winter huddled beneath a duna made of chook feathers, and if it all got too much, just popped off the twig. Ah we were tough in those days.

These days Madigan might be able to speak even more movingly if the summers get hotter and the winters get colder, and extremes get more common.

And then Henderson produces a doozy, anything to disagree with the ABC:

In one of the few media discussions on Madigan, academic Rick Kuhn told the ABC Bush Telegraph program that upwardly-mobile Catholics associated themselves with the DLP in the 1950s and '60s. This is not the case. The DLP was very much a middle class and working class party then - Madigan's Senate victory suggests that it remains so today.

Yep, there it is in print. The Catholic middle and working class back in the fifties and the sixties in Australia weren't aspirational or upwardly-mobile. Conservative the National Civic Council and Catholic Social Studies Movement might have been, and their spawn, the Democratic Labor Party, equally conservative, but really what Henderson is saying is that bog Irish Catholics couldn't be upwardly mobile or aspirational or want to drink a latté´. (The DLP was substantially, although not exclusively, a party of Irish Catholics - wiki here).

Waiter, bring me another latté´.

I'm feeling the bog Irish genes today, and I need to get ready for the reunion of bog Irish at the family do in Melbourne that's coming up, wherein there'll be the odd bog DLP type, so common and working class.

And so to the stirring Henderson wrap-up:

No doubt some members of the press gallery will find reason to make fun of Madigan's social conservatism. But it is unlikely that senior figures in Labor or the Coalition will do likewise.

Yes, you filthy latté´-sipping reptiles, mock away, but let's all take Madigan's economic protectionism, and the sundry other delusions of the DLP seriously ... there might be a vote in it.

Meanwhile, let us remember that both Gough Whitlam and Gerard Henderson are deviant Trotskyites.

Ah comrade Gough, who'd have thought you'd be the inspiration for comrade Gerard, with your shared attitude to protectionism.

Yes, it's all here, and if you like to click on the images below to enlarge (found here), you can take a walk down Trotsky memory lane with the anti-protectionist comrades.

It's a long way from Miranda the Devine and the London riots but more fun ...