No arms for the Dutch, thank you very much, it's the best way to keep bodies off the street...

(Above: and so say all of us, Mr. Ivens).


So where are we in this crony commentariat vale of tears, this Monday, with the moaning and the bleating and the whining and the carry on and the banging of drums and the we'll all be rooned said Hanrahan and Sheehan?

Truth to tell, the pond is a little over it, having caught up on some reading over the weekend, and in particular Charles Glass's Syria: On the Way to Genocide? (currently outside the New York Review of Books' paywall here).

Nearly seven million lost their homes, more than two million of them fleeing across the nearest border and five million living in penury with relatives, in schools, in other public buildings, or outdoors in public parks. Nearly a third of the population of twenty-three million are refugees or displaced internally.

Roughly the same size as Australia in terms of population, yet comprehensively fucked as the fighting has turned into fighting for the sake of fighting and religious causes.

No doubt the reptiles at the lizard Oz could get a few columns out of that.

As for Tim Bleagh?

Why he's at the cutting edge of incisive commentary and profound insight:

Yep, if you've got some soft blancmange in need of a hard-hitting exposé, Tim Blair is your man and the Daily Terror is your rag.

Roll on the Daily Mail down under. Could it be any worse?

Blair, in the usual crony commentariat way, seizes on a few tweets to berate the left and the rest of the infidels for seizing on a few wayward tweets giving David Cameron a hard time about Mandela, thereby conveniently overlooking the real villains in the piece - the John Howards, the dick, Cheney, the Margaret Thatchers, and the Ronald Rayguns who cheerfully dismissed Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and did their bit to preserve apartheid.

But you won't cop any of that in Paris Hilton fake reveals twits. You won't cop any denunciation of conservative heros and heroines who got it wrong and stood on the wrong side of racist history. All you'll cop is Tim Blair hiding behind Paris Hilton's rather fetching leopard-skin dress. Because apartheid and leopard-skin go together like a horse and carriage.

Meanwhile, the most expert hater of all, the routine exponent of conspiracy theories, the man who routinely rattles the can of racism and ethnic fear and loathing, the abuser of respectable climate scientists going about their scientific business, the one and only Bolter,  turns up with some standard shock horror.

Sure it would be simpler to tell him to go live in Syria and see what hate is really like, but instead we have to put up with this smelly offal, dumped on the front page of the Daily Terror.

Yes, of course, the Bolter is shocked, shocked to his core, shocked to the very root of his being, shocked beyond belief, shocked out of his skin, shocked like he's accidentally wandered into an electricity sub-station and triggered one of the circuit breakers:

Shocking. But back to the Bolter's shock, fear and loathing:

Shocked, he's shocked he tells ya.

Even before you click on Leftist hate is turning ugly, you know it's a comedy item, since it's written by a man who makes a living out of cultivating professional hatred, who routinely denounces people as warmists, who routinely calls out leftists and progressives as bastardly bastards offering bastardry that goes too far, who is always ready to have a go at the pesky, uppity blacks, and the weird aliens who've taken away the streets from decent angry old white folks, and who has a comments section that routinely reads like a cesspit of fear and loathing.

And he works for a crusading company which has routinely demonised and demonstrated a hate-filled fear and loathing for the ABC, the NBN, climate science, and all the other phobias that infest the conservative mindset.

Sure enough, the ABC is out of control, in the matter of Campbell Newman, the militarisation of the state, and the war on the bikies. An old phobia, but worth another re-run, because it demonstrates that the ABC is out of control, and never mind that bashing the ABC is now way, way out of control in News Corp and conservative government circles.

Up next came the hapless Thomas Reuter, who did in fact write a remarkably silly piece for The Conversation, which you can find out the header Australian espionage and the history of foreign intervention in Indonesia.

He got things wrong, and the site later published a correction. No doubt the Bolter was inflamed by Reuter blaming the wretched Dutch for their wretched colonial behaviour, as Reuter dares to point out that the Dutch had subjugated and exploited the country for centuries, and in consequence its neighbours are still living with the fall out.

But if Reuter's such a hopeless leftist, why didn't he mention the role of some Australian unions in the Indonesian struggle, celebrated by visiting Dutch film-maker Joris Ivens in his 1946 short Indonesia Calling?

Yes, not all Dutch folk toed the line in the old days - and what about the likes of the largely forgotten Molly Bondan? The pond has long had a soft spot for Bondan, who walked the walk at a time when it was dangerous to do so, and at a time when any expression of sympathy for the revolutionary Indonesian independence movement was denounced by the primeval conservative forebears of the Bolter as treachery and dangerous leftie pinko pervert commie treason (she's also mentioned here in a book review about the times).

Of course Reuter set himself up for a fall, and the reptiles at the lizard Oz were on to him in a flash, as in Academic backtracks over massacre post (behind the paywall) the more so because Reuter's piece had been picked up and run in The Jakarta Post, now required reading for all Australians in order to discover what the Australian government has been doing ...

Reuters got taken down by Adrian Vickers, a historian who clearly knows a bit more about history than Reuters,  but the real crime of Reuter's piece is that it has produced the astonishing sight, the high farce, of the Bolter posing as a friend of a vibrant, independent Indonesia.

Naturally the Bolter wants to know what his university is going to do about Reuter getting it wrong, but then you might as well ask what News Corp is going to do about providing shelter for the most offensive commentator in the land. Why promote him even harder ....

And then there's the matter of ACT Education Minister Joy Burch calling Christopher Pyne a cunt, when in fact it's widely accepted that the correct and only term is poodle, but we've already done that in the pond, and we can't crank up the indignation the way the Bolter does. Yes, it would have been better for her to have called him a preening, mincing ponce of a poodle, but shit happens.

At the end of all these verbal skirmishes, the Bolter rears up on his hind tail like a red bellied black, ready to strike, and cranks up the hysteria level to eleven:

Tony Abbott has been called a "liar" by the Opposition Leader and pictured hanging from a noose on a poster at a same-sex marriage rally. 
Someone operating in the Geelong Trades Hall set up a Facebook page urging Abbott's assassination, and The Age promoted "F--- Abbott" T-shirts sold by an Age columnist. 
The hatred now has a dangerously violent tone, and I ask again - what does the Left want? 
Bodies in the street?

Oh go take a holiday in Syria.

It's amazing - no scrub that, it's fucking amazing - how quickly the Bolter forgets. Not so long ago, his radio shock jock chums were urging that Julia Gillard be taken far out to sea and drowned in a chaff bag like a mewling kitten, and his hero Abbott was standing in front of signs urging the world to ditch the witch and get rid of Bob Brown's bitch.

What, you might ask, was that all about? Did the Bolter and his chums want bodies in the street?

Indeed they did, and they got the body they wanted, and there it is Clyde, they tanned her hide, and that's it hanging on the shed (but let's not repeat that other verse about the blacks, though the Bolter might just enjoy the sing along).

Poor old John Lennon got it right in that famous lyric:

And in the end, the hate you take
Is equal to the hate you make ...

And day after day, the Bolter keeps making the hate and maintaining the rage and shouting at people and getting everyone agitated, and then has the cheek to turn around and talk about bodies in the street, when in recent times the main Australian contribution to bodies in the street has been in places like Iraq and Afghanistan ... and now deluded sods heading off to the killing fields of Syria.

It's typical that the Bolter attributes all the hate to the usual suspects, lefties and progressives (strangely greenies and the Fairfaxians miss out - maybe now the greenies are at one with jolly Joe they're not so bad) but then it require a bigger order of self-analysis for him to take an analytical look at his and News Corp's role in sustaining the hate and maintaining the rage ...

Day after relentless day it's a hate fest about the ABC, designed in the end to reduce the ABC to smouldering rubble; day after day it's a hate fest about climate science and the warmists, designed to allow ignorance and darkness to stalk the land; and day after  day, there's copper-celebrating luddite-NBN bashing designed to make sure the pond never enjoys a decent online connection ...

Is it wrong to join all these together and attribute it to one malevolent voice, the demonic house of darkness of News Corp? Damn right, it makes a lot more sense than lumping together the ABC, Reuter and Burch and attributing the assorted results to weirdly united malevolent leftists ...

Does the pond take this demonic malevolence on the part of News Corp personally? Damn right. So long as copper lives. Let the hate fest continue ...

Meanwhile, over at Sheehan Manor, the generally grumpy Sheehan says farewell to Qantas in Buck has to stop on saving icons.

Now the pond has no dog in the fight, and no real interest in the argument, having - like General Grump - long ago left Holden and Qantas, but there's a poignant flourish towards the end which will have people chortling, at least the few that can remember Sheehan only a few columns ago railing against indulgence:

It was of more than passing interest to read on Saturday that China Southern Airlines had been considering a strategic investment in Qantas, as I am a member of the Chinese airline's frequent flyer program because I can fly business class for less than half what Qantas wants to charge, and for not much more than its economy fare. 
China Southern has put aside that possible investment, but I have made the shift. Whether Qantas keeps flying internationally has ceased to be of concern to me, because I cannot afford to care.

Shouldn't that have read because I am not cattle or even a member of the sardine family, and I must have my business class indulgences and treats, and having spent too much on ten dollar sourdough bread and magic water, I must now have them delivered cheaply?

Yep, let's not talk about economy class for the long suffering crony commentariat. It's tough work maintaining the hate and the rage and the anger, and the doom and the gloom, and a glass of champagne before take-off helps soothe the indulgent nerves.

There is one other reason to read the piece. It sets you up for a David Rowe cartoon, and more Rowe here: