David Kemp, Greg Sheridan redux, and the ongoing war on the dangerous elites ...

(Above: vile law? Now there's a handy form of coarse abuse).

There's some kind of deep psychosis at work in The Australian, and it's on view every day, as it conducts wars with its enemies on all fronts.

A favourite font of childishness and retribution is the Cut and Paste section of the rag - bring on the paywall, bring it on now - wherein quotes are dragged in and assembled in a certain order to smite the foes.

This day it's the enemies of Greg Sheridan who must be smitten, and it's the lot of hapless Mona Elthawy to especially be smitten, and in the process Sheridan's enormous blunder and ignorance on show in Monday night's Q&A can be re-written, and so we now learn what he should have said if he'd had the first clue ...

It's all there in Who knows better what George W. Bush said? George W. Bush or Mahmoud Abbas?, to which the corollary should be, is George W. Bush a born again Christian who talks regularly to his imaginary friend, or is George W. Bush a devout secularist?

But it's the capper quote of the anonymous cut and paster which is most peculiar and a dead give away:

Right Pulse blog on October 3:

Feeling like some Monday night punishment so I have tuned into the ABC's . . . Q&A. Some real nutters on tonight. A Marxist that is making no sense and highly fidgety. Even Tony Jones is trying to shut him up.

You can imagine the anon cut and paster writhing with satisfaction, rubbing hands and cracking knuckles in a Uriah Heep way, thinking, there, that's nailed the Marxists, Q&A, Tony Jones, Mona Elthaway, stray foreign philosophers with a funny peculiar kind of fidgety accent, and all the cardigan wearers at the ABC ... when in reality the pathetic tawdriness of quoting a comment which bears all the hallmarks of a loon blogger (deep in Andrew Bolt la la land) doesn't seem to impinge at all on the lizard Oz's consciousness.

The anonymous editorialist for the Oz also joins in the chase with Minding our p's and q's on Q&A, wherein they chide the ABC for coarse language and note swearwords are often a lazy form of speech.

Calling people nutters or fascists is apparently a much more elevated form of speech, which is no doubt why The Australian features so regularly in a pond written by a loon for loons ...

After copping a shitty cartoon (remember swearwords and coarseness are a lazy form of discourse), the cut and paste treatment, and a barrage of letters going the way of the newspaper, an apparently bruised Robert Manne, in Out of Control: More Bad News, put it this way:

There is, in my view, no other serious newspaper in the English-speaking world that would have responded in the mad, obsessive way the Australian has responded to the publication of “Bad News”. It is as if the paper has been determined to prove my thesis true, namely that it is not only the principal enforcer in this country of the core values of the Murdoch empire – market fundamentalism and American global hegemony – but also that it is now so boastful and bullying in character that it cannot rest until it feels that those who have dared to criticise it have been crushed. In addition, the response has confirmed another hypothesis of the essay: the paper’s cult-like character. The manic response of the Australian to “Bad News” makes it clear that even its most senior journalists cannot bring themselves to tell its editor-in-chief that his behaviour is not only doing harm to his personal reputation but is helping to destroy the credibility of their paper in the eyes of the observing, discerning public.

Indeed. The only surprising thing is that Manne claims to have read the rag assiduously over the past thirty years, and is surprised by the feral, cult-like response to his piece.

Apparently he hasn't been reading it as closely as he fancies.

When it comes to war and the mad, obsessive way The Australian goes about its business, it takes its tone from the aggressive, pugnacious, in the face stylings of Andrew Bolt.

What's curious is the way the minions of Bolt feel the need to go out and troll the world, if there's the slightest hint that their hero might be under some kind of attack. Reading the comments in The Monthly for their plug for Anne Summers' forthcoming profile of Bolt (Andrew Bolt Profile in October issue) is more interesting than reading the puff piece, because it's wall to wall trolling of the "fidgety Marxist making no sense" kind.

Follow the link there to an Age puff piece about the Bolt profile - Bolt an opportunist keen on Fox News, says writer - and yes, it is a relatively innocuous puff piece recycling some of the tasty bits from the Summers' piece (including a comment on Bolt's EQ) - and you get the same wall to wall trolling in favour of Bolt.

Stroll over to Stephen Mayne at Crikey asking After a phenomenal peak, is Andrew Bolt in decline?, and again the most interesting thing isn't Mayne's by now standard demolition job on Bolt, or his helpful reproduction of the IPA advertisement dropped into The Australian in support of Bolt - how bizarre - but the rampant trolling in favour of Bolt in the comments section below.

It's as if a flock of Indian mynah birds, squawking and territorial, have been let loose in the garden, determined to shit on everything in sight (reminder: a cartoon about shitting isn't a coarse or lazy form of debate).

Well the good news about Bolt is that his television ratings are dropping. When we last caught up with the news in the #LOLBolt quarantine zone, it seems the Bolter's ratings had then reached the level of the banished Video Hits previously occupying the morning slot (and the afternoon repeat wasn't doing much better). In the cruel cut and thrust world of television, if you believe in a free market and what a free market is saying to you, Bolt's show should be gone by Xmas.

If on the other hand it survives ... well, you'd have to ask why anyone would bother to keep on a limp wounded demagogue at some expense in a way that makes very little commercial sense. Back at the end of August, the Bolt watchers provided this nifty chart:

But there's commercial reality, and then there's relentless warfare, and just like Bolt, once The Australian sinks its teeth into an issue, a bit like one of the uglier American pit bull terriers, it can't let go.

Typically, it acts like one of those rolling stoppages that causes such inconvenience to travellers, and rolls out a series of commissioned pieces all striking and slashing away, and designed to prove the rag's current blinkered, one sided, warring with all point.

So yesterday in the matter of Bolt, it had the splenetic Brendan O'Neill spluttering and gnashing his teeth in an utterly predictable way in Silence of the illiberal lambs, moaning how a punch in the chops for Bolt was actually a massive slap in the face for freedom of thought and freedom of expression. As usual, it's the elites that cop the blame:

The most shocking thing about the Andrew Bolt case is not the judge's decision but the slavish, unquestioning acceptance of it by huge swaths of Australia's cultural elite.

This is of course a gross distortion of reality, but why let reality get in the way of a Brendan O'Neill state of siege and shock.

Naturally it's only a quick hop and a step from talking about uppity blacks to talking about dangerous Islamics, Danish cartoons, effete liberals, homophobic Christians, irrational hate-filled feminists and so on and so forth ...

What a terrible way to run society. We need to go back to allowing people to believe and say whatever they choose. Anything less is an insult to democracy.

Indeed. Bring back Adolf Hitler, the pond says, so we can sort out the question of the Jews, the effete liberals, the homosexuals and the feminists, and the sooner the better ...

But of course one bleating O'Neill doesn't amount to much more than a sparrow's fart on the front line (remember a shitty cartoon isn't a corse form of argument), and so today we have the pleasure of reading David Kemp advising us that Vile law should be abolished.

Vile? As in the dictionary definition, loathsome, disgusting, morally depraved, ignoble or wicked, miserably poor and degrading, wretched?

Dearie me, and there was Kemp and his cohorts sitting on the benches for a decade or more allowing this vile law to stand unmolested. How vile of them ...

Well you won't gain any more insights into the matter by reading Kemp. This time instead of the elites, we head off into a different kind of la la land:

It was not racial hatred but class hatred that raised the guillotine during the French Revolution, or when millions were starved and slaughtered in Stalin's attack on the "wealthy" peasants, or in Mao's collectivisation, or in his vicious Cultural Revolution, or in the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Uh huh. Please explain what this got to do with Bolt and the act in question?

Nothing much, but no doubt it makes Kemp feel good to get it off his chest, and how pleasing that it suggests Kemp is on the side of Marie Antoinette, and the peasants should have been happy with cake, royalty and the status quo. Dear lord, all that class hatred, and the French nobility so nice and obliging ...

There's loads more, all bizarre, over the top and unkempish, in a Kempish way, concluding with this resounding piece of rhetoric:

The processes of this law I find obscene in the full meaning of the words: offensive, loathsome, ill-omened, disgusting.

Yep, that'd be the law Kemp and his cohorts allowed to sit on the books for a decade or more ... and that'd be the law which sees Bolt elevated into a righteous sanctimonious martyr, St Andrew of the cloth eared ...

Of course some might think that the Bolt column in question was offensive, loathsome, ill-omened and disgusting, but of course that would be to coarsen the debate and use offensive language, typical of the chattering elites.

The end result? The opinion pages in The Australian, always filled with suppurating rage and vile words and obscene extremities, end up reading like the trolling vigilantes patrolling the intertubes to save their martyr and smote the wicked for their unkindly words ...

Who'd have thought we'd end up quoting David Penberthy (Penberthy: Andrew Bolt, you've got it wrong):

In my personal view journalists should examine tensions in society, not amplify those tensions. Bolt is a one-man amplifier. He has somehow got it into his head that with significant column inches and online space at Australia's biggest-selling daily newspaper, not to mention his own TV show, he is the victim of a conspiracy of silence, and has been ganged up on by the elites.

If you wield that kind of power you're not a victim of the elites. You are the elites.

Indeed, and in that tall poppy way beloved by Australians, it won't be the elites who decide on Andrew Bolt.

It'll be the ratings ... and the radio station finances ... and someone in the Murdoch empire finally working out that if you want to sell a newspaper to the high end demographic elites, then taking the part of an unseemly bar room brawler, and berating the elites on a daily basis for missing the point isn't much of a business plan ......

Let the Bolt trollers, that "army of abuse", deal with all that how they will ...

(Below: did someone mention the French revolution and women on the battlefield? Hmm, how did Neil James get into this column, when liberty is such a fine inspiration for Andrew Bolt? Never mind, it's a fine Delacroix vision of liberty for the thinking elites).