Talking of mean, low, petty, and kibbutzs and tea parties and German greenies, as you do ...

(Above: talk about a rogue's gallery of the low, the mean and the petty).


Tempted to be low, mean and petty?

Madam Lash, aka Bronwyn "kerosene bath" Bishop will set us all straight ...

It was of course, a low, mean and petty provocation delivered up by Tony Abbott in his first remarks to the new parliament.

It was the smirk in the delivery that gave it away.

Nah, nah, I'm now the king of the castle, and you're all the dirty rascals …

It showed how hard it is going to be to turn a gloater, a competitive mugger, a pub brawler, a street fighter, and a king hitter, into a seemly statesman.

It'll be tough work, needing a complete and total makeover, rather than a comb over, especially with the limited resources for a comb over.

Of course it brands Abbott as a hypocrite of the first water, but is this news?

Of course it's a measure of the way a dissembling conniving professional politician really doesn't give a toss about the Xian approach he's supposed to lovingly embrace.

Of course there have already been classic signs of a complete betrayal of political promises, most bizarrely pushing the debt limit into the stratosphere, and the furtive, concealed negotiations with Indonesia for a paid people swap, except it won't be called a people swap, and there'll be no memories of Abbott shrieking "wrong, wrong, wrong" from a supine media.

Unless you're an optimist, it's impossible to be disappointed by this circus. Only an optimist would assume that parliament is more than a gang of thieves, rogues and scoundrels, or that Abbott, a serial rorter himself, would ever worry about fixing up things that produce a contempt for parliament and politicians ... such as serial rorting.

Which is why the pond views politics as a kind of cruel form of bear baiting, cock fighting (with real metal spurs), and dog fighting, performed by hams and clowns.

Already the new parliament is shaping as a comedy fest, not least when Clive Palmer channeled a speech by John F. Kennedy to propose that rejection of a pay rise for Karl Marx had led to Stalinism, and as a punchline, to plead for a pay rise for Hedley Cullen from Chairman Rupert.

You can read about it here in Clive Palmer's Press Club speech borrows heavily from JFK, and thanks to News Corp's incoherent paywall, what was once a Hedley Thomas peacock exclusive for the reptiles at the lizard Oz can now be found here, Clive Palmer's former bodyguard labels 'tyrannical bully': report.

Poor old Hedley. He could have been a contender, but now he's consigned to ferreting through Clive's trash cans, bodyguards, resorts, Titanics and dinosaur parks.

You have to admire his devotion to Murdochian duty, and to maintaining the rage in the lizard Oz about Palmer. The pond has a sneaking suspicion that the unseemly proposed rise in the debt limit is in part driven by a fear that a big spending Abbott government - big spending on mates of course - might run into some opposition from crazy Clive in the upper house.

Never mind, it's tough work for the hagiographers, as daily they go about their duty of burnishing the lamp, and each day the reptiles at the lizard Oz carry an EXCLUSIVE report on their efforts, as with this top of the digital page work out:

Oh dear, the pond is mortified. 

The dog ate its homework, and the lizard Oz's digital ink sadly ruined the presentation of this fine EXCLUSIVE, designed to raise the spectre of Tea Party politics in Australia, and never mind that Chairman Rupert is the covert head of tea partiers everywhere.

Yes, yes, he did, Tony Abbott actually invoked the Tea Party, and shackled the Labor party to Tea Party policies.

What's most bizarre? Abbott having ranted about debt and now saying that the nation's debt is sure to surge past $400b and yet still he persists in pushing on with his inequitable generous paid parental leave scheme.

Sheer outrageous chutzpah, unmitigated gall? 

Whatever - sometimes words fail in their duties - it takes a special cheek to talk of debt roulette, having campaigned so extensively on debt reduction, but now one of the first jobs in the new parliament is the business of increasing the possibility of debt to a cool half trillion.

Where are all the chicken littles now? Only a year ago you could see them running about in the street saying the sky was falling, and it was debt wot had done it ...

Working the other side of the relentless street, Hedley was also still at it today:

Pleading and begging, but Hedley's on the job.

But the story which brought a tear to the eye was this special brand of humbug, which NT people will understand isn't a quaint English lolly, but hypocrisy, especially when you remember the members of the new government who refused to turn up for apology day ...

The pond apologises for that damned lizard Oz digital ink, but salutes Stefanie Balogh for an epic abuse of the concept of the dreaming ...

It seems you can humbug the hagiographers at the lizard Oz every day of the week.

But it might be getting too tough a job for the professional hagiographers, if Dame Slap is any guide.

Today Janet Albrechtsen abandons any attempt to directly polish the brass spittoon known as the Abbott government.

Instead she spends her time brooding about the kibbutz movement in Israel, and the greenies of Germany, Green dreams on kibbutz track, inside the paywall, but you know how to google.

In the piece, as in the header, somehow Dame Slap manages to shackle collectivist socialist Jews to deviant wealthy greenie Germans addicted to renewable energy.

Next week the pond promises to link the ancient rulers of Egypt to the fall of the house of Windsor.

Yep, poor Germans have been reduced to poverty - the fashionable term is "energy poverty" - by the greenies, and don't you dare mention that Germany at this point of time doesn't even have a minimum wage unless you happen to be a construction or electrical worker, janitor, roofer, painter or letter carrier.

It's the most slapdash, ideologically motivated, half arsed analysis of the Germany economy, the situation of German workers and the German poor that anyone has produced in some considerable time (why not have a read of Timothy Garton Ash pondering The New German Question for a change of pace?)

Most of Dame Slap's piece seems to have come from a selective reading of a few hysterical outbursts in Der Spiegel ... you can of course save yourself the trouble of having opinions from Germany refracted through addled Dame Slap's brain by simply reading Der Spiegel on line in its international edition here.

Never mind, the pond sometimes wonders if the hagiographic crony commentariat - Dame Slap was one of the cronies - ever get together and have a chat about the contradictions in what they write.

There for example is the wildly excitable Bjorn Lomborg, on his current tour down under, blathering on endlessly about how technology and innovation and alternative energy is the only feasible and economic solution to the problems posed by climate science, and then there's Dame Slap full of resentment and bile about green technologies, and posing as a champion of the German poor, and then there's Greg Hunt at this very moment on radio rabbiting on about how soil carbon capture technology is the solution just around the corner, and how pissing money against the wall on pipe dreams and renewable energy policies and a nice new environment are the way forward ...

Truly, every day is circus day on the pond ...

(Below: more Pope here, bringing Clive and JFK and the German poor together, and if you head off to his gallery - at the top of the page for today only - you can catch his excellent Bronnie portrait).