Sign the pond up for a lifetime membership of the 'sneerocracy' club so that sneering at Brendan O'Neill is more than a fringe benefit ...

(Above: an artistic impression of Brendan O'Neill)

Brendan O'Neill is a first class twittering twit when it comes to twittering about twitterers.

And he's painful to read.

The pond has no idea how and why he ended up with such a giant sized chip on his shoulder, but a lifetime of work by a professional woodchopper wouldn't get rid of it. It's tougher than ironbark (please continue the debate about the toughest gum to chop in rural forums) .

Not to worry, that should get the pond recognition as a credentialed, paid up member of the "sneerocracy".

O'Neill is a big fan of the dissembling "I'm no fan ... but" routine, the classic trick of apologists who want to have a bet each way, but in the end want to come out on the right side.

The opening pars of 'Romneyshambles': the wrath of the sneerocracy shows the art at its finest:

I'm not a fan of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and there is no doubt that like many other aspiring political leaders today, he is a doofus in the diplomacy department, seemingly suffering from a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease.

But how shambolic has his current world tour really been? Has it really been a "Romneyshambles", as first Twitter and now the world media have described it? Has his globetrotting to promote himself as the US president-in-waiting been a "disaster tour", in which Romney has "messed up badly"?

There it is, in all its glory. I'm not a fan of Mitt Romney, but ... I'm just a fan of Mitt Romney.

Win-win, so who blame - if not the Mittster - for the failings of his European and middle eastern tour?

This is where you have to seek an alternative villain. It might have been easy to accept the mantra of personal responsibility - lord how conservatives love that mantra - and accept it was all Romney's own work that he occasionally made a fool of himself, but then there'd be no way for O'Neill to get him off the hook.

Cue yet another version of "it's all the fault of the fancy pants, smarty pants, urban elite" and give them yet another sneering, sniggering name:

I'm not so sure that it has. Rather, what we are witnessing in the global branding of Romney's tour as "Romneyshambles" is the power of a new political clique - let's call it the sneerocracy - to make or break an individual's reputation.

But what if your clique game is to sneer at the sneerocracy? Does that turn you into a supersneerocrat?

Based in the modern-day battleground that is Twitter, armed with their 140-character grenades of snide commentary, and with vast swathes of the media at their beck and call, this sneerocracy is more able to set the agenda than ever before. And it has been primarily responsible for institutionalising the idea that Romney is a hapless, hopeless mess of a politician.

It does, it does. How else could you come up with the utterly bizarre notion that an newly formed and sworn in posse of sneerocrats are primarily responsible for Romney being hapless and hopeless in Europe, and that the sneerocrats are the agenda-setters. As opposed to the blathering Romney setting it for them ...

"It's all their fault" constitutes analysis? Sound like a ten year old to you? It's all your fault, smarty pants, nah nah.

And then O'Neill, to maintain some superficial connection to reality and credibility, has to do his own version of the sneerocracy ... by sneering:

He has certainly committed his fair share of what the media calls "gaffes". During his stopover in Britain he questioned whether Brits are really ready to host the Olympics. "There are a few things that are disconcerting", he said, such as "the stories about the private security firm [for the Games] not having enough people".

And so on and on, because then O'Neill has to painfully trawl back over the sundry Romney gaffes, like any average sneerocrat reliving the moment.

There's Boris Johnson firing up the crowds, and there's Romney forgetting the name of Ed Milibrand (as if one grey politician forgetting the name of another grey politician is somehow an excuse), and if that's not enough he even goes back to 2007 to throw in another charge, that Romney once nominated L. Ron Hubbard's Battleship Earth as his favourite novel.

Turns out the Bible is the Mittster's favourite book, as you can read about here, which produced this wonderful entry into the sneerocracy hall of fame:

Everything about the book is bad. Just a few sentences into the first page, you're confronted by this sentence: "Terl could not have produced a more profound effect had he thrown a meat-girl naked into the middle of the room." (A clothed meat-girl apparently gets a big yawn.) Hubbard's soundtrack for the book, when played, either attracts mice or repels dogs, or both. The movie, which starred John Travolta, is what therapists show to the producers of Ishtar and Glitter to help them feel good.

Now O'Neill is right about one thing. Someone who thinks the Book of Mormon contains the truth is ripe for a science fiction, and on the scale of things liking Hubbard is a lesser crime (but why oh why would a Mormon cite the Bible as his favourite book over the book of Mormon, with its improved and enhanced version of Christ in god's own America and the promise of a personal planet?)

But that reminds the pond of another problem with O'Neill. He's resolutely humourless, sincere and earnest. It's all to do with that larger than life chip on the shoulder, a man who sounds like he wants to live in Texas, except for some strange monstrous injustice which sees him live in London:

Clearly the opinion-forming classes long for another Bush, for another unenlightened hick they can laugh at and define themselves against, and they hope Romney will be the man to fill Bush's (cowboy) boots.
But how bad are Romney's gaffes, really, on a scale of 1 to 10? I would say only about a 3. Possibly a 4. Some of them aren't even gaffes at all.

Yep, at this moment, O'Neill dispenses with the 'billy goat butt" routine, and abandons any pretence he doesn't have any time for Romney, to the point that it begins to sound like a classic bout of man love - not that there's anything wrong with that, unless you happen to live in the Romneyverse.

And naturally O'Neill presents the best case for his fandom by lashing out at all around him, because it's their fault. Nah, nah, losers.

So it's fine to forget Milibrand's name, and it's great to love a trashy novel, and then we get on to the real sideshow:

The most striking thing about the Romney gaffe debate is the role played by the Twitterati. The Twitter mentality - mock things in 140 characters or less in order to get laughs and retweets - is now leaking from the internet into the mainstream media and into political parlance itself.

Never mind that the most striking thing about the Romney gaffes were that they were so simple and obvious and easy to avoid, if Romney hadn't been intent on big noting himself about the role he played in staging the games in Salt Lake City. Apparently that bit of hubris is all the fault of the twitterers.

And so we come to O'Neill, the cracked shellac whirling at a relentless 78 rpm over the same tired broken old groove. You guessed, it's the elitist groove:

What we can see here is the increasing influence of small groups of time-rich, ideas-lite, constantly tweeting individuals, of the sneerocracy, whose hive mentality can lead to people's reputations being trashed in a matter of minutes.

As thick as ironbark. As classic a case of the diagnostician suffering from the disease and not realising it. (Yes Spiked is full of cliquey twittering twits, here).

Make sure you take a good stone to sharpen the axe when confronted by ironbark.

Does O'Neill seriously believe that this little burst of twittering has trashed Romney's reputation? If so, some reputation ....

On and on he hacks away at the elites with his little tomahawk:

A bit like an army of ants speedily devouring an apple before moving on just as quickly to something else, this Twitterati launches "twitch hunts" against people it doesn't like, such as newspaper columnists who say silly things, and it partakes in a mass form of unofficial rebranding of its least favourite politicians' personalities, so that someone like Romney is now universally known as "Romneyshambles".

Was there a simple alternative solution that would have saved Romney and so saved us from O'Neill's invective?

Like not saying and doing stupid things? Sorry that would be inordinately complex and difficult for O'Neill to contemplate, it's so much easier to get agitated about the sideshow:

That serious newspapers and even the Democratic Party have "seized on Romneyshambles" suggests we're witnessing the Twitterisation of the media and of politics itself, the consolidation of an increasingly shallow, shrill, utterly unserious form of political debate, which is actually not very political, nor much of a debate.

Well yes, because if we were to look at O'Neill's contribution to the debate, surely it would have to be considered increasingly shallow, remarkably shrill and utterly unserious, though that's not to stop it being incredibly solemn and silly at the same time.

The poor lad's all atwitter about twitter and doesn't realise that the result is just more twittering.

The end result is that, yes, Romney looks bad, as his political standing is dented by the sneerocracy.

Actually Romney looks bad, because everything that happened could have so easily been avoided. That's what you expect of a politician. Not to answer the question asked, but to answer the question you want to ask. How is London going in its preparations? Fine, looking forward to it, next please ...

You can only amplify something if it's provided in the first place. No signal, no noise.

But his critics look worse, being so devoid of a serious alternative to Romney's outlook that they must instead seize upon his every alleged gaffe in order to say in the manner of a 10-year-old child: "Ha ha, loser."

Which brings us back to that incredible chip on the solemn O'Neill's shoulder. The incessant chatter about elites, the talk of alleged gaffes when earlier in the piece he'd already given up the game and acknowledged that Romney had committed actual gaffes, before he started to discount them and throw them out the door with a fifty per cent off sale.

By the end you almost feel like a ten year old again, having read O'Neill's tosh, and wasted time with it, and feeling the urge to shout out "what a loser you are, you dropkick, think about what you're writing and saying, think for just a nano second without going into your usual frothing and foaming routine about the 'leets".

And send me a lifetime membership of the sneerocrat club, so any time I can make use of its services any time I make the mistake of reading another of your columns.

And now for those who've cut the cable, or don't watch the pay TV they pay for, here's a couple of catch-up doses of Jon Stewart sneering at Romney.

Warning, he uses more than 140 characters.

But he's funny, which is more than you can say for the spotted gum brushbox world of hardwood O'Neill ... (and while you're at it, why not follow on with a dose of Lewis Black sneering at campaign ads, here, which you won't find in O'Neill's blockhead view of the American universe).

(Below: finally, let's hear it for a man who knew how to sneer in style, and long before Twitter. George Sanders' Memoirs of a Professional Cad is now hard to find, but you can still catch him doing the acerbic, haughty drama critic routine in All About Eve. He'd have made mince meat of O'Neill:

I'm Addison DeWitt. I'm nobody's fool, least of all yours, Mr. O'Neill.

More DeWitt quotes here).