And a Dirk Diggler to that ...

With friends like this inside the tent, why go trolling around the camp for enemies?

Of course the tweeting Textor subsequently deleted his tweet, but not before it had done an obligatory tour of the intertubes.

If you take the time and the trouble to actually visit the twittering Textor tweeting his texts, you find a seething morass of cheap shots and point scoring, given all the huge complexity that 140 characters allows.

So much anger, so much hostility, so much sarcasm, so little time.

Invariably when someone thinks with his thumb, the best advice is that occasionally he should suck it.

Naturally the reptiles at the lizard Oz did their best to step around the issue, running with a little AAP copy here.

It took the Fairfaxians to give Textor the proper texting honours:

In one tweet, since deleted, Mr Textor attacked the Indonesian Foreign Minister. Advertisement ''Apology demanded from Australia by a bloke who looks like a 1970s Pilipino [sic] porn star and has ethics to match,'' he tweeted along with the hash-tag ''#Fairfax demands appeasement''. 
In another, the Liberal insider asked ''What sort of head of state communicates with a head of a neighbouring government by twitter FFS? SBY''. FFS is shorthand for ''for f---'s sake''. 
In a further tweet, Mr Textor said the phone-tapping incident revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden was in 2009 and said ''Maybe SBY uses some sort of weird-ass ancient calendar''. 
But he also appeared to justifying the phone tapping of the Indonesian President and his wife as well as eight other senior figures with the tweet: ''Last time I looked no Indonesians were ever bombed in Australia.'' He published pictures of the Bali bombers under the tweet ''Nothing to see here.''  (here)

So that's the top level, diplomatic, statesmanlike, oil on troubled waters advice the Liberal party can rely on ...

The point, if there's any, is that Textor's gratuitous childish pugnacity might have been overlooked by the reptiles at the lizard Oz as the prank of a faithful but slightly rabid supporter, but it's now been splashed in the Indonesian press, fuelling the domestic flames involved in the dispute, and there's a direct trail that can be walked from Textor to Abbott:

The Coalition’s pollster, Mark ­Textor, was prolific again on Twitter in playing down the import of the incident, a sign being widely perceived that Mr Abbott was being advised the issue was not damaging him domestically. Among dozens of tweets, Mr Textor said: “Apology demanded from Australia by a bloke who looks like a 1970s Filipino porn star and has ethics to match.”

Not damaging him domestically? Right now we're talking about a short-term storm, but what if it settles into a long march to the Indonesian elections?

And to what avail?

While Textor is still trying to assail assorted domestic beasts - the ABC, Mike Carlton, the rest of Fairfax, The Guardian - it barely seems to have dawned on him that Tony Abbott won the election, and now has the job of governing, which inter alia on foreign affairs, occasionally requires him to sound like a diplomat and a statesman.

While in the background, the twittering Textor turns it all into a tweeting circus ... FFS ...

President of the Western Australian Farmers’ Federation, Dale Park, called for “good diplomacy” to avoid repercussions for the live cattle trade, which Mr Abbott vowed to try and restore when he travelled to Indonesia after being sworn in. (here)

Good diplomacy? Good luck with that. Dragging out a reference to Filipino porn stars is good diplomacy? Instead of a fuckwit fuckwittedly tweeting?

Well ...

... to that ...

But at least it reminds the pond why it's never taken to twitter. If this is the adults in charge, how come so much room was allowed for their children, their illegitimate, thumb-talking spawn?

Meanwhile, in another world, someone has dared to mention the truth of Telstra's copper network, at least so far as it applies to the rain-sodden, wretched, decaying trenches outside the pond's house, occasionally sighted when a despairing technician has to pretend the gunk of copper could actually be made functional, as you can read in Telstra's copper is 'nearly beyond repair' and 'an absolute disgrace': union.

The point of course is that Tony "let's pretend we'll go on an Indonesian fishing boat buying spree in a time of national budget emergency" Abbott is about to renegotiate its copper deal with Telstra, and the luddite Abbott's representatives are going to bunker down and negotiate a deal in relation to FTN use of the useless copper outside the pond's house.

NBN Co's new chief operating officer, Greg Adcock, confirmed at the hearing that NBN Co would test parts of Telstra's copper underground network before it made any definitive moves to a fibre-to-the-node design. 
 "The current thinking is that there would be testing done. Whether it informs the strategic review or whether the strategic review makes some assumptions to be then tested, I think that is the way we would frame it at this point," Mr Adcock said. 

Oh really? First class bureaucratic gobbledegook Mr Adcock, and please, come on over to Newton and Camperdown, and will be pleased to show you the most useless, half-arsed, damp squib of a copper network on this godforsaken earth ...

The state of Australia's copper network has long been a focus because critics say that it has deteriorated and might not provide the speed of 100 megabits per second the Coalition eventually wants to deliver over it, with technologies like VDSL2 vectoring. 
 The Coalition has promised to replace any copper that doesn't achieve the speeds promised but critics say the true state of the copper network is not known, and its costly replacement could blowout the Coalition's NBN costings.

100mgps? Now there's a cosmic joke.

On a rainy day any fool who's kept a landline is lucky to make a connection where the voices sound like a commercial for a snap, crackle and pop breakfast cereal.

Speaking of la la land, let's wrap up with a visit to generally grumpy Paul "magic water" Sheehan, sounding off in Those who exposed spying on Indonesia have got what they wanted.

First of all, he slags off Tony Abbott:

What elevates this diplomatic firestorm is the element of personal affront. Indonesia's president has made his displeasure known in the most explicit, direct and public terms. He believes he has been affronted twice. First, by the cowboys in the Defence Signals Directorate, then by Abbott refusing to apologise, explain or even mollify. 
If Abbott digs in over an outdated, outflanked matter of principle, his relationship with Indonesia will be in tatters, and his credibility in foreign affairs compromised. It's his choice. 

Uh huh. So Abbott made the wrong call.

But that sticks in Sheehan's craw. Waiter, some magic water, so Sheehan can clear his throat and his keyboard, and it explain it's actually all the fault of the ABC and The Guardian:

All this would have been anticipated by the people who lit this conflagration, the ABC and the English import The Guardian Australia. The Guardian had possession of the security leak for months. Nothing happened while Labor was in power. 
ABC managing director Mark Scott had a clear choice. It was self-evident that revealing these phone taps would poison the relationship with Indonesia, damage Australia's intelligence-gathering, humiliate President Yudhoyono, compromise Australian security arrangements, and ripple out to Australia's education market in Indonesia. He decided to go all-in with The Guardian. 
His decision was consistent with, on his watch, the ABC's institutional hostility to Coalition policies on asylum-seekers, and its decisions such as appointing Russell Skelton as chief fact-checker despite his public record of anti-Coalition partisanship. The ABC has got what it wanted. It will now pursue the story with zeal.

Pathetic. In every way shape and form.

Where was Sheehan when it came to Obama and Snowden and Merkel? Stories that crossed the flimsy ideological line, the party consensus that spying and snooping on the citizenry is all good in a "whatever it takes" world?

Why on this Orwellian world did you need to ask, when you could have just read Snowden a threat to US national security:

The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has described Snowden's actions as gravely damaging to US security. 
Another inconvenient fact is that the US government was operating within the law, laws passed by a democratically-elected government which must ultimately answer to the electorate. 
Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a security agency must request permission from a secret court set up to judge requests to target individuals or entities via an internet service provider. The US Congress, the courts and the Obama Administration approved these measures.

Take that whining, moaning Angela Merkel. You see, it's all legit and above board ...

It led one Crikey reader to wonder, here:

Is Paul Sheehan actually a dinosaur of the military industrial complex? ... Really he is as boring and predictable as Gerard Henderson. Belongs in a sandstone quarry with the other primitive artefacts.

Amen. Would Fairfax have run the story, if they'd have got it, instead of The Grauniad and the ABC?

Of course they would. Sheehan isn't so much a bit of sandstone as a smelly sulphur-laden case of sour grapes ...

The difference is that once the leak was out there, Obama ate humble pie.

Whereas Tony Abbott wouldn't or couldn't ...

And that had diddly squat to do with the machinations of the ABC or The Grauniad ..

Perhaps it's because he has a problem with Filipino porn stars ...

Or perhaps it's because he tried to place a call to the Indonesian President using the copper wires outside the pond's house, and all SBY could hear was a lot of crackly shit ...

(Below: and because the pond does cricket these days, Rowe captures the tone perfectly. More Rowe here, the best reason for the AFR to survive)