However the American election season turns out, it's a depressing spectacle and a terrible advertisement for democracy in action.
Billions spent in relentless television, robo call campaign advertising at the whim of an interventionist activist Supreme Court that has proposed companies have feelings, moods, opinions and the right to splash cash, and more billions spent on technologies open to abuse, and frequently abused, and attempts to manipulate the ballot box, right down to bosses now instructing workers how to vote - sure both sides have done it, as in Tammany Hall but it's now reached the point where both sides will shriek at the result and abuse the referee's call, especially if it ends up in the nakedly biased Supreme Court - and that's not to mention the abuse of voters' right to vote and specious laws about voter fraud when electoral fraud via manipulation of boundaries and private sector operatives is rampant and unchecked - and for what?
The election of a person who will be limited and constrained, not for the benefit of the citizenry and the avoidance of dictatorship, but as a way to take care of special interests and to ensure inertia and stalemate.
No wonder Putin sleeps easy at night.
In the end, it's politics as showbiz or sport, and it's natural that with the Melbourne Cup, the Australian media should line up for the next feast of entertainment, but it can't end soon enough for the pond. The ABC's been all over it like a rash, as if it's Hollywood or Royalty.
It's already gone on for two years, and yet in two short years, whoever gets the gig will be pronounced a lame duck president as the game starts all over again. A two year season!
And yet the more extreme ratbags in the Liberal party look yearningly at the way the fix can be slid into place in same way as it operates in the United States ...
Why it's enough to make the pond turn to Janet Albrechtsen for a little light entertainment.
Oh dear. It seems that bitchy witch Albrechtsen has returned to very old and stale ground.
What's that you say? Calling her a bitchy witch is a groundless attack on a woman that could set a bad example for impressionable young men? Oh take your placard, stuff it in a chaff bag and drown it at sea. And while you're at it, drown Albrechtsen.
Oh sorry. Does that constitute another groundless attack?
What's really tragic however is that Albrechtsen should return to the fray using a story in Marie Claire as an excuse for hand-wringing in The perils of the Prime Minister's feminist fantasies, hidden behind the porous paywall of the lizard Oz for your personal protection and safety:
When will thinking feminists admit that Gillard's anger-laden feminist taunt was a regressive step, undermining the need for men and women to calmly and intelligently sift through the sometimes complex relations men and women?
Oh will someone just shut this silly old Rupert Murdoch bitch witch up, and take her out to sea and drown her. What's the bet she'll pretend to be even-handed?
Just as some men can be sexist, so too can some women. Just as misogyny exists, so does misandry.
And just as members of the commentariat get tired, so you may be assured that they resort to the worst sort of baleful cliches and statements of the bleeding obvious.
Just as stupidity exists, so does Janet Albrechtsen.
Gee, this non-sexist abuse can be fun, an inspiration to impressionable young men everywhere. So let's cut to the wrap-up:
Having been happily co-opted into a showy PR stunt for a Prime Minister intent on living her Walter Mitty style dream as feminist warrior, perhaps the next issue of Marie Claire may explore the unfortunate consequences of hypocritical feminist stunts.
What? She can't even have a Mrs. Walter Mitty fantasy?
Wouldn't it have been simpler, cleaner and truer for Albrechtsen to say that she doesn't like Gillard, and in the hypocritical name of a feminist denouncing hypocritical feminists, she's produced yet another tired beat up? Way past it's use-by date?
Back to climate change and Lord Monckton and a conspiracy involving world government emanating from the United Nations, and the sooner the better if Albrechtsen is going to keep on attracting readers.
Meanwhile, Miranda the Devine does her very best to make Albrechtsen come across as an intellectual giant.
How? Why by the very simple device of addressing an open letter to Camilla about her use of a parasol.
Ever heard of sunscreen, the moll wants to know (moll is of course non-sexist abuse, as approved by Janet Albrechtsen, and suitable for use by impressionable young men) in Camilla's parasol beyond the pale.
In the old days, this used to be known as a fluff piece, a piece of fluff written by a fluffy-headed wombat for other fluffy readers, but it turns out this description is insulting to fluff everywhere.
You see, while pretending to be as light as 99 luftballons, the Devine can't help but sound weird:
In PNG the white lace parasol looked absurd, bobbing around the countryside. It made you look like a parody of the colonial memsahib, ready to expire from all the bare bosoms and dark flesh.
Which was a pity, since you were a good sport, perched up there on the royal ute with Prince Charles, sharing conspiratorial grins. When Charles beamed at the sight of perky native breasts, you just smiled sweetly.
Say what? What the fuck? Where did that come from? Perky native breasts from Devine's salivating, spittle-saturated keyboard?
Not to worry, here's what it came from, from deep within, a tortured bubbling up of neuroses worse than the sort of fresher pounding you might endure if you attended a Catholic college at Sydney University:
Charles had the right idea, donning an Akubra. How we would have loved you if you had joined him. That is the thing. Australia is Diana country. Of all the Commonwealth, this was the seat of your predecessor's most ardent fans.
Diana visited five times, the first just before her wedding to Charles, when we were a haven in the middle of a media storm. We have felt protective ever since.
Diana country! Sweet weeping absent Jesus! Is that like Marlboro country?
This is your first visit to Australia and the comparisons are inevitable. When you went to the Melbourne Cup we couldn't help but remember the last time Charles brought his wife to Flemington - Diana - 27 years ago.
No one expects you to compete with the ghost of a winsome 24-year-old. But what endeared Diana to Australia was her natural unpretentious style. Diana would never have hidden behind a parasol. She barely wore a hat.
Who could forget her, hatless at Uluru in 1983, alongside Charles, in a daggy safari suit, or giggling with lifesavers at Terrigal in 1988.
Yep, gales of nausea began to sweep through the pond, like that pickled peanut that caused so much damage in Beijing ...
Yes, yes, the pond acknowledges that if you read that passage in a burst, you have lost at least ten IQ points, quite possibly for life.
But the pond carries no insurance, and in any case you acknowledged at the very start that you were entering loon pond, where loons gather and worship at the feet of spectacularly neurotic members of the Royal Family, so barking mad that even the firm didn't know how to cope with her barking madness.
Could it get any worse? Of course it could:
Of course, in Melbourne on Cup day, you would have felt more at home under the customary low grey clouds. So we were pleased to see you left the parasol behind.
Anyway, welcome to Australia Camilla. One thing we can say for you is that Charles looks a lot happier than he did the last time he brought a wife here.
You might have been the "third person" in his marriage to Diana but no one can doubt the affection you share. One day we might forgive you.
We might forgive you? One day? There'll be a place for us, and peace and quite and open air, and no parasols, and wait for us there, somehere?
The Devine is speaking for the entire nation? Isn't that what barking mad people like Dickens' Uncle Dick did?
Or is she adopting the Royal "we" in her offer of forgiveness?
It can ... be used to demonstrate an absurd degree of self-regard and pomposity if used by someone who isn't royal. (here)
That's the Devine alright. Not Royal.
But we are amused and we forgive her, because truly how bereft and bare the pond would be without the musings of the likes of Janet Albrechtsen on feminism and Miranda the Devine on the royal use of parasols, as mad dogs and Englishwomen go out in the noon day sun.
Before today the matter of parasols had completely escaped the pond. We had paid no heed, but henceforth the pond intends to take up the cause of parasols.
Who'd have thought there would be a shred of sympathy for Camilla down at the deep end, but when you get this sort of pompous prattling condescension from the shallow end, with its idle offer of a Catholic kind of benediction and forgiveness, something's got to give.
Time for the Devine to get back on to the important matter of climate science, and explain Lord Monckton's point of view? What about expounding on the plasticity of the human brain, a la Susan Greenfield?
Would giving her a sound thrashing with a parasol be a sensible use of the thing? Surely impressionable young men would see it as a fine example of thought in action ...
(Below: look at that filthy pervert looking at young black tits and look at that silly parasol and look, you've just lost another ten points of IQ. Send the bill to Miranda the Devine, and failing that, Rupert Murdoch).
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