Shouting at brain-washed feminist chairs with the commentariat at The Australian ...

(Above: special feminist brand).


Sometimes the pond misses the commentariat at The Australian, and on the weekend the sense of loss is at its finest, or perhaps its keenest.

Today for example we have a Shanahan - there's a flock of them, like Jensenists - astutely pinpointing what is wrong with Australia:

Feminist brainwashing saturating the land with myths!

Shanahan's analysis is fine so far as it goes, but the pond found it a tad conservative. When will she reveal that feminist brainwashing is responsible for climate change, the carbon tax, the mockery of Sydney Anglicans, pedophile priests, the war in Afghanistan and the failures of capitalism?

When you get past the excessively verbose header - Women are not fools at the ballot box: they vote for policies, not a leader's personality - thankfully trapped behind the Oz paywall like a herd of lost sheep - it turns out it's just another Shanahan yarn about how unfair the world is to Tony Abbott, and how unfair it is that Julia Gillard is allowed to exist, and how fairly women will vote, for Tony Abbott of course, because a thinking woman will vote for policies and Tony Abbott has the right policies ...

Moving right along, sure in our knowledge that feminist brainwashing has ruined the world, we turned to that old faithful, Christopher Pearson, rummaging through the offal and the kidneys to come up with his umpteenth variation on the future of Australian politics.
Clearly feminist brainwashing is responsible for Pearson's addled thinking.

For years now, Pearson has been running various lines up the flagpole to check who might salute. The Ruddster has been a long running favourite, but any port in a storm - Simon Crean, Wayne Swan, Stephen Smith, Bill Shorten, amongst others, have been given a trot by Pearson's fevered brain.

The latest - Good early election option - is more infantile lap poodle fantasising in service of Pearson's master, Tony Abbott esquire, who no doubt wishes devoutly that Julia Gillard would call an early election, and the sooner the better.

Pearson's piece is trapped behind the paywall - like a wayward sheep lost in the back paddock - and it's just as well, because Pearson leads with Yes Minister as his guide to politics, and leadership challenges, and what this might mean for Gillard as a way of sorting the Ruddster, the sooner the better.

Sadly in a desperate attempt to show he has some connection to reality, Pearson is forced to offer a caveat which makes the entire exercise a supreme example of wankerdom.

Yep, even Pearson concedes that calling an election in response to a Ruddster leadership challenge is not by any measure, her preferred card. But it is the preferred card of Pearson and Abbott surely, and in this crazy mucked up world isn't that enough of an excuse for a column?

By any measure, Pearson is a fool and the pond feels like issuing an alert - at best you'll feel like you've wasted fifteen minutes of your life you'll never retrieve, and at worst you might suffer irretrievable brain damage while reading Pearson.

So hey nonny no, on we go and next up is Greg Sheridan, with his complete incomprehension of anything:

Air in the balloon?

That's right Sheridan is ecstatic about Clint Eastwood, and almost faints with excitement in Magnum force for Mitt Romney, fortunately trapped behind the paywall with the other sheep seeking to make sense of the world.

"Go ahead, make my day."

What a brilliant moment. The most unplugged, out-there, adventurous twist of the hitherto bland Mitt Romney campaign for president was Clint Eastwood and the empty chair act.
The Hollywood legend, beloved of tens of millions of Americans, was the X-factor for the Republicans.

Uh huh. What a brilliant moment? What a brilliantine twit ...

Reading Sheridan you get the impression that one day he was a hundred pound weakling who had sand kicked in his face, and as he retreated, he kept having an epic fantasy of pulling out a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world (way back when), whirling on the punk, and asking him whether he felt lucky.

It turns out that once Eastwood speaks, it's holy writ:

If Eastwood regards Vice-President Joe Biden as a laughing stock -- "the brains of the Democrats, you know, kind of a grin with a body behind it" -- then the Vice-President has a problem.

The pond blames feminist brainwashing.

Of course if you read the rest of the world's responses, Clint Eastwood's performance drew mixed reviews, ranging from "eccentric" to "bizarre".

Not only did it cut into coverage of Mitt Romney's speech, going more than twice the scheduled time, even the likes of the Oz's fellow tabloid (in spirit if not in shape), the New York Post asked questions, as you can read in Ann Romney says Clint Eastwood is a 'unique guy':

TAMPA, Fla. — Ann Romney says she appreciates the support Clint Eastwood gave her husband's presidential bid, even if the actor's bizarre monologue at the GOP convention isn't earning rave reviews.
Romney told "CBS This Morning" on Friday that she didn't know what to expect when Eastwood came on stage Thursday night as a warm-up act.
Eastwood's rambling conversation with an empty chair representing an imaginary President Barack Obama drew laughs in the convention hall, but has been widely mocked by critics.
Romney chuckled during awkward pauses both times she was asked about Eastwood.

Yep, in Sheridan's world, bizarre equals brilliant.

You won't find any nuance or balance or insight in Sheridan, which leads the pond to ask if he's the Bill Collins of commentariat scribblers for the Oz. Soft on film stars, and their movies, and in the end a little soft in the head ... oh feminist brain washers, look on your work and apologise to the world.

But wait, there's even more. That stuffed pompous shirt known as Paul Kelly (the editor at large, not the nice singer songwriter) contributes a fine piece of hysteria titled Carbon wars go global, which earns a big splash, happily trapped behind the paywall with the rest of the bewildered sheep:

Will you ever see a header in The Australian, bold and brave, that shrieks CLIMATE CHANGE GOES GLOBAL?

Only in your dreams.

Anyhoo, the befuddled nervous nelly Kelly spends the entire column hand wringing and anguishing about the carbon tax, the bottom line being that this is put us in bed with the perfidious, uncertain Europeans.

What a brave isolationist Kelly makes, and if he can only ensure that Australia has nothing do with climate change and international trade, his policy trifecta will be perfect.

Of course being Kelly he pretends to contemplate all the policy issues with an even-handed balance, which may be summarised faithfully as Tony Abbott is right, and Labor and its climate change edifice and the EU pretty certain to be fucked.

Meanwhile, the pond patiently awaits that big splash in The Australian headed ARCTIC SEA ICE SHRINKAGE HAS GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS.

Even its sister tabloid (in mind if not in body), the Daily Terror, managed a little coverage awhile ago in Arctic sea ice hits record low as melt goes on, which concluded thusly:

The melting of Arctic has helped open up new shipping lanes but is also believed to hold serious consequences for the rest of the planet as the ice serves a vital function in keeping the planet cool.

The pond and google have searched fastidiously to check The Australian's detailed coverage of the issue, and drawn a blank.

Never mind, how does the fastidious futtock Kelly conclude his piece?

Labor's climate change edifice is now tied to the EU.
It is a further elaboration of the market and administrative arrangements that Abbott is determined to tear down. His pledge to repeal every aspect of Labor's structure looms as one of the defining policy and ideological contests of recent decades.

Uh huh. Of course the issue of the effectiveness of the carbon tax, and whether Abbott's set of alternative government/socialist/bureaucratic interventions might be preferable and more effective, could be construed as a response to one of the most important scientific issues of recent decades, or perhaps even recent centuries.

But you won't find much of a word about any of that in The Australian.

The pond blames feminist brain-washing.

What else could be responsible? Certainly not the ability to see everything as an ideological contest ...

(Below: and now for some chair-shouting).

(Or in other words, click to enlarge)