The daily war on the left liberal agenda continues, as you'd expect from a family fiefdom that imagines it's a symbol of a free press ...

(Above: The Australian on the warpath today, with its usual orchestrated sing a long).

It says something about the United States presidential election campaign - still so far away that there's an eternity of suffering to come in the phoney Republican wars - that a man who wears strange underclothes, and believes in strange stories about gold tablets and the resurrected Jesus ministering to the Nephites in America appears as one of the saner, more balanced candidates, with some appeal across the aisle.

It says something about the Fairfax press that Paul Sheehan continues as a member of its commentariat, and continues to blight each Monday with a round of depressing, gloomy, generally grumpy views of the world, usually tinged with ethnic prejudices of the lazy, bludging Celt and lazy, cheating Greek bashing kind.

But this week in Even lust loses in this story of dirt, Sheehan plays the role of common fishmonger delivering dirt, aka common gossip, about billionaire Richard Pratt and those around him. As befits a common gossip, there's clucking and tut tutting and a moral to the story, though the moral seems to be that we should sympathise with the filthy rich and their associates, because the more money you have, the less latitude society offers you, until it all falls away. If only the pond had some of that less latitude ... or more money ...

Meanwhile, over at The Australian, sundry members of the commentariat maintain the rage in the opinion pages, all brooding in one way or another on the matter of Andrew Bolt. Yep, it's a standard sing along, so class, get out your music sheets, and let's follow the notes.

The tags on the summary page show the way to conduct the argument. Confronted with a bald statement like The Bolt case reveals leftists prefer symbolic victories to dealing with disadvantage, what can you say? Could leftists chew gum, which is to say deal with disadvantage and enjoy symbolic victories all at the same time?

Seems not.

As generalisations go, it's as silly as saying the Bolt case reveals twits at The Australian prefer rhetorical arguments to dealing with disadvantage.

Then when you get inside Chris Kenny's piece Silencing dissent won't resolve indigenous issues, you get a wondrous bit of conflation, and inflation.

The federal court's finding in relation to Bolt has drastic implications for free speech, and it almost goes without saying, it is frighteningly Orwellian.

I propose, "the [n]th rule of cynicism:"
As a political conversation progresses, the chances someone brings up 1984, Brave New World, or some other dystopic novel, approaches one.

Truth to tell, as someone else remarked, there's never been such a yammering and a blathering, with Bolt preening and posing as a martyr and sounding off all over the place, and the screeching and the yowling coming from the minions of Murdoch getting ever more desperate, exaggerated and pitiful. Oh and dissembling, never forget the dissembling:

Much has been made of the findings about errors of fact. Errors are always unfortunate and sometimes egregious but in this case they are hardly the central point.

Well in Murdoch land, I guess it's far to say that errors of fact are hardly ever central to the point. They rarely seem central to the point when discussing climate science, for example, not when any any rube might be invited in, fresh off the street, to have their denialist day.

For the rest of Kenny's piece, there's much blather about leftists and liberals and the leftist liberal agenda, which presumably encompasses the gay agenda and the feminist agenda, and perhaps even the agenda for the public school tuck shop committee meeting.

Naturally there's also an activist judge, who displayed his activist agenda by interpreting a law left on the books by the Howard government for a decade with what others might see as a routine interpretation and following of the words of the legislators ...

But when you get a wind up Chinese alarm clock like Kenny really wound up, there's no stopping him, and so we get a detour via Bill Henson's nude photos:

The modus operandi of the morally vain liberal Left has always been to trumpetits tolerance by denouncing others. Still, that is the point; we must be allowed to offend each other.

Morally vain?

More, to the point Trumpetits? Sic, so and thus, but it has to be said, the vision of trumpet tits conjured up by the typo quite distracted the pond from Chris Kenny's most serious and solemn points.

Which somehow took us on an even grander tour of the Hindmarsh island affair and an even grander defence of the Northern Territory intervention.

When shocking abuse of indigenous children was revealed, triggering the Northern Territory intervention, the debate was not about repairing communities and providing hope for children, but about indigenous rights and discriminatory paternalism.

Of course if you were seriously libertarian - as opposed to paternalist, discriminatory and frighteningly Orwellian - and you invoked the Larry Flynt defence - defend the worst you've got in the name of free speech, then you would rightly deplore the Northern Territory intervention.

You'd even argue for the right of blacks to enjoy access to pornography in the same way whites do. Since certain forms are legal, and since even Catholic priests have access to it, no matter what it might drive them to do with altar boys ...

But Kenny's piece isn't about logical positions, it's just a standard, all to typical lizard Oz opinion piece, about the evils of the left liberal agenda, and how people, especially indigenous folk, can only succeed by triumphing over environmental and cultural policies to somehow arrive at an economically self-sustaining future ... though how long self-sustaining policies might last in a completely fucked environment can only be discerned by the more adept acolytes of Murdoch.

Meanwhile, moving along to Wesley Aird and More transparency, less hypocrisy, he's found the right people to blame in the Bolt affair, and it's the pesky professional blacks, because we all know that the real professionals in race-based discrimination are Aboriginal people.

Remember, always shoot the victim, it's the only way to keep the place tidy.

The tag at the end of the piece tells you that Aird is a member of the Gold Coast native title group, but it would have been grand of the editorial team to remind us that Aird is a board member of the Bennelong Society, working with that luminary president Gary Johns, as they did at the bottom of his piece Great Aboriginal con.

Aird, who found himself on the Howard government's tokenist National Indigenous Council, is a reliable man when it comes to finding people to step up to the Oz plate, with a long history of columns berating despicable left liberal agenda, sorry day, and so on and on, and most particularly the broken "indigenous industry", which is of course an insidious part of the left liberal agenda.

Not for Aird a flexible inclusiveness:

If we are ever going to get anywhere then we need to talk about issues such as identity and entitlement. We need to have a collective understanding of what it means to be indigenous.

To illustrate the confusion, not even the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a uniform approach for the national census when it comes to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

But at a time when we need tolerance and discussion about indigenous identity it is clear that debate is extremely risky for fear of being taken to court.

Yes, of course. It's much more important to have tolerance and discussion of Andrew Bolt's offensive meanderings about indigenous identity, personally assaulting sundry people with factual errors, than to sympathise without people who seem to have thought that they might somehow be indigenous.

And as for that question of flexibility and individuality and individual circumstances? No, no we must have a rigorous, one policy suits all approach of the usual blinkered kind ...

Naturally these valiant attacks on the liberal left agenda leads us to Mark Day's No one can deny benefits of free press, to which wags might add a corollary, No one can deny the benefits of a press free of the baleful influence of the Murdochs.

After brooding about the high flown British inquiry into the press, and then the more prosaic, mundane questions being asked by the low rent antipodean inquiry, inevitably Day adds his two cents on the Bolt matter:

I accept that these are relevant questions, but I do not accept that they should be answered in the affirmative. We talk of a free press, but in fact it is anything but free.

Indeed. In the antipodes, it's largely owned by Chairman Rupert, and it's anything but free, and hopefully will be even less free once the paywall clangs into place (why here we are in October, and the paywall soon to land like an early Chrissie present), so the pond can pay what's worth. By renewing subscriptions to quality international magazines ...

Journalists and publishers must find their way through a minefield of legal restraints on what they can say, ranging from defamation to the Racial Discrimination Act, as the Bolt case attests. The last thing we need is new restrictions.

Yes, I guess in much the same way as the last thing we need is fact checking, or sub-editors, or prominently featured corrections for egregious errors and shameless assaults on people's integrity. Because truth to tell, in the online world as well as in Murdoch tabloids, it's now the extremists who drive the hits and the distortions, and who never bother with what might have been described as the conventional virtues of factual news reporting ...

It is more popular than usual at the moment to condemn the media for its faults and shortcomings, and the reasons are understandable. A loss of trust linked to the phone hacking and a fiercely partisan political environment are two major causes.

But we must not lose sight of the benefits a free press brings society as it lifts the lid on government secrets, corporate and public corruption and shines a light in places where crooks, crims and politicians would prefer darkness.

Uh huh. Well it would be even better if we never lost sight of the way that a shackled press provided chairman Rupert with unholy access to, and influence upon politicians in the UK (just as Fox News hoes its own path in the United States). Nor should we lose sight of the way that the Prime Minister of Australia trotted off to a News Limited private briefing to give them an insider's treat - an elitist big city treat you might say if you liked News Corp rhetoric - in a way that's far more privileged than that afforded the average Australian.

And we should never lose sight of the way that an owned and abused press can attempt to hide its own corporate secrets and its private corruption, and avoid shining a light in places where grasping, self-interested proprietors would prefer darkness.

But I guess if ever there was a willing terrier, ready to bark up any tree for his master, Day's your man:

Even the rambunctious tabloids can be a force for good. Until the phone hacking you could win a debate that the News of the World's contribution was positive, even if its methods were, in an Australian context, questionable.

The evidence Day leads with? The Pakistani betting scandal, and exposing the desperate pathetic Duchess of York to the world, using secret recording devices? These are the scandals that justify illegality and ruined lives? That the best the NOTW has got?

How about the scandal of an intimidatory proprietor in bed with Tony Blair, seeking to gain a stranglehold on pay television in the UK while encouraging middle eastern adventurism? Nailing politicians to the world in the interests of commercial advantage and unholy power should be overlooked while the tabloids bay at a few cricketers and an ex-royal, and do gotcha honeypot entrapments that would do the secret service proud?

Well for for a more sensible answer to that, you'd have to read The Guardian or some of the other rags doing the rounds, which makes the pond grateful for there being an alternatively owned press still at large in the world.

And for the moment a relatively free intertubes, which reminds the pond of why it will never vote for a Labor government so long as Senator Conroy and his giant internet filter remains lurking in the shadows.

Bugger an already owned press with a pre-set agenda, routinely carrying out its left liberal bashing wars of the day, and as in the Bolt matter, always assuring us that the freedom of a right wing demagogue is supposed to guard the freedom of us all.

If that's a free press practising freedom of the press, for the love of the absent lord, let's just keep the intertubes relatively free ... so that there are places where the political guards of the political inmates can be guarded ...

Crikey, long may they vex and beard the solemn priests who somehow think a daily gang tackle of the left liberal agenda indicates the lucky country enjoys a free press.

Free press? as John Elliott might ask. Pig's rectum, as he might answer ...

(Below: a nice sketch accompanying Heather Stewart's When you run a multinational like News Corp as a family fiefdom, expect to run into trouble, though we personally would have given it the header When you pretend a multinational family fiefdom like News Corp represents a free press, expect to run into trouble).