We're doomed, we're poor, we're hopeless, we're useless, or so the Bolter tells us in another uplifting paranoid sermon ...

While the pond is maintaining its rigorous anti-Olympics stance - the Nine Network could be using a team of boofhead football commentators to call sports they know nothing about for all the pond cared - even the pond has noticed some unseemly gloating from the Poms, not least this little bit of bashing by the so-called liberal Guardian, in Australia left wishing its Olympic athletes cried tears of gold.

Yes even the namby pamby effete ponces at the Guardian aren't above getting into the gutter and delivering a few kicks to the groin like an English soccer thug on the prowl in Europe.

The pond farts in their general direction, but what's more alarming is the way the sternest, stoutest members of the commentariat in Australia have fallen to pieces.

There's Andrew "the bolter" Bolt having an unseemly hysterical dummy spit in World beaten - We must lift our game to compete, not just at the Olympics (may be paywall affected).

The Bolter uses the moment to turn himself into a hectoring Scout leader, or a righteous gauleiter:

Better get used to these Olympic tears, people. Unless, of course, we work harder.
No, not the athletes. All of us.

Oh dear. The tears, the tears that wash away the world and hope and joy and bliss and ...

It's everyone's fault, the centre won't hold, mere anarchy and Aussie tears are loosed upon the world, the British are stomping towards Bethlehem, the Chinese are on the march, and we're doomed, doomed, I tells ya:

Money, you see, buys medals. Dan Johnson, an economics professor at Colorado College, even has a formula - one gold medal for every extra $5000 in GDP per person.
And we've been rich. Even now, were eleventh in the world in GDP per person, says Forbes.

Yes, we must earn more, produce, boost productivity, head down mine for twenty five hours a day, work to the formula, fix up the GDP. In the GDP lies hope and joy and salvation.

We've been rich, rich I tells ya, but now we're poor, poor as church mice, and struggling on the world stage, and it's all the fault of bludging workers and their productivity, and nothing to do with the Bolter who churns out a ginormous amount of crap on a daily basis.

It was about this point that the pond felt like donning a Daniel Craig disguise, picking up the Bolter and slapping him in a manly Bondian way on both cheeks - several times - and then delivering this bon mot:

Harden the fuck up Mr Bolt.

Well it would have saved the world the Bolter ranting on and on:

How else could we pay for our new sports stadia, our Australian Institute of Sport?
That's what's kept us in the hunt.

In fact, in recent Games, we've done even better than usual in per capita gold medals - third in Athens, fourth in Beijing.

But, of course, the sheer size and collective wealth of some countries will tell on the actual podium. Witness the United States and Russia.

Oh the world is pressing down on us, crushing us, destroying us. The sheer overbearing size and wealth and weight is killing us, sucking us dry.

It seems everyone is a threat, everyone is doing us down. And then there's the wicked celestials, the ominous orientals:

...Witness the rise of China.

Ah, yes. The rise of China, and its 1.3 billion people.

In Sydney, Australia finished fourth in the overall medal count. China came third.

In Athens, Australia finished fourth. China came second.

In Beijing, Australia finished fifth. China came first.

And in London? China leads, and we're slipping fast.

Slipping fast!! We're doomed, doomed I tells ya. Walk out into the street and look around you. Notice how all the people are in tears, their clothes torn and bedraggled, their faces covered in ash and cheesecloth?

What are we to do, up against these fiendish orientals?

Again, count the dollars. China's economic growth has transformed it. Half a century ago, some 40 million Chinese died in Mao's man-made famine. Today, the country is buying mines and farms in Australia, selling us everything from cars to the shirts on our backs.

They're buying farms in Australia, buying mines, they're making Gina Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest and Clive Palmer filthy rich, and those filthy miners are making life hard for all of us,including Wayne "Born to run" Swanee.

And Clive Palmer likes The Seekers! We're ruined.

Oh wait a tic, billionaires and Gina Rinehart good, so maybe Chinese good after all.

Let's just wind that one back.

Today, the country is making my patroness Gina exceptionally wealthy, so what's wrong with digging up the country and shipping it to China and in return them selling us good quality goods from cars to the shirts on our backs.

That's right Mr Bolt, harden the fuck up.

Now, in the pool of the London Games it is buying the swimming medals we once thought ours, reportedly paying the two Australian coaches of its swimming team a $250,000 bonus for each gold medal.

Swimming! The Australian crawl! Richmond "Dick" Cavill! Ruined!

Australian coaches! Traitors, double dealers, apostates, back-stabbers, betrayers, deceivers, defectors, deserters, double-crossers, fifth columnists, informers, Judas lovers, miscreants, quislings, renegade snakes in the grass, turncoats selling out for the easy quid and the cheap dollar and the filthy renminbi.

How could Aussies use drugs to win? Oh wait, what's that, she passed the drug test? For all we know, she did it fair and square?

Never mind, let's keep trying to lather up a frenzy.

Same story with booming Brazil. In Beijing, it could finally afford to win more gold medals than it scraped together from all the Olympics before Montreal.

Oh no, not the Brazilians. Et tu Brazilians, thrusting yet another dagger into the bleeding tear-sodden heart of Australia.

Yes, money and even size is still not everything.

No, no, stupidity and banal cliches to end a silly column are still way more important.

At which point the pond felt again that urge to slap the Bolter on both cheeks, hard ...

Harden the fuck up Mr Bolt, it's only a game, and not the end of the known bloody universe. You win some and you lose some, and that's the way it goes.

The man really is a paranoid dunderhead of the first water. And to think he started off doing sports for The Age. These days you wouldn't allow him to carry a bucket for Adam Sandler in The Waterboy.

Every so often the pond likes to pit one Murdoch kool aid cultist against another, so come on down David Penberthy with Expect more demands for Olympic cash after Magnussen defeat:

The chief thing I would question is the assumption at the centre of this demand -- namely, that sport is so intrinsic to our national identity that the prospect of failure is too hideous to contemplate.

I don't know about you but I still managed to get out of bed yesterday morning and go to work despite the fact Magnussen had failed in the pool. I don't feel physically sick recalling the apparent humiliation of Montreal, where our failure to perform created the impetus for the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport, and is still held up in sporting circles as a "never again" moment.

More pertinently, given that there is always a finite amount of public money that can be spent, I reckon it's pretty interesting that we have come up with an unchallenged model by which able-bodied sportspeople can play at the highest level, and travel the world doing so, but we still haven't got a solution to fund the care of people with disabilities so they can simply live their lives with dignity.

Oh splendidly said Mr Penberthy. How do you like your martini? Shaken or stirred?

"Do I look like I give a damn?'

Oh Mr Penberthy, let's throw in an a large thin slice of lemon peel and we can dance and laugh long into the night, and ponder the complete, utter mystery of that goose Andrew Bolt...

Henceforth to be known as the quivering, jelly marshmallow GDP 'crap on for crap's sake' man. (and more than you ever need to know about how to make a Bond martini and say shaken, not stirred here).

(Below: make ranting an Olympic sport! Then it'd be gold, gold, gold for Australia, the Bolter and the Parrot).