From happy Hanukkah via rottweiler Pyne to a krogering of SBS ...

(Above: and remember always put a favourite biblical reference in to any greeting card you send to an atheist).

It has to be a spoof of course, but it was enough to get a run from David Weigel awhile ago, in Happy Hanukkah from Rick Santorum at Slate, and it's a reminder of what a weird role religion is currently playing in the United States.

Of course if it was real, you wouldn't want to keep reading John, and see what the next few chapters have to say about the role of the Jews in Christ's departure.

Even the Grammys were infested with a frock showdown:

It's the pond's view that Nicki Minaj lost, without any need for a countback.

Never mind, Colbert and Stewart are back and making out like bandits in relation to the Catholic church and contraception (Colbert suggested 98% of American Catholic women had used contraception, and the other 2% were nuns), so all's well with the world, and the United States more than ever looks like half the country gone fundamentalist mad - a bunch of mad muftis, as mad as anything Iran has to offer - and the other half laughing at them ...

And it leads to fun copy. Matt Taibbi is one of the few reasons to trot off to the venerable Rolling Stone, and a recent metaphor is still rolling around in the pond's mind:

If you're not a conservative voter with a dog in this fight, watching Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and whoever else is running for the GOP nomination this week try to hold on to front-runner status has been great slapstick, like watching a cruel experiment involving baboons, laughing gas and a forklift. No matter how many times you ring the bell, those poor animals are never going to figure out how to move that pallet of bananas – yet they keep trying, taking the sorry show from one state to the next, over and over, as if something is going to change. (The Odd Couple: Romney Vs. Gingrich).

Of course if Rick Santorum ends up as VP to Romney's candidature, and they managed to defeat the god-denying Obama (strange, as Colbert pointed out, the word is he's a secret Muslim), and then Santorum was a heart beat away from the presidency and for some reason Romney's heart stopped beating...

Ah, there's the problem. It's Friday, and the weekend will soon smooth out the worst of the paranoid fantasies.

Sadly, no link to the pick of Colbert - you'll just have to imagine him, inspired by Rick Santorum's words about the French revolution and the guillotine being just around the corner, putting a condom on a banana and then using a miniature guillotine to slice the banana in half. Damn you Foxtel, damn you to hell ... but we've dropped in a Stewart link below, just for fun.

This is tough competition, but you have to hand it to Christopher Pyne, he keeps trying for the antipodes. Lordy, does he end up trying ...

It turns out that Pyne has moved past the French Revolution and Robespierre and zoned in on Oliver Cromwell:

Parading the benefits of his classical education or, his staffers' ability to use Google, Pyne then quoted Oliver Cromwell. '''Depart and let us have done with you!''' quoth he. '''In the name of God, go!'''

Has the Liberal party gone Republican? Will a guillotine be applied to Prince Charlie or Prince Willy?

Does Pyne realise he's sounding as silly as Albo quoting lines from an American movie? Quoting Oliver Cromwell? Has he ever read another word about Cromwell, apart from the one his staffer found via Google?

The Prime Minister's leadership, he continued, had been ''infected'' from its beginning, ''and like a person with a gangrenous wound, the body is now seeking to excise the sick limb''.
When Albanese responded and called the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, ''nuts'', Pyne objected. People with mental illness might find such language offensive, he told the Speaker, displaying greater sympathy for them than he evidently nurses for the gangrenous and the limbless.

Ah well, seeing Pyne fancy himself as an attack dog of the Rottweiler kind - when he's just a naughty poodle - allowed Jacqueline Maley to have fun in After Slipperace, Pyne takes stage to play Oliver (Cromwell, that is).

There should be more writing that treats politics as the most sublime form of comedy ... except of course soon enough Pyne will be mincing about in office.

Ah, there's the problem. It's Friday, and the weekend's needed to sort out the worst of the paranoid fantasies.

But before we go, let's make special mention of Helen Kroger and her piece for The Punch SBS shouldn't be allowed to re-write history.

So how has SBS re-written history? By running a British series, The Promise, which first appeared on Channel 4 a year ago, with little fuss, apart from the Jewish lobby, and a balancing amount of critical praise.

SBS of course had no editorial control. It was written and produced in Britain, to British editorial guidelines. SBS's only choice was to pick it up and run it, or to ban it. That's right, ban it, because it didn't conform to Kroger and the Jewish lobby's guidelines for fair and accurate dramatised documentaries (and never mind that it's just a drama).

Which means - if you think about it - that Channel Four - and by extension the current conservative government in Britain which connives in the funding of the channel, must also have played a part in re-writing history.

Kroger, in the classically stupid way of politicians wanting to beat a drum (or perhaps secure the Jewish vote or the approval of the Jewish lobby) manages to confuse fiction and reality, history and drama, and impose her own politically correct view on the world.

Now if a liberal indulged in this kind of politically correct nonsense, the conservative commentariat would be out in enraged force.

The SBS Complaints Committee stated that ‘the ordinary reasonable viewer fully appreciated that The Promise was a fictional drama and nothing more than that’. I am far from convinced. The series is not a fantasy in the sense of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter or Ian Fleming’s James Bond (fiction in the true sense of the word). It portrays events which are a matter of record.

Uh huh. So Joe Blow is so dumb, he can't recognise a fictional drama unless it's Harry Potter or James Bond? Does that mean the Bourne trilogy, which features the odd bit of politics, might be treated as borderline? And is 24 is merely a documentary?

Well the pond is far from convinced that Kroger has any grasp of reality, let alone what constitutes a fictional drama.

Moreover, it cannot be argued, as the Committee insist, that Jews are not demonised by The Promise. Even accepting the series’ version of events, statements such as “the Jews want it all – all the land”, “we found Jews living in our houses“, or “that’s what the Jews want” have no place on Australian television. Alarms bells should have rung at SBS HQ.

Clearly Kroger hasn't seen the dozens of Hollywood movies in which Arab terrorists make shocking statements about Jews and Israel. The difference of course is that in that kind of simple-minded morality tale the baddies always get their comeuppance.

Of course Kroger is just adding to the campaign already covered in the wiki here which amounts to a desire for political censorship ... of a drama because it doesn't conform to the expectations of sundry lobbyists ... and because - in the la la land of Kroger - dramas should be fair and balanced, and because dramas should in the end be documentaries. As if there's just one simple uncontested historical record to which all dramas should conform.

It is unfortunate that SBS, in pushing ahead with a DVD release, have so readily dismissed community concerns about The Promise.

Oh get over it. Just tell people to pirate it instead.

It turns out Kroger must fancy herself as a rising star in the Liberal party, what with being chair of the Senate References Committee on Foreign Affairs, and now following Sophie Mirabella into la la land at The Punch, but all she's managed to do is remind the world of the way politicians think censure and censorship is the solution.

It isn't ...

But she does remind us that we really need Michael Kroger to hand if the Liberal party wanted SBS - now almost out on its feet, a dead Norwegian blue - to get a good Krogering ...

The current fuss is a year old, and it makes The Punch seem as relevant as the average Norwegian blue ...

Oh it's a strange nepotic world is politics, oh it's a strange world altogether ...

Oh lordy, let Friday end soon, and here's an old grab of Stewart, damn you Foxtel, damn you to hell ...