Oh dear sweet absent lord, not another day with the birthers, strike that, the Brucers ...

The baying hounds, the feral pack of flacks, still can't let go of their favourite bone. Have a look at the sordid collection above, on digital display for all the world to see, in today's weekend Australian (remind me again why you pay for the rag?)

When you've got nothing to write about, you resort to colour and movement, and David Crowe's piece is a doozy, dragging in Artem Naumov:

Ah yes, it was Artem Naumov what got her off the hook.

Then there's Hedley Thomas's mea culpa and cry from the heart, about the Media's shameful silence, and it indeed it was an extraordinary shame and a shocking silence for a few days before the media began reporting on the prime sources for The Australian's daily display of smear and smut and mud-flinging.

And now, after the orgy, and Gillard being unexpectedly feisty, comes the remorse?

Not on your nelly, now comes the snide Australian editorial, justifying it all, in Gillard opens a file on spin.

It's as convincing a display of paranoia as we've seen from the castle, curiously known by itself as the "heart of the nation" when the "barking mad backside of the nation" might be a better psychiatric fit.

It turns out that the rag has been treated shamelessly by everyone, and most especially Julia Gillard:

...Julia Gillard decided finally to confront the issues surrounding the end of her legal career at Slater & Gordon in 1995. Her tactics were as clever as they were transparent. The Prime Minister had spotted a clear but relatively minor error in a page six corollary story to our investigations into the affair. Our reporter referred to a "trust" fund when he should have written "slush" fund -- you be the judge. Having demanded and received an apology, Ms Gillard decided to go on the attack, accuse this newspaper of recycling "false and defamatory" information, conflate our coverage with a vicious online blogger's efforts and try to put the issue to bed.

Oh the deviant, spiteful hussy. Fancy demanding an apology - why fancy getting one, how it must hurt, having it imposed from up high for a simple slip - and then fancy conflating The Australian's remorselessly vicious pack of hounds coverage with the efforts of a vicious online blogger who once worked for the rag as a cartoonist. Shocking, shameful.

And the hapless rag was dudded and diddled. Key questions were asked, but some were not, because somehow the rag didn't have the wit to ask them, no doubt because its valiant reporters were shocked and startled and distracted by Artem Naumov turning up.

It turns out that Gillard is at fault because not only did she fuck a cad, she failed to turn him into the coppers:

When Ms Gillard became aware of the alleged corruption, she ended her relationship with Mr Wilson. We do not know what other action she took, if any, to alert authorities.

Yes, the witch is guilty, guilty, we tells ya. And then - in a ritual familiar to those who read the lizard Oz's editorials - it's time to strike out and slash at the vipers and the snakes and the enemies surrounding the valiant troops in their fortified castle.

You might think of it as a prime bout of paranoia, not understanding that the miscreants are everybody else in the media, some of whom took a more proper approach than the screaming tabloid way of the Oz. And some who, shamefully, shockingly didn't:

The Prime Minister has not attacked The Sydney Morning Herald for reporting on Thursday that she might have broken the law -- something this newspaper has never alleged.

You see, the witch is a Fairfax lover, which is an extreme rag, unlike the moderate careful Australian, except when it has to apologise, and even then it really shouldn't have. Shocking, shameful.

The Australian has been ever so controlled in its approach. Why there hasn't been any more than a dozen spiteful, malicious stories and columns provided by a vicious gaggle of hounds and run in the rag on a daily basis ...

Yet, astoundingly, their political editor Peter Hartcher accuses The Australian of being "dedicated to the destruction" of the government.

Oh that's way below the belt Peter Hartcher. That's shocking, that's shameful. What right minded person could read the right wing ranting of The Australian and possibly imagine it was dedicated to the destruction of the government and the elevation of Tony Abbott?

It's simply preposterous, absurd.

Yep, that's how easy it is to step into cloud cuckoo land when you read an editorial in The Australian.

They can't even be honest about their painfully obvious intentions. Has the rag ever mounted one of its crusading pack of hounds crusades against Abbott? In your dreams ...

It's okay, rabid pack of hounds. It's your right, but please enough of the stench of hypocrisy. Just be honest about it ...

Oops, sorry, that's just so unfair.

You see the poor rag has been harassed and bullied and tormented, and it's just so damned unfair:

The Age also has been spared Ms Gillard's wrath, despite following our reports with accounts of its own.

Oh diddums, there should be a law against a woman bullying a hapless, innocent paper just going about its daily job of vilification.

Should the rag maintain the rage, stand defiant against the herd? Of course it should:

But then, commentary by its political editor, Michelle Grattan, has seemingly sought to build a bridge with the Prime Minister ever since suggesting in April that she should resign. Many journalist have accepted the invitation to move on.

But not The Australian. It's determined to sulk and carry on, and naturally the ABC must be included in its wrath:

At the ABC, political host Barrie Cassidy has demanded journalists place Tony Abbott under more scrutiny. Yet he argues Ms Gillard should face less. Perhaps instead of writing about journalism, he ought to practise some.

Oh what a pathetic bunch of paranoid anal retentives. Talk about opening a file on spin, and a false heroism under fire.

And so the Brucers have their Birther cause.

That it's corrupted and tainted by its sources - most notably Ralph Blewitt - is a never no mind.

Peter Hartcher, for example, in his piece this morning PM and a fistful of questions for Fairfax, mentions Blewitt as a key source, without at all delving into Blewitt's history and why he might be demanding immunity from prosecution to dish the dirt.

Yes, it's more questions, yet more questions, and never mind who's asking the questions or why.

It's as shameless and scurrilous an effort as any The Australian has mounted, and it leaves the pond wondering why at the same time Hartcher didn't bother to mention some of the controversy surrounding Blewitt, as outlined for example in that slander sheet Vexnews, with Bad to the Boner: PM's accuser is sleazy sex tourist, preying on vulnerable young Thai women.

And if that involved too much nose holding, how about a mention of the details about Blewitt in Fairfax itself, in the Phillip Coorey story Union official in PM row fled Indonesia, which helps explain why Blewitt might be asking for immunity from prosecution for dishing the dirt. And let's not even begin to contemplate the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic rantings of Larry Pickering, whose cartoons are too vile for the pond to run.

If you're going to get down in the gutter, at least include the full story. There's little doubt that Gillard got herself involved in a nest of union thieves, but right at the moment, many of the journalists involved in this story are quite happy to stay involved with the same nest of thieves, and push their cause and their barrow, and then get agitated when anyone points out there's more than one side to the story.

Or they just bung on a massive paranoid sulk, like The Australian. Because all they're doing is asking questions, just questions, not accepting the right of others to question the questioners and their Brucer motives.

Ah well, it's Saturday, and the sun is shining, and it's time to get the nose out of the gutter and that rag The Australian, and look up at the bright blue sky, and perhaps leave the final word to Mike Carlton as he broods about the capacity of the lunar right to embrace sinister conspiracy theories in Geniuses at work scaring the punters:

The latest in the genre is the Julia Gillard-Slater & Gordon shock horror. This is being furiously peddled on the internet by Larry Pickering, a purveyor of obscene cartoons and anti-Semitic filth, with a shove along from the fine, Italian hand of John Pasquarelli, former speechwriter to Pauline Hanson.
Naturally, the radio shock jocks and Melbourne's village idiot Andrew Bolt have been all over it like flies at a cow pat, and The Australian has been indulging in a week-long fit of hysterics on the thing, climaxing on Wednesday with no fewer than six opinion pieces ordering Gillard to 'fess up. Fans of the Oz editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, will recall another of his global scoops when he was editing Brisbane's Courier Mail in 1996: forests died and rivers of ink ran dry to prove the historian Manning Clark was a Soviet spy who'd been awarded the Order of Lenin.

Melbourne's village idiot all over it like flies at a cow pat?

Love it, why it's a metaphor worthy of Tamworth ...

And yes, this morning's editorial is extraordinarily revealing of the pugnacious, obnoxious crusading "Manning Clark was a Soviet spy" atmosphere that now fills the air at The Australian, in much the same way as that smell in the nostrils can suggest that to a reader that they've trodden on a cow pat. All you can do is pick up a twig and scape it off - rubbing the shoe on grass also helps. Or a newspaper if it's handy. But is that a good enough reason to buy The Australian?

Gillard and the union movement of seventeen years ago might not emerge too well from the frothing, foaming frenzy, but the sordid behaviour of Chris Mitchell and his pet pack of rabid hounds has emerged even more tainted.

That self-righteous, brooding, paranoid, wildly accusatory and resentful editorial says all you need to know about Mitchell and the way The Australian is currently run.

Oh look, squirrel, Soviet spy, Julia Gillard ...

(Below: and a special honourable mention for John Shakespeare for his illustration accompanying Carlton's piece. Caught it in one Mr. Shakespeare, well played, or should we say well drawn. That portrait of Chris Mitchell leaping high above the pack to catch a morsel is unnervingly accurate).