Sophie Mirabella, and please bring out the baseball bat of comical humour ...

(Above: Sophie Mirabella. The body language has the floor).

In other news today, Doug Cameron speaks out about people speaking out, and urges discipline in the same way he practises discipline, by speaking out about the need to not speak out, except when it comes to the matter of speaking out about the wonders and joys of chairman Rudd.

Here's Cameron feeding the chooks, Lay off Kevin, says Labor powerbroker.

Yep, the minute after David Bradbury wondered about getting a tattoo for Gillard (Labor will die unless Rudd backers 'shut up'), Cameron went to the feed bin and got some prime corn to throw to the chooks, about how the Ruddster deserved respect because he'd been the PM who defeated John Howard.

Sure, go tell that to Billy Hughes. Now there's a PM worshipped by the Labor party ...

Keep the flame alive comrades, keep the flame alive.

Meanwhile, the pond urges others who are anxious about discipline in the ranks to speak out, to ensure there will be no more speaking out, except for that last little bit of speaking out, and break discipline in order to urge the need for discipline, so that the voters of Australia can be pummelled into a torpid ennui, and the yabbering about leadership can go on until the twelfth of never ...

Where does it all lead?

Well it leads directly to Sophie Mirabella, the hideous, vulgar, harridan hiding under a header at the horrible Punch, Julia Gillard is starting to sound like Comical Ali.

Let's just catch that moment of mockery in digital aspic. Click to enlarge if you want to wallow in the sight:

Yep, that's the level of political debate the country has reached.

Debate? Actually you wouldn't run Mirabella in a first year university revue. Unless you wanted to harvest the jaffas thrown at the stage ...

What she imagines is humour makes you understand why there was so much chatter last year about her health and stability. (Sophie Mirabella gets a much-needed holiday).

The pond routinely notes breaches of Godwin's Law, which is why we haven't just yet rushed into print with a suggestion that Mirabella's behaviour surely makes her the Joseph Goebbels of Tony Abbott's team (yes Goebbels was a dab hand with metaphors and propaganda).

Mirabella has been here before, of course, back in March 2011 saying Gillard was as deluded on climate as Gaddafi was about Libya. (Julia Gillard as deluded as Gaddafi, says Liberal frontbencher).

But the thing about the shameless is they have no shame, so even though there was some murmuring at the time about comparing the Prime Minister to terrorists and murderous dictators (Gaddafi comparisons slammed), now Mirabella's doubled down.

But she's doubled down by dropping Gillard from Gaddafi status to comical Ali/Baghdad Bob status, and he didn't even make it on to the original set of playing cards. It was left to the intertubes to make it right:

But here's the terrifying thing, where the mouth puckers and the laughter dies.

Right at the moment Mirabella is the shadow minister for innovation, industry and science (or so her website says here).

Does this mean that we can look forward in the future to innovative and industrious forms of political abuse? Will Mirabella devote her days to the scientific study of effective forms of biff and aggro?

Right at the moment she displays all the gravitas of a pinhead.

Sorry, the Mirabella style is so catchy.

Mirabella spends the rest of her column throwing "comical" around, and applying it to all and sundry. What's the bet some teacher explained to her that when writing an essay, you should take a word and use it in innovative ways, pounding the concept to a bloodied pulp right in front of innocent readers.

By the pond's quick count, "comical" gets twelve outings throughout the piece, culminating in the most amazing bit of cheek, when Mirabella starts talking about honesty. Is that the same politician who turned up in stories like Sophie's choice: the professor, the politician and the family feud?

An ugly spat over the will of a dead former lover could engulf Federal Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella as the man's family considers Supreme Court action to challenge her management of his estate.

Colin Howard, QC, a highly regarded former dean of law at Melbourne University, was Ms Mirabella's de facto partner in the late 1990s, despite a 40-year age gap - a fact she has successfully kept secret until now.

Secret? Oh let's be honest, politicians blathering about honesty is the surest sign that the fix is in ...

And not content with labelling Gillard with the Comical Ali label, Mirabella flings it around all over the place in her penultimate par:

It’s not just the PM doing a “Comical Ali” routine, it’s the bloke who wants to replace her, the ALP powerbrokers who will say and do anything to retain government, and the Labor colleagues fighting over who will be on the “winning side”.

So it's okay - by extension - to say that the pinheads around Mirabella are complicit in her Goebbels comedy routine?

By golly, Hitler would be proud and pleased at this ultimate proof of Godwin's Law, a further innovative advance in science.

And then Mirabella rounds out her piece - which is 700 words of empty, rhetorical abuse, and cheap, contemptible, contemptuous insults, a piffling puff piece with no point except to display the subtlety and finesse of a schoolyard bully, or perhaps Nelson saying "hah! hah!" in The Simpsons - with this:

While there won’t be any clear “winners” in this mess, there is already a clear loser. It is the Australian people that suffer the uncertainty of a dysfunctional, unstable government while their cost of living is spiralling out of control.

By golly, she's right about that. There's a clear loser and it's the Australian people, to think that Sophie Mirabella represents some of them right now, and the best she can come up with in relation to government and politics and policy is this sort of empty, idle, insulting blather.

But there'll be bigger losers in due course. Anyone interested in innovation, industry and science in the lucky country for starters ...

... unless they think innovation should be about finding a way to advance the art of hard-knuckle abuse and cheap jokes ...

Thanks Doug Cameron. Keep the flame alive comrades. Deliver Australia unto the likes of Sophie Mirabella.

As for The Punch, which showcases Mirabella and encourages her with a photo of comical Ali to accompany the story, you have to admire John Hartigan for his summary of its style of blogging:

In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for - something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.

Yep, whenever Murdoch and Kim Williams get very grand about News Corp and its civilising mission, just remember it runs a blog that's up there with the very worst blogging standard, the sort of beast that loon pond needs for its daily supply of loon bread.

And by golly big Harto is in grand form translating Kim Williams for his former colleagues, here, but it's sadly behind the Crikey paywall. Still, to give you an idea of how on the money big Harto is, he translates Kim Williams' final remark "With every good wish" into the Queen's English: "Go fuck yourselves".

Now that's humour that's perhaps a little too nuanced and subtle for Sophie Mirabella to understand ...

(Below: perhaps "bitch" is more parliamentary? Or almost as funny as "Comical Ali" being comical? Unless of course it's used in the context of Sophie Mirabella being comical ... when a piece of four be two or a baseball bat is more to the point).