Miranda the Devine, and maintaining the war on readers' intelligence and understanding of the world continues apace ...

(Above: the good old days of the war on alcohol, and that war worked out tremendously well, didn't it).

First an entrée aside.

It seems like John Mikkelsen has discovered the virtues of science, in Something's really fishy in the Gladstone waters:

Some scientist contacts who pointed me to that report said claims water quality in the harbour had not changed were “simply unbelievable”.

Dear sweet absent lord, let's hope these scientist contacts now ready to spot environmental degradation and damage - could such things exist in a free market-based economy? - aren't the very same scientists involved in a massive fraudulent global conspiracy, as explained by Mikkelsen in The Climate Commission report is full of it, and Reward: Take the climate chante challenge.

Well I guess that The Punch publishes the thoughts of 9/11 truthers, so why not the contradictory, confused meditations of Mikkelsen on the environment. All's well, except when all's not well ...

Now to the succulent, appetising main course.

It's truly amazing how much media space and attention has been devoted to the fate of a fourteen year old boy busted for drug possession in Bali, but as always the keen-eyed, sharply observant Miranda the Devine gets it right in her opening par in A teen's plight no photo op for Rudd:

The way our member of the chattering commentariat Miranda the Devine has jumped on the Bali case and former Chairman Rudd smacks more of Devine's pathetic maintenance of the war on Rudd and drugs than altruism ...

Sorry, dammit, that former minion of Murdoch subbie lurking at the pond always gets it wrong. The opener should have read:

THE way our Foreign Minister has jumped on the Bali case smacks more of Rudd's ambition than altruism.

Yep, it's another example of damned if you do - pay any attention to a case - as opposed to damned if you don't - pay any attention to the case. The perfect gotcha ...

Over at another rag - like today's Fairfax update Teen arrested in Bali 'boasted about drugs' - warning forced video at other end of link - you get former chairman Rudd trotting out the standard line he's been running all week:

The Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, urged the public not to expect the boy would be brought back to Australia. ''We must all be patient and work within Indonesian legal processes,'' he said yesterday.

Over at Devine headquarters, this becomes an epic fit in a media blitz, featuring a familiar appeal to domestic jingoism about "one of ours" entrapped by foreign barbarians ...

Yet 'a boy trapped amongst the barbarians' has been the tone adopted by any number of Murdoch tabloid rags, and if Rudd had determined the matter was a minor matter and stepped back from the plate, he would have been given a dust up for dereliction of duty.

Even the pond, who has never been fond of Kevin, whether in '07 or now, can sense a Devine hatchet job brewing.

The tone regarding the northern barbarians was set long ago in the media (and associated mini-series spin offs), as far back as 1986, when Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers were hung under Malaysia's newly toughened drug laws, and since then Schapelle Corby has done a lot of heavy lifting for a prurient media, despite strong competition from top contenders like the Bali Nine ...

Mention drugs, Bali or Indonesia and the media are off on a slavering hunt for stories, so it's natural for the Devine to transfer all the guilt to the likes of Rudd.

Perhaps it is unfair, but you can't help but think Rudd's high-octane approach has less to do with the boy's welfare than with his campaign to regain his old job.

Perhaps it is unfair, perhaps it's entirely stupid, but in the current fetid atmosphere whipped up by the minions of Murdoch, almost any baleful interpretation is the go:

In the current fetid atmosphere in Canberra, it wasn't hard, for instance, to detect a dig at the childless Julia Gillard in his repeated declarations that "I have kids", "We both have teenage kids"; "I think anyone who's a parent and you are, I am", "both as a parent, but also as Foreign Minister".

Dear sweet absent lord, an attempt at empathy suddenly becomes a Bill Heffernan routine about a barren Gillard.

Here's how that particular trick is played, because the next Devine line rolls out thusly:

Even if his motivations are entirely pure, Rudd's rhetoric just heightens anxiety. Indonesians have shown themselves in the past to be completely unmoved -- if not irritated into obstinacy -- by Australian theatrics, whether over Schapelle Corby or cattle.

There, see how it's done. Even if his motivations are entirely pure ... which is to say even if I've been the bitch, snide, innuendo-trolling, Murdoch minion conservative Catholic harridan from hell, with my sly insinuations, I can still ping the fucker every other way to Sunday ...

And then comes the capper sentence:

But even more crassly opportunistic than Miranda the Devine on former Chairman Rudd was Australian commentariat advocate for the war on drugs Miranda the Devine declaring the boy's arrest proved that the war on drugs was surging to victory, a triumph for the Indonesian legal system, what with the boy locked in a padded cell and being given a damn good lesson, with maybe only months in the slammer, rather than a pat on the head of the kind he'd cop back home. We should run Australia the way they run Indonesia, the Devine declared to anyone who would listen ...

Damn you, former minion of Murdoch of subbie, get it right. You know that par should have read:

But even more crassly opportunistic than Rudd last week were Australian drug legalisation advocates declaring the boy's arrest proved that the war on drugs was failing.

Yes, yes, the war on drugs is doing tremendously well, especially in Mexico, where the guess is that the toll might have topped 40,000. (Mexico Debates Drug War Death Toll Figure Amid Government Silence, or you might try How many have died in Mexico's drug war?).

This has led a few to pay attention to the Global Commission on Drug Policy June 2011 report (available here in pdf form) which starts this way:

The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.

Vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption. Apparent victories in eliminating one source or trafficking organization are negated almost instantly by the emergence of other sources and traffickers. Repressive efforts directed at consumers impede public health measures to reduce HIV/AIDS, overdose fatalities and other harmful consequences of drug use. Government expenditures on futile supply reduction strategies and incarceration displace more cost-effective and evidence-based investments in demand and harm reduction.

Uh huh. Just thought we'd slip in people saying something sensible. How wearying. How every Michael Duffy, original font of inspiration for the pond, railing in The cost of the war on drugs. No wonder the conservatives have turned their back on him. Why they even play Frank Zappa on Counterpoint!

Now back to the Devine:

Barns claimed Indonesia tolerates Bali tourists' excessive alcohol use, which is far more harmful in overall health terms.

Uh huh. Now there's a problem. How to answer? Well as we all know:

Downplaying the harm of alcohol is a trademark of the war on drugs lobby. Yet they are swimming against the tide of scientific evidence, as you'll find if you read such reports as Alcohol 'more harmful than heroin or crack' in The Guardian, or the variant header in the Daily Mail, Alcohol 'more dangerous than crack, heroin and Ecstasy.

Damn you, former Murdoch subbie, get it right, quote the Devine properly:

Downplaying the harm of cannabis is a trademark of the pro-drugs lobby. Yet they are swimming against the tide of scientific evidence.

Uh huh. Well we all know that when the Devine starts talking science and science reports it'll be cherry picking, in the manner of her treatment of climate science, or sheer maundering mendacity and effrontery, as in her recycling of nonsense about how the intertubes and computers and visual media are changing the plasticity of our brains ...

And sure enough, after a very short one line tour of one unreferenced Lancet report - are links so hard to find and to do in the world of Murdochian journalism? - we get a standard punitive diatribe about the great unwashed and unloved:

If you polled Australians, you would likely find a majority would prefer our laws were as strict. (except of course if you were to take an actual interest in the subject by reading A review of Australian public opinion surveys on illicit drugs - pdf form - where as you might expect, the results are more complex and interesting, and less simple minded).

Instead, if police had caught the 14-year-old with marijuana near his Central Coast home he probably would have been let off with a caution.

Indonesians must feel their strict laws are justified when they look at some of the sorry specimens from overseas that wash up on their shores.

And so on and so forth in the usual splenetic, intolerant, aggressive shock jock way we'd expect of the Devine, a sorry specimen if ever there was one, replete with the usual conservative blather about tough love:

If our authorities would exert a fraction of the tough love coming from Indonesia over illegal drugs you might not have a 14-year-old allegedly doing business with a drug dealer.

The authorities? The moral police? Yet weren't the commentariat only recently explaining how the riots in London were due to lax parenting and single mothers and absent fathers? What happened to personal responsibility? Get lost on the plane over to Bali, alongside the pissed dinkums already well sozzled on the free cabin booze?

Never mind, you can't expect coherence or insight when all you can offer the world is tough love.

Still, the Devine goes into such a rhapsody over Indonesia and its tough way with drug laws, there's surely one solution for the Devine and for the long suffering world of her tabloid readers.

As we used to say in Tamworth, when in the grip of acronyms and initialisms - what an ugly word - she can POQ and DCB. And if you're not from Tamworth, you still might have guessed the pond would be perfectly happy if the Devine Pissed Off Quick to Indonesia, and Doesn't Come Back ...

There, that should keep the anonymous editorialist clucking and shaking his head about the coarseness of public debate, as conducted by teenagers in country towns decades ago ...

As for the Devine's war on drugs and Kevin Rudd? Well a fourteen year old boy will do for cheap sloganeering and pathetic innuendo, on a par with the slobbering, slavering coverage that's saturated the media for the week ...

(Below: a cartoon invoking the effect of the Devine's war on her readers, though if you stop the banging, the headache only lasts the rest of the day, until the sun is over the yardarm, and it's time for a good stiff drink, perhaps a tot of rum, or the medicinal brandy and milk my granny so loved).