Murdochland, full of apologists and pure, distilled essence of evil, and an exorcist nowhere to be found ...

Is there a more insufferable sight imaginable than a Catholic denouncing morals and ethics?

Ethics are the new black. It's no longer enough to disagree with your opponent, they have to be morally bankrupt as well. So this paper's editorial position is not just wrong but evil; the Abbott government's policies are beyond misguided and are unethical; and the repeated failures of the Wallabies exceed incompetence and constitute turpitude.

Does anyone see any irony in this?

Given that the Catholic church has routinely, for many centuries, denounced its opponents as morally bankrupt, filthy vessels filled with evil, and even worse, destined to hell, or at least purgatory, or perhaps with a bit of luck and being in the right category, limbo, though it seems the status of limbo is now lost and the young 'uns diddled, what with the church having invented the concept and then announcing that it no longer exists.(Oh dear, here).

Indeed the Catholic church is inordinately fond of evil, and of moral judgements, not to mention black garb.

Which is why hapless, hopeless, useless Greg Craven has to start off Blame game distracts from issues of government (behind the paywall and let's hope it stays there), with idle talk of Ethics, since a mention of mother Grundy sanctimonious righteous Moralising would be a little too close to the Catholic bone.

Craven, in a way that can only be called cowardly lion, calls out both sides of the house for their verbal fisticuffs, and then wouldn't you know it, having washed his hands vigorously in a bowl of cleansing water, proposes this:

Yet here, in a context where the word ethics is uttered about as often as the terms love and respect, is an ideal opportunity to apply a genuine ethical critique. 
The need is obvious. At its worst, federal-state relations are an ethics-deficient zone comparable to the Somali pirate coast. Not for the nothing are they universally called the blame game. Too often, this really is a game, where participants cynically try to shift responsibility while maximising advantage, with the public always without a chair when the music stops.

Somali pirate coast? This is a genuine ethical critique? This from the man who denounced people for adopting ethics as the new black?

Consulting a clinician, the pond was assured that this was a sure sign of schizophrenia, a very specific and acute form, one where comparing state politicians to Somali pirates can be seen as ethical because it's "black Greg" who is in control of the keyboard ...

And then "white Greg" resumes control and spends the rest of the column banging on about state-federal relations as if he's just reinvented the federation wheel, which has been turning ever since federation, and to which Christopher Pyne and Tony Abbott's recent, singular, inept Gonski education folly is just one remarkable contribution, but only one of many ...

It's harmless enough rhetoric, if also completely useless and meaningless. If Craven had just scribbled I say, old chums, pip pip, wot wot, can't we jolly do a bit jolly better, and get a long a little better, in an ethical sort of way, old things, egad, wot wot, yaroop garoooah, it would have been a lot shorter and just as much to the point.

But thanks to Craven, the pond came to realise that indeed the Murdochian rags were now fortified paranoid castles of distilled essence of pure evil, and it was far too late for an exorcism.

The pond was most impressed with a reader's link to a spider's web of connections, here, which rivalled old Lucifer herself.

Meanwhile Lucifer's far-flung minions were at it again, practising their dark arts of deception (by golly is that written in the new Catholic ethical black style or what?)

Truth to tell, they never shut up, and above all, the Bolter never shuts up. It's as close to the pure evil they found in the cellar in Evil Dead as anything the pond has come across.

No, not the Bieb, though the Bied and the Bolter does provide a weird and a marvellous symmetry.

But forget the Bieb, for the Bolter is once again busy being revolting.

There is of course absolutely no point reading what the Bolter has to say in We've had enough of Aunty's bias, beyond the standard rejoinder that any sane person would have long ago had a gutful of the Bolter's insane vitriolic bias, or the ideological zealotry of the House of Murdoch that gives him a platform to shriek his venom into the already carbon-loaded atmosphere.

Day after day, banging on about the ABC? Where's Greg Craven when he's needed? Oh that's right, he's doing a bit of cowardly lion window dressing for the reptiles at the lizard Oz.

But here's a few words Greg Craven might care to consider should he ever care to contemplate the evils done by the Bolter in what is now a failing, flailing, evil Empire, intent on reducing its public enemy to rubble in the forlorn hope that this will somehow improve its commercial prospects:

Leftist bias, suffocating size, warmist, bias, political soap box, overbearing reach ...

Etc etc and so on.

The self-interest, the pitiful self-regard, struts each line - yes, the rags that claim to own 65% of readership in Australia are threatened, overwhelmed, struggling to survive, groaning under the yolk of such an overbearing reach.

It's the ABC wot done it. And nothing to do with the reality that sitting down to read the Murdoch press is now a most unappetising sight and meal, even for those determined to find the comedy in it.

There's little humour in unpleasant harping and carping, and vengeful cries for revenge and revolt, no more than it was fun to watch the Branch Davidians get taken down in Waco, Texas.

The problem with the rhetoric is a simple one. Argue about its size all you like, but the ABC doesn't dominate the marketplace. To suggest it does is mindless and childish, and simply ignores the commercial realities and the ratings.

About all that the Bolter can be offer along these lines is crocodile tears about Fairfax:

The ABC is now so big and well-funded that it is killing off private voices. It offers free the same kind of online news and views to the same audience that The Age and Sydney Morning Herald must charge for just to survive. 

The Bolter shedding tears for the Fairfaxians? Does crocodile hypocrisy get any more grotesque?

Even more peculiar that The Guardian and soon enough the Daily Mail are about to land in Australia, mixed blessings that, and possibly in due course American brands like Huffington Post, all folks who made the conceptual leap to online - as did, it has to be said, the BBC and the ABC, while the Murdochians were still busy conducting their crusade against the NBN and genuine connectivity, and urging that we all stay back in the dark days of copper.

To blame the ABC for the fate of the Fairfaxians, while ignoring the role the Fairfaxians have played in their diminished reach? Beyond the valley of the bizarre, a cheap trick which avoids any sensible scrutiny of what actually went down, and how the Fairfax board routinely ignored advice about the new online world, until it was much too late ... (don't get the pond started on the advice they ignored, we could be here all day).

When it comes to the crunch, the Bolter has only one example - just one - of a media failure which can allegedly be laid at the door of the ABC:

That is uneven competition. Last month Politifact, a political fact-checking web site run by a former Fairfax executive, announced it was winding down operations and could close, in part because the ABC this year created its own online political fact-checking unit.

Note the canny "in part".

Truth to tell, it was a half-arsed idea, quickly and cheaply borrowed from the United States, without sufficient capital, and without sufficient interest once the hysteria of the election campaign receded and people went back to their standard titles for their quick overview of the day's events.

After all, it's well known in Australia that politicians lie.

The Liberals under Abbott are most adept at it, complete with backflips and triple pikes, though it has to be said Labor isn't so bad at it either, when not distracted by the bigger pleasure of knifing each other.

How long did it take the Greens to hop into bed with jolly Joe Hockey, or should that be jolly Joe hopping into bed with the Greens? Who needs to fact check that? Who needs to go back and be reminded of the rhetoric about the evil greenies and the dangers of debt and all the other horseshit that flowed into the ocean of Murdoch tree killers?

Who's astonished that Australia, in the most naked exercise of power, and in the process the most inept betrayal of the status and security of foreign aid workers, would conduct itself in the way it has in the East Timor affair?

Or that just as predictably The Australian would deliver a heart-rending sobbing editorial, Lest Timor forget, we have our national interests too, which nauseatingly proposes that East Timor owes Australia and now must pay the bill:

Meanwhile, our intelligence and security agencies are obliged to do what they can within the law to protect our nation's interests.

Commercial interests? Alexander Downer?

What need of a fact checker, when daily you can choke on your cornflakes or your vomit, depending how your consumption of Murdochian nonsense goes down.

It's a sign of a rabid ideologue that no matter what the circumstance or the complaint, at some point the hoppy toad that sits in the brain, and provides a daily madness and fixation comes hopping out, and as always in the case of the Bolter, it's climate science, and Climategate, and Robin Williams and all the usual black helicopter shibboleths and nightmares:

The ABC is not just biased. It is a massive organ of state media, strangling private voices and imposing a Leftist orthodoxy that thinks it fine to publish security secrets and sinful to report the secrets of global warmists. Yes, it's time to revolt.

Strangling private voices?

Can anyone anywhere at any time get the Bolter to shut up? Can anyone strangle him? Please someone strangle him (disclaimer, this is not an invitation or an offer or an inducement to an assassin, and no money or reward, either verbal or containing a prize or even an Xmas cracker is available from the pond).

The secrets of global warmists?

Every day the paranoia level at News Corp seems to crank up to a new level.

If it's not the ABC having tentacles in children, it's the ABC as part of a conspiracy of global warmists concealing dark secrets ...

You don't need a fact checker to realise that you're dealing with the barking mad.

The Bolter harping on endlessly, in a monomaniacal way about climate science, reminded the pond of a Charles Darwin quote which bobbed up the other day on radio, and which was first to be found in the introduction to The Descent of Man:

It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known: but ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Nailed the Bolter in one, and Darwin was scribbling back in the days of copper.

What was it Craven said?

This paper's editorial position and crony commentariat team is not just wrong but pure, distilled, essence of evil. Waiter, call an exorcist, but if you can't find one, Max von Sydow will do ...

Why, that's almost as good as Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) in Halloween on meeting the biggest and best Murdochian of all:

I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil.

Instead he ended up in the crony commentariat working for Chairman Rupert.

Meanwhile, the pond's war on Xmas is cranking up a notch, as wicked slack-arsed corporate email cards drop in email boxes around the land. Talk about the spirit of Xmas!

Now enjoy Xmas - if you can - with this David Rowe portrait hanging from your toilet door, and more Rowe here.

Please don't ask the pond to count the delights in this cartoon, we could be here all day. Send it to a friend. Email is best. Tell them to hang it from their toilet door. Let's spread the spirit of Xmas far and wide ...