Paul Sheehan, and relax, it's just bait to generate a frenzy amongst the bitten ...

(Above: Power broker and media personality seen last night in The Hamster Wheel, and the pond keeps counting the costs of The Australian paywall. Sob. No more Richo).

Another relapse today, with the sickening realisation that Graham "Swiss Bank Account" Richardson, formerly a Labor party head kicker and balls cruncher, will no longer be accessible to the pond, thanks to The Australian's paywall, yet each week he seems to turn up on The Hamster Wheel dispensing wisdom over a fine meal ...

How did Tanya Plibersek put it in Q & A?

I hope when I retire I never make a buck trashing the Labor party ...

Miaow, and no way to build up wealth in a Swiss bank account for sure. And likely as not it won't get you a decent beer and a plate of gyoza ...

Never mind, today we have Paul Sheehan doing his Thursday tour of duty, and astonishingly he's just discovered that he has readers, and that they have views on what Sheehan writes, and now thanks to the intertubes share their thoughts, and that they're inclined to be as grumpy as Field Marshall Grumpy himself, as he explains in Haka, who groans there? Bile villains:

The overwhelming bulk of posted comments are anonymous, spontaneous and negative, with a heavy bias to vicious. So, you get a trifecta of ignorance. I'm not sure if this cheapening of the public discourse is what the media had in mind.

At this point, you have to remember that Sheehan's idea of elevating the public discourse is to rail at lazy Celts, cheating, thieving, drug-taking Greeks, and any other amount of ethic abuse he can mount on a weekly basis (want the weak and the helpless routinely abused? Sheehan's your commentariat man).

Comments often come from roughly 0.2 per cent of readers, so they are not even reliably representative. They are the home of a certain type of personality, encapsulated, for me, by one reader last week, ''JJ'', who wrote: ''I didn't even read any of the article. Just came straight down to the comments section to say that you are an idiot.''

Indeed. Now it turns out that JJ was in fact simply following Sheehan's very own advice:

My advice to people who do not like me or my columns is to stop reading them.

Indeed. So JJ was just following orders, while at the same time exercising his right to make accurate observations about the world. Like it's a bit muggy in Sydney, or Paul Sheehan's an idiot ...

We keed, we keed, because speaking like that would get us right down in the gutter, lowering the tone of the conversation, in the Sheehan way. You see, he admits he's a provocateur, a trawler and a troller, a dealer in insults, as a way of getting the gorge rising and his readers indignant:

Irrelevance is my enemy, not insult. Don't rise to the bait.

Tell that to hapless meeces deprived of their regular commentariat bait in The Australian!

The point about bait is that it's tempting - perhaps the bait is to offer an understanding, an insight into the world from well paid professional journalists able to indulge themselves with an opinion piece in a significant broadsheet - and the next thing you know there's the stomach cramps and the brain seizures and the moaning and the groaning ...

It's called bait and switch, Fairfax and Sheehan style ...

Besides, what's wrong with insults. It seems a few have even penetrated the Sheehan elephant skin, especially as he spent time in his last column insulting New Zealanders and the haka and rugby union (not that we care much for boofheads), and so scored a lot of comments.

The response was an outpouring of bile from hundreds of Kiwis. The column, they wrote, ''reeks of bitterness'', ''incoherent rubbish'', ''you are just bitter that you were beaten'', ''narrow minded'', ''trash'', ''racist stereotype'', ''narcissistic, culturally disrespectful'', ''racist slurs'', ''a horrifying article'', ''you want to take away the haka'', ''absolute garbage'', ''of such a low standard'', ''a good old-fashioned Kiwi-bash'', ''please tell me this isn't your day job!!'', ''nonsense'', ''little man reaction to getting beat'', ''embarrassing'', ''an ignorant, churlish racist'', ''self-deluded and out of touch with reality'', ''old, tired, xenophobic, ill-informed gutter journalism'', and a ''bitter and twisted load of drivel''.

All true and fair and accurate, but you see, the poor old Kiwis had just been taken by a master troller.

They'd taken the bait, so elaborately laid about by Sheehan, and so he gets to double down, increase the amount of slug and snail poisoning in the bait:

There is something wrong here: it was an outpouring of dog-in-the-manger, chip-on-the-shoulder, small-country-small-minded, defensive churlishness on an industrial scale.

Yep, it takes small-minded defensive churlishness on an industrial columnist scale to spot a gaggle of small-minded defensive churls ...

Now you might think that the something that was wrong here was the nasty, narrow-minded scribbling by Sheehan, who set the ball rolling with his routine slagging off, but then you wouldn't be inside the vast la la land inhabited by Sheehan's ego.

You see it's alright to slag off New Zealanders, but it's thoroughly alarming that the shrill sounds of unhappy Kiwis should penetrate the fog of self-regard that surrounds the elevated Sheehan.

Fortunately, Sheehan has a solution. It turns out the outrage generated by his outrageous musings are actually just the work of a few online ratbags:

If the reaction to my column last week was any guide to the underlying truth of what New Zealanders really think of Australians, we would have a problem. But the problem, fortunately, is much narrower. The problem is the subculture of online ''comments'', which have evolved in a way that the newspapers have not intended. This forum is becoming dominated by a certain type of reader.

Will Sheehan ever come to an understanding that the problem is even narrower than that? The problem is the subculture of the commentariat commentator prowling the opinion pages like a stirrer and a troller, with these types having evolved into idle-minded wind machines and empty clanging provocateurs in a way that newspapers quite possibly never intended.

The pages of Fairfax tends to be dominated a certain type of commentariat scribbler, exemplified by Sheehan, all outrage and bile when not offering doom and gloom, and ever ready to lash out at lazy Celts, thieving Greeks, and offensive throat-slitting, World Cup-wunning New Zealanders, or whatever other offensive group comes their way in the hours before deadline ...

Masters of bait-laying and bitterness and magic water the lot of them.

And - if we can quote Sheehan - the rationalisations he offers for this strategy are pathetic. Blaming his readers for reacting to his scribbling, as if there's a vast silent majority in accord with his ranting ...

Well D. H. Lawrence once said "Never trust the teller, trust the tale", and in this particular case, punters would do well not to trust Sheehan and his obfuscations and delusions, but to trust what they read in his columns.

And then triple the outpouring of rage in the comments section ....

(Below: relax, it's just bait).