Christopher Pearson, Paul Kelly, Frank Furedi, the anonymous editor, and just another day at The Australian's mad hatter tea party ...

(Above: put it another way. Future ages will wonder at The Australian and its commentariat columnists, as the present age wonders at it now).

Of all the commentariat fowls to visit the pond regularly - common chookus gossipus - Christopher Pearson is perhaps the bird with the richest, if most predictable and banal, rhetorical plumage.

Pearson can be guaranteed to rouse even the fiercest secularist from slumber into sectarian frenzy (especially with sectarianism all the go, as we contemplate the array of other Catholic chookus gossipi doing the rounds, from Miranda the Devine to Angela Shanahan), but today in Besieged emperor tries on some new clothes, it's more of a cavoodle frenzy.

In what's a standard bit of Gillard bashing, Pearson does his best to try out as a script writer for the next series of At Home With Julia, as he sneers at Gillard getting a cavoodle for her birthday, and so taking a carefully calculated step up from the world of Kath and Kim. Yep, you see, in Pearson's world, Gillard lives in the world of Kath and Kim.

Of course if anyone else wrote condescending comparisons about the opposition or its leader, it would produce howls of indignation, and suggestions that the constipated elites are out of touch with the aspirations of the outer suburbs (and yes, Kath and Kim was a major success in demographics beyond its original ABC eerie).

No doubt Pearson has problems with thongs and T-shirts and terry towelling products.

Pearson concludes his piece by citing T. S. Eliot, a typically elitist reference, certainly out of touch with the aspirations of folks in the outer suburbs, though it does give us a chance to note the strange, richly neurotic, classicist, royalist Anglo-Catholic world of Eliot, as outlined in Louis Menand's Practical Cat, for The New Yorker on the occasion of the publication of the letters of T. S. Eliot (sorry, it's inside the paywall, but you do have to pay for quality writing, while the fowl nonsense Pearson peddles remains for the moment free. If you can imagine paying for Pearson, you have an exceptionally rich imagination).

Pearson starts off his hatchet job - it's hard to give it the honorific of a perspicacious column - by seizing on Graham "Swiss bank account" Richardson's recent outing in The Australian, and then proceeds to explain in sneering tones why everything is wrong about Gillard and the Gillard brand, her media advisors, her newly hired spin-doctor, but above all - "last but not least" - her Tim Mathieson ordered cavoodle.

Second thoughts, At Home with Julia might be a stretch for Pearson, perhaps he should consider taking up residence at Woman's Day, where the news that cavoodles have doubled in price overnight might strike a chord.

Oh wait, for that he'd have to be at one with the aspirations of the outer suburbs. Could be tricky. Would they have room for the aspirations of a writer who routinely writes like a wet prat?

Moving right along, readers of Paul Kelly - the boring pontifical columnist, not the slightly alternative singer - might wonder what form of kool aid he or his writers might have drunk to write about Kevin Rudd's towering achievement as PM, in Rudd sounds alarm for G20 summit.

Yep, there it is in print. Towering achievement, and without any modifier, like delusions of grandeur, to accompany it.

Kelly's piece is if course part of The Australian's ongoing current campaign in its current war to claim Gillard's scalp and return Kevin Rudd to the throne. Lately columns harping on this theme have flown like confetti, all pushing the same line. The front page of the rag yesterday, inspired by Graham "Swiss bank account" Richardson's trolling, got terribly excited at the thought of a new ascendancy, and so Kelly is merely doing a Pearson and taking up the trolling:

Reading between the lines of Rudd's comments there is only one interpretation - he fears that Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan are not sufficiently investing in the G20 to address the growing economic crisis.

The sensitivity on this issue is extreme. Rudd's attachment to the G20 and its centrality for Australia is born of his achievements as prime minister.

In this particular mad hatter's tea party view of the world, you have to wonder who's more up whom. Rudd's strutting of the world stage or Kelly reading between the lines.

But when you get to the end of Kelly's immensely dull piece about core messages and crises, you come to this line A salient warning, and you know that there has to be a clear winner, and Kelly's the man.

A salient warning? Of all the portentous bits of drivel you might encounter in The Australian, perhaps these three words are the most offensive, and so the pond issues a salient warning against wasting time with Kelly's idle speculations, all of which manage to take Rudd even more seriously than Rudd takes Rudd.

Meanwhile, moving right along, if you want an even more absurd and preposterous bit of nonsense, why not try Frank Furedi's Too many wrongful claims to be on the right side of history, in which he berates Julia Gillard, Barack Obama, Nick Clegg and Hillary Clinton for using history as a rhetorical device (note: no conservative politician has at any time ever appealed to history, or used the past as a rhetorical device with which to berate the present. Nota bene: this is a laboured attempt at irony, in an attempt to prove the pond can be as silly as Frank Furedi).

From this springboard, Furedi somehow ends up here, deep in the pond, squawking away to his heart's content:

With so much energy invested in upholding the authority of history it is evident that what we are experiencing is a 21st-century variant of the old doctrine of fatalism. This elevation of Fate assigns human beings the unflattering role of deferring to forces beyond their control. Surely there is much more to the human experience than acting out a script casually scribbled down by Fate.

Surely there's more to life than reading Furedi, but each time he bubbles up in the digital ether, we feel this deep, fatalistic desire to read his casually scribbled scripts to see what new levels of fatuous silliness he can reach ...

Surely there's more to the human experience than this fatalistic desire to lose a few more brain cells?

And finally, it wouldn't be the weekend without mentioning the ongoing splendid musings of the anonymous editorialist at The Australian, still reeling from the use of swear words on Q&A, still apparently yearning for a return to the nineteen fifties and the world of Ming the Merciless, and now seemingly with a program that allows a quick search of assorted rags in search of offending words.

Take it away In defence of the asterisk:

We are ashamed to confess that our Expletives Editor has let you down. An audit has revealed that on 11 occasions in the past 15 years, she has failed to delete the letters "u" and "c" when we've published the f-word. We can only admire our colleagues at The Herald Sun, who have kept a clean sheet since 1996, and their counterparts at the Northern Territory News and The Mercury with only one expletive each in print. Sydney's The Daily Telegraph has lapsed four times, the Courier Mail three and The Advertiser twice.

This prim prissy giggling granny or maiden aunt routine is presumably meant as some kind of joke, as the anon editorialist tries to work out how to deal with the word fuck.

Fucking is of course what has led the planet to a population approaching seven billion, and fucking is what most common folk do for entertainment on a cold winter night, and fucking is what most young people aspire to do, and old people regret not being able to do with as much regularity and satisfaction as they once did.

To go all prim and proper about fuck and fucking, like some wayward Victorian maiden, is ... well how to put it ... fucking unbelievable.

But being The Australian, it wouldn't be a day in the office without at once turning it into the culture wars and using it as a club to berate the Fairfax press:

Meanwhile, at the foul-mouthed offices of Fairfax, they seem to mistake expletives for exclusives and curses for courtesy. The f-word has been allowed to flaunt itself 43 times in The Age and 116 times in The Sydney Morning Herald. But for lewd, low and licentious language, The Australian Financial Review tops both of them, assaulting its readers' sensitivities on 135 occasions in the past 15 years. Perhaps this grubby little tabloid should watch its tongue - then again, the markets have been volatile lately.

Speaking of fowl mouths ...

And then being The Australian, they have to revive their cultural war with the ABC:

Enough, already. Robust language is as Australian as vegemite and most of us in the media are known to f . . k up from time to time. But as the ABC's Q&A demonstrated this week, clear language beats gratuitous swearing every time. Besides, overuse will only devalue the currency.

Fuck me fucking dead, fuck that for a joke. The bloody thing is entitled In defence of the asterisk, and then they use a form of ellipsis, which is to say two dots as they fuck up yet again, or f..k if you will.

If you're going to get it right, and defend the asterisk, at least get the f**king thing right and use the f**king thing as you intend, you f**king useless dipsticks ...

Right now my f**king foul-mouthed uncle is rolling in his f**king grave ... but then he preferred a decent fuck to intercourse, congress, fornication or copulation.

You have to admire The Australian, because every day there's a new ideological and cultural war, and every day the mad hatter's tea party gets more extravagant and absurd.

(Below: and so, it being the weekend, a couple of cornball jokes).