The pond had a choice this morning.
Read the usual bout of spleen-showing bile-billowing from generally grumpy Paul Sheehan in How covert union stays disciplined ...
Hang on, covert? Along with a truly bizarre Fifty shades of Sheehan illustration ...
Sheehan does Madame Lash?
But back to "covert", which it seems is roughly like an SM party with Mr Sin Sheehan ...
The election is being contested by two antagonist political coalitions, both highly disciplined in their voting unity. While one of them is called, unimaginatively, the Coalition, the other coalition has no name and pretends it does not exist. It is the Voldemort of Australian politics, aka He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
Yes, she who must not be named is the publicly announced, widely disseminated news that Labor would preference the greenies (and the Katterites) in various ways, a decision equally publicly denounced, and the denouncement widely disseminated, by Tony Abbott, who tried to mount a wedge by announcing he wouldn't preference the greenies ...
It's probably as overt as any bit of recent news in the election campaign ...
1. Open and observable; not hidden, concealed, or secret: overt hostility; overt intelligence gathering.
2. Of, relating to, or being military or intelligence operations sanctioned or mandated by Congress: in Australia, overt transfer of preferences between the Labor party and the greenies.
Oh well, most of it is in the dictionary ...
Has no name and pretends it doesn't exist? Voldemort? Must not be named? As if only Sheehan is in the know and he's spilling the beans?
How is Sheehan routinely and so casually allowed to abuse the English language?
Of course what Sheehan is on about is the stupefyingly obvious, so nakedly apparent that his mindless attempt to whip up a controversy is bizarre - as bizarre as the lazy way he quotes extensively from a speech by Eric Abetz discovering the very same carefully hidden conspiracy, a conspiracy so deeply hidden at one point it involved an actual agreement between said Labor and Greens party.
Naturally the sting is in the tail:
... while the media has been fixated on a presidential-style election campaign between Rudd and Tony Abbott, what has been neglected is the important rearguard action that Labor is fighting in the Senate campaign. As its decision to preference the Greens shows, it would rather have the Greens with the balance of power. This means Labor wants gridlock, something the Greens are happy to deliver. As Gillard said in 2011: "We happily leave to the Greens being a party of protest with no tradition of striking the balance required to deliver major reform.''
Gridlock?
That assumes that the last three years, in the face of relentless nattering negativity, and a minority government, and the need to negotiate in the upper and the lower houses, the federal government did and achieved nothing.
What's Sheehan's alternative to this gridlock?
Presumably it's the unfettered power of Tony Abbott in both houses, able to do what he likes however the mood takes him and his party and his faceless backers. We keed, we keed, his backers are only too well known, from the IPA to the Pellists ...
That unfettered power previously spelled the end of the Howard government, which went too far, and frankly, giving unfettered power to the more extreme ends of the Liberal party - giving the likes of Sophie Mirabella and Cory Bernardi and Eric Abetz and George Brandis a free kick, and a 'get out of jail, buy all the properties you like and charge a motza for them' card, would actually be doing a disservice to Abbott.
Let him negotiate, let him achieve consensus, let him discuss and argue for his policies, let him do the relentless grind required to get his legislation passed, let herd wisdom rather than Sheehan and Abbott autocratic power mongering rule ...
Someone has to introduce some sanity into some of Abbott's more bizarre socialist, great leap forward, five year planning socialist experiments, from his favouring of the rich and increasing income inequality in his child care schemes, to his notion that magic soil and a green army will deliver carbon reduction .... helped along by shovelling taxpayer cash down the throats of business ...
I mean, when you've even got dear old Dame Judith Sloan - the Dame Slap you have when you don't have the real Dame Slap - denouncing the scheme as Too dear, too wasteful: drop it for daycare (behind the paywall for your safety), producing a concordance between Sloan and the pond as rare as catching a glimpse of a total solar eclipse .... I mean, gridlock might not be such a bad thing ...
But back to that choice the pond had this morning.
We could have marvelled at Fairfax finally deciding to draw attention to the absurdity of Abbott's direct action plan, on the front page what's more, though how Climate of uncertainty earns the title of "Exclusive" when it for the most part re-states the well-known and the bleeding obvious, is up there with Sheehan's use of "covert" ... to describe that which is hidden in plain sight ...
Or the pond could have gone off and danced amongst the dandelions with the reptiles of the Murdoch press as the Corp continues to maintain the rage and display its ongoing complete lack of balance ...
Most notably the astonishing sight of the Daily Terror urging that the curfew on Sydney Airport be abandoned, using it as a stick to bludgeon Albanese, in Deputy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese blows billions on airport curfew.
Arise John Lehmann, henceforth you will be known as Lord Warden of the Max-Moore Wilton cinque mascot airport ...
Oh and provider of bullshit statistics and meaningless data to support your work as Lord Warden ...
As for a second airport for Sydney?
How quickly and how stupidly the lizard hacks at the Terror turn on a tabloid pin, and there'll be no chatter about a second airport now that the hacks have the curfew in their sights, and worship and channel the thoughts Max on their knees ...
Yes, the pond had all these choices and more, way more, but instead it was offered an early appointment with the dentist.
Sheehan, Sloan and the reptiles at the Terror, or a painful expensive dental treatment?
Why the choice is simple and blindingly obvious ...
A lay down misère ...
Go easy with the needle doc, don't take advantage, just because anything you do is less painful than time spent with the hacks ...
(Below: well played Terror)
Your top portrait shows frightening malevolence. Torquemada is it?
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