Leadership? Does that involve frothing stallions?

(Above: the pond sets the tone for today's Paul Sheehan piece).


Shamelessness, a capacity for immediate forgetfulness, indifference to contradictions, nay a Walt Whitman-esque capacity to embrace contradiction, the hide of an elephant, the baleful glare of a rhino, and a willingness to throw stones at glass windows while lurking inside a vast modernist emporium constructed out of glass ...

These are all part of the essential armour of the hide-bound commentariat, and what better example of it than Paul Sheehan.

After scribbling a piece like Why Seven needs this beauty with the beasts, the pond would have gone into hiding for weeks, perhaps months. The slobbering and the salivating over Francesca Cumani was amazing, as was Sheehan's desire to replicate her horse-riding experience:

I can only imagine the force of being on a frothing stallion with its ears back. 

The pond can only imagine the rich fantasy life of generally grumpy Sheehan, but here's where it gets rich, for today, Sheehan has taken it upon himself to write, at third hand, about the Paula Broadwell David Petraeus affair, in the mysteriously headed Mutual love of leadership cost Petraeus ultimate prize. (forced video at end of link to make you suffer)

To get things going, Sheehan starts this way:

After Paula Broadwell co-wrote a biography of the most feted American general of the past 50 years, David Petraeus, a telling sentence appeared in her author's profile: ''She spent much of the past year in Afghanistan as an embedded author''. 
Pause. 

Boom tish, or tish boom, if you will, from the man who wrote about frothing stallion with ears back less than a week ago. And Sheehan persists with the boom tish routine, as if he's just come from a frat party at St. John's:

She also wrote about her ''passion for leadership''. 
Pause. 

It's about as funny as being slapped about the face with a wet fish, and way less stimulating than having hot blood surge as the beast beneath gallops towards the fence, always ready to service the needs of its rider.

Or some such thing, because Sheehan, who routinely mistakes a hammer for a feather keeps going:

In the biography's prologue she wrote: ''I took full advantage of his open-door policy …'' 
Pause.

What else is there, after this opener? It turns out bugger all. There's a quick survey of the affair, with poor hapless Petraeus contrite, the wicked witch Broadwell completely at fault, and a tour of Dwight Eisenhower's affair during the war years.

And then Sheehan concludes by drawing a completely unsubstantiated implication that Broadwell's affair with Petraeus might also make her opposition to the Pentagon's "combat exclusion policy" a collateral casualty.

There are many reasons that the Pentagon's current combat exclusion policy might survive, but Broadwell fucking Petraeus (or vice versa if you will), isn't one of them, unless you happen to think in the same dumb way as Sheehan. The pond thinks of it as frothing stallion syndrome.

There are dozens of investigative pieces about Broadwell and Pretraeus pouring out of the US press at the moment (here's the New York Times backgrounding Broadwell for example), all a click of a mouse away, and it only takes those "pauses" at the head of the Sheehan piece to realise you'd be better off reading all of them, or none of them, and you'd still be better informed than reading the frothing stallions man.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Pell has turned to the sectarian ruse and to his own version of the glass house to fend off the calls for a Royal Commission, but it seems even the fawning Murdoch press is on the turn. Pell is deeply into denial, according to the lizard Oz's report on his Sunday mass turnout, in Pell shuns commission, saying apology was enough (behind the paywall to save you pain):

"We have to answer up for what we've done but any suggestion that we are the only culprit or only community producing culprits is entirely misleading," the Archbishop of Sydney told the congregation.

The pond knows of absolutely no one who has contended that the Catholic church is the only culprit or the only community producing culprits, but the pond is aware of plenty who propose that institutions with the care of children, such as the Catholic church, have a special burden and responsibility.

But that doesn't suit the straw man argument, or the need to limit the ongoing damage:

He said it was "inappropriate" to discuss the matter further during mass, but told The Australian outside the cathedral of his doubts about whom the royal commission would serve. "For whom? For who? If people say there are thousands of cases like that, they (victims) got that (justice) when we gave them due procedure and apologised," he said.

Due procedure and an apology? That's it? If Pell had half a clue, the church under his leadership would be pro-active, out and about, being shown to do things, to cleanse matters that have been dragging on for decades. Instead it's the old "haul up the drawbridge, fill the moat with verbiage, and defend the castle walls" routine, and that stance is getting the church deeper into the swamp.

If the head of the BBC can fall on his sword for not knowing what a program was up to, it's about time Pell contemplated falling on his for defending the indefensible, and maintaining the rage against a Royal Commission ...

Meanwhile, the Xmas comedy season is coming early, as usual, and what to do about a second Sydney airport is the "boom tish" routine of the day.

It seems Canberra might not be the ideal location, due to problems with the very fast bus and the even faster tricycle connections under study, and so Mike Baird and the Daily Terror have come out in support of a fourth and a fifth runaway in Botany Bay. You can find Baird's insights under NSW Treasurer Mike Baird backs more runways, no new airport for Sydney.

Showing absolutely no brains, the Terror even penned an editorial under the header A Sydney Airport expansion is a no-brainer, which is true if you have no brains left after a brain explosion. The best line in the piece?

... where cost and common sense are concerned a Sydney Airport expansion is a no-brainer. At just over $5 billion it is about half the cost of building a new airport, largely because much of the transport and associated infrastructure is already in place.

Which tells you only one thing. Chairman Rupert has cracked down so hard on newspaper expenses that even editors aren't allowed to catch taxis to the airport, and no one can afford the cost of parking there, and so no one has ever tried to travel to or from the domestic or international branches of the airport during peak hour.

What's slipped under the radar is that yet another plan for Sydney airport's revitalisation has been stymied (this time by Virgin, on the basis that any airline located at the international airport would suffer  serious competitive transport disadvantages in relation to domestic travellers).

You can read about the headline news, as old as September, in Sydney Airport scraps plans for alliance-based mega-terminals.

Sydney aiport spun a rich vein of fantasy out of this until reality intervened, and it was back to the drawing board.

The same can be said for Baird's bout of delusional pie in the sky building, designed to provide a sop to the grand alliance-based mega-terminal idea.

If it had been perverse ploy to bring Badgery's Creek back on to the table, it might have some merit, but at best it's a stop gap, interim proposal for a grander vision.

So it's NSW politics, so what's new?

Ironically the proposal includes the notion of shutting down or reducing the role of the third runway, the flight path for which runs directly over the pond, but truth to tell, aircraft noise is always balanced by handy access to the airport, and sending up inner west dwellers as greenies is just another Murdoch Xmas routine.

The real problem would come when the seams burst and the curfew is scrapped, a direction the likes Max Wilton-Moore would love to take (he already wants an increase in the landing cap).

Sydney airport is never going to go away. But Sydney needs a second airport because an even bigger problem is the productivity constraints, and the sheer waste of endlessly circling planes, and endlessly circling traffic on the ground, as recently outlined by Lenore Taylor in Airport debacle stuck in eternal holding pattern.

Badgery's Creek is the obvious solution but no one will grasp the nettle, and so left field proposals will keep coming ... and all we've learned today is that Mike Baird is yet another NSW politician who doesn't have a clue. But then he's the Treasurer for a government which carelessly mislaid the odd billion in its budget, so why are you surprised?

O'Farrell was delusional when he had the Canberra spasm, and yet there's no sign he's willing to step out of his delusional world.

He's as helpless and as hapless as George Pell when he's asked by the optimistic to show some leadership ... and that's enough jibber jabber about leadership for the day ...

(Below: so now there's only one other question to resolve. Did Mike Baird really stand in front of this grand new plan, or is it a Daily Terror photoshopped fit-up? Either way, it'll make for fine comedy down the track, say in a year, when we check in on progress on the solution to Sydney's airport woes).