Greg Sheridan, Janet Albrechtsen, and hate media keeps on pumping out the hate ... and the ignorance ...

(Above: an easy quick quiz question to start the day by sharpening the brain. Spot the goose in the photo above.

A few clues. Two are pointing at the goose, and the goose is holding up his hand to say you got me good and feathery.

Alternative, more effective way to wake up: have a good strong coffee).

So there'd Greg Sheridan on Q&A chucking a hissy fit, and getting his knickers in a knot, as a result of Mona Eltahawy talking of a Christian brotherhood and daring to suggest George Bush had once said "God told me to invade Iraq" ...

Greg Sheridan: You made it up.

Mona Eltahawy: No, I did not make it up.

Greg Sheridan: There's something in your coffee.

Well whatever Eltahawy has in her coffee, it's way ahead of what Sheridan uses for a brain. Back in 2005, the story was all the go, as you can find by referring to Ewen MacAskill in The Guardian leading with George Bush: 'God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq'. Or Rupert Cornwell in The Independent with Bush: God told me to invade Iraq, or in dozens of other rags that ran with the BBC show that broke the story.

If Sheridan had his wits about him, at least he could have said the story came from Palestinian officials, and he didn't believe them, but like a mug punter, he accused Eltahawy of making it up. No way back from there, not as the cameras roll and catch the ignorance in action ...

Sheridan would have had an equally hard time dancing around the story that Bush and Blair hunkered down for a prayer session at the crucial summit in 2002 at which the invasion of Iraq was agreed in principle. Or maybe they were just praying for advice on the best way to eat a pretzel ...

And how about this Bush-ism?

Another telling sign of Mr Bush's religion was his answer to Mr Woodward's question on whether he had asked his father - the former president who refused to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq after driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 - for advice on what to do.

The current President replied that his earthly father was "the wrong father to appeal to for advice ... there is a higher father that I appeal to".

What a pity he didn't appeal to the lesser father, and get more solid, realistic advice, and perhaps avoided the sordid mess that Iraq became.

Why Sheridan should be surprised that a born again Christian believes he talks to and gets advice from god, and indulges in prayer fests with his absent friend is an even greater mystery than the nature of the trinity.

Hasn't Sheridan ever met a born again? Doesn't he know that their imaginary friend guides them in all they think and do? This isn't rocket science, and yes, I've lived with a born again, though not for long after they went clap happy (oh dear, was it me, was it the coffee ...?)

Amazingly Sheridan is listed as The Australian's foreign editor, "the most influential foreign affairs analyst in Australian journalism". Does influential encompass peddling the most fatuous and ill-informed twittery on television?

Ah well it's just another day in la la land, off with the pixies and the gurus at The Australian, and today is of course Janet Albrechtsen day. Think of that, Greg Sheridan and Dame Slap shaping your news of the day. When was the last time you were completely and utterly befuddled? When will you ever think again?

Dame Slap is in typically fine form in Yes, there's a silver lining to PM's green salad days, though it's a piece she could have written in her sleep, and perhaps did.

It's yet another waltz through the federal political landscape, and it concludes with this resounding flourish:

In short, we have learned about Brown's clever tactics as Greens leader using an environmental cloak to hide a much broader, more radical agenda to change the way we live and work to reflect the party's anti-commerce, anti-growth beliefs. We should be eternally grateful the Greens have educated us so well these past 12 months. More voters now understand that former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore was right when he said that when the Cold War was over and the Berlin Wall fell, the leftists moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas: agendas that have more to do with opposing capitalism and globalisation than with science or ecology.

Ah yes, the wretched watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside, and their wretched radical agenda.

Where would we all be - especially the commentariat - without a radical agenda? If you want pure meaningless cant, there's nothing like invoking radical and far out agendas, as featured in every five and dime conspiracy store.

There's the gays, a collective horde, all acting in unison, like a flock of starlings, rolling out their radical agenda. Then there's the feminists, full of radical agendas. There's rock 'n roll with its hideous radical agenda to subvert western civilisation, a role lately taken over the intertubes, with its radical agenda to change the very shape of our brains ...

Of course sensible folk don't have radical agendas. Like Angry Anderson. He has a radical silliness, but silliness doesn't amount to a radical agenda ... it just amounts to an ageing rock 'n roller from Sydney's northern beaches joining the National Party (Angry Anderson joins National Party). Is this the best the Nationals can do to match Peter 'short memory' Garrett? The screecher from Rose Tattoo?

But we digress, when clearly we should be marvelling at the way Janet Albrechtsen has a deep abiding concern for science and ecology, which you might begin to think is some kind of radical agenda. Which is why we were so lucky she was to hand to channel Lord Monckton and warn the world Beware the UN's Copenhagen plot.

Yes, climate science is just an excuse to introduce world government. Talk about a radical agenda from a bunch of conspiratorial fat cat bureaucratic scientists ...

We have learned that the Greens don't have much time for other old-fashioned notions of democracy either. At the National Press Club, Brown laid out his preference for a world government. That's Brown's elitist view of participatory democracy.

Eek, Bob Brown's in on it too, demanding a world government, like all those elitists with their inner city elitist agenda, demanding good lattes and sippable chardonnay.

Fortunately there's nothing elitist about hauling down a lavish salary package and typing out abusive columns from an ivory tower for a low selling right wing national newspaper sponsored by chairman Rupert for the political influence it provides ...

Now on with the green bashing, with a cry of tally ho:

We learned that the Greens have a peculiar view of freedom of the press. When Brown labelled News Limited the "hate media", it became clear that a newspaper knows it is doing precisely the right thing when the Greens are upset by the scrutiny. And now the Greens leader is suggesting individual journalists should be licensed. This is the green face of fascism.

Yes, it's vital to remember that freedom of the press means the freedom of chairman Rupert and his family to own the bulk of print media in Australia, and if you don't like that, go off and start your own newspaper (oh okay you can inherit one if you're lucky).

And let's deliver a rigorous scrutiny of the greenies and the policies, by examining the green face of fascism.

What's that you say, that's mere petulant abuse of a Godwin's Law offending kind?

Is it possible - anywhere outside a "hate media" driven agenda - to compare Bob Brown to the kind of fascism created by Mussolini and friends in Italy in the twenties? Especially when Brown would be off to one of the concentration camps quick enough for his sexual orientation? Is there something peculiarly offensive linking Brown to fascism, when in 1931 the Italian government declared homosexuality illegal?

Is it possible that Albrechtsen has once again fallen for idle word abuse, as pointed out as long ago as 1944 by George Orwell?

All one can do for the moment is to use the word (fascism) with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

Well for degradation to the level of a swearword, look no further than Albrechtsen.

Hang on, hang on, as usual, reading Orwell is way more fun than reading Albrechtsen:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Ah George, if only you'd been around in the days of the hate media agenda.

You could have heard the word applied to inner city dwellers and greenies and hippies, and understood in a blinding flash that greenies are fascists who should be hung from the nearest lamp post (along with any stray hippies or scientists urging world government on the world).

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

Yes, we'd accept bully as a synonym for fascist, provided the verbal bullying of Janet Albrechtsen can be counted as fascist.

Oh dear, you see what happens when you run into Dame Slap on a Wednesday. Suddenly there's hate in the air and fascism is flung around like a swear word and the English language is rolled in the mud-soiled gutters like an abused child.

Yes, you fascist astrologers and dog lovers, with your abuse of reason and the English language, that includes you too ...

Conclusion? Feel free to keep reading Albrechtsen. There's lots more in her piece - flatulent and fatuous and with enough hot air to fill the average balloon intent on doing a Hunter valley winery tour - all about the independents and Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor and their effrontery and clamouring self-interest, along with some pot shots and snipes at the federal government, before it devolves into a tirade about the greens and their policies, which is, according to Dame Slap, giving them a proper analysis and a rigorous scrutiny.

Which is to say calling them a bunch of greenie fascists ...

You'll pardon the pond however, if we revert to George Orwell and What is Fascism? before moving on to his excellent essay Politics and the English Language:

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Solidity to pure wind? Yep every day in The Australian there's the sound of pure wind at work, and you can recognise it by the vocabulary, which features worn-out and useless phrases, such as fascism, and Orwellian and world government and radical agendas and so on and so forth until the cows come home for their milking.

Poor George. If there was life after death, they'd have to install a rotating spit to assist in his eternal revolutions as he rolls in his grave ... but if you like, feel free in his honour to throw Janet Albrechtsen's lump of verbal refuse into the dustbin where it belongs ...