Soul clap hands and sing, Akker Dakker and Miranda the Devine are ready to ruin Sunday ...

(Above: more Rowe here)

The Sunday Terror must be really struggling.

How did Yeats put it?

An aged Dorothy is but a paltry thing, 
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless 
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing 
For every tatter in its mortal dress...

You see, lately of a Sunday, the Terror has felt the need to trot out the heaviest hitters in its crony commentariat arsenal.

Like Akker Dakker, who seems easily shocked. He's certainly easily, routinely offended, perhaps because he routinely offends as many as he can:

But here's the question they should be asking themselves. Do they really think that Akker Dakker rambling on for the squillionth, zillionth time about the ABC is the way to return to the rude ruddy glow of commercial health?

What's the point of running a story about not running a story when all Akker Dakker has as a story is his pious hope that something will turn up from current police investigations? While recycling all the Murdoch stuff from the lizards at the reptile Oz, equally optimistic, in best Micawber style, that something will turn up ...

Who on earth could be bothered to read Akker Dakker, full of sly innuendo as he is, and already denouncing the ABC as guilty, for failing to report things that have yet to happen ....

Akker Dakker is, of course, out to get Gillard and trade unions in general, and yet in what must pass for the slightest sleight of hand trick, we move from this:

Expect astonishment from the ABC's vast national audience when the federal government places trade-union slush funds front-and-centre of a major inquiry in the New Year. 
The rusted-on viewers and listeners will be bewildered because the taxpayer-funded state-owned broadcaster has imposed a regimen of strict censorship on the key element in the inquiry - the misuse of money from the AWU association which was established with the assistance of legal advice from former Prime Minister Julia Gillard when she was a partner in the Victorian Labor law firm Slater and Gordon.

... To this:

For too long, the union bosses have insisted that the Labor Party turn a blind eye to union activities. Next year, the ALP must be given the opportunity to demonstrate it truly has the workers' interests at heart. 
It will send a disgraceful message if it doesn't champion the broadest inquiry into the operation of slush funds and the union movement's handling of members' money more generally. 
Surely it has nothing to hide?

Meanwhile, what does Akker Dakker add to the sum total of knowledge regarding the conspiracies he alleges, which seem to embrace everyone from the ABC to the entirety of the Labor party?

Why nothing, nada, zip, zero.

The idea, of course, that the ABC would ignore a breaking story about actual proof of Gillard's malfeasance is almost as bizarre as the notion that the ABC should have ignored, in a desperate desire to avoid being called treacherous and traitorous by the same crony commentariat, the story about tapping the phone of the wife of Indonesia ...

Why you might just as well have scribbled:

For too long, the crony commentariat have insisted that the Murdoch press turn a blind eye to the worst activities of crony capitalism and business corruption. Next year, the Murdoch press must be given the opportunity to demonstrate it truly has the workers' interests at heart. 

In your dreams.

Meanwhile, Miranda 'hang a greenie from the nearest lamp-post' Devine is out and about, and what do you know she's deploring the standard of public debate:

Because, you know, hanging a wretched indolent greenie from the nearest lamp-post is something any decent member of the crony commentariat should be allowed to get away with. It's not as if she also suggested tar and feathering greenies, I mean, even the Devine has her limits ...

The Devine of course takes extreme joy in discovering that the Left takes joy in fowl abuse.

But inter alia it raises other issues, and it is this:

We all make mistakes. But imagine if the roles were reversed. Imagine if Pyne had used what I view as the most obscene word in the English language, describing an intimate portion of the female anatomy, in reference to Burch. He would be crucified. Twitter would be ablaze! The destroy-the-jointers would be apoplectic. The entire Abbott government would be implicated. 
 "If I had done that, before my head hit the pillow [Thursday night] I would have resigned or been sacked," Pyne says. 
 "If it was me saying such a thing, the howls from the left would be cacophonous."

Did you catch that? In amongst the self-pitying poodle Pyne, moaning that he can't say "cunt", we cop this bit of moral delicacy:

...what I view as the most obscene word in the English language, describing an intimate portion of the female anatomy ...

Uh huh. It's as if the 1960s and feminism had never happened for this greenie-hanging member of the crony commentariat, yet another reminder that death and violence - a good hanging - is always much more acceptable than sex.

Come on down Laurie Penny, with In defence of the "C' word:

The word shocks because what it signifies is still considered shocking. Francis Grose's 1785 A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue defines "cunt" quite simply as "a nasty name for a nasty thing".

In other words, the Devine is in the grip of self-loathing and a kind of self-disgust, not uncommon amongst the crony commentariat, which is then dressed up as loathing and disgust for others.

Penny herself discovered the power of the word:

For me, "cunt" is, and will always be, a word of power, whether it denotes my own genitals or any obstreperous comrades in the vicinity. The first time I ever used it, I was 12 years old, and being hounded by a group of sixth-form boys who just loved to corner me on the stairs and make hilarious sexy comments. One day, one of them decided it would be funny to pick me up by the waist and shake me. I spat out the words "put me down, you utter cunt", and the boy was so shocked that he dropped me instantly. 
Ever since then, "cunt" has been a cherished part of my lexical armour. I use it liberally: in conversation, in the bedroom, and in debates. I only wish I could hear more women saying it, more of us reclaiming "cunt" as a word of sexual potency and common discourse rather than a dirty, forbidden word. If the BBC continues its oily pattern of vulgar logorrhoea, I'd like to hear Julia Bradbury saying it on Countryfile. I'd like to hear Kirsty Young saying it on Desert Island Discs.

Why she might even like to hear it being used about poodle Pyne, though there is a caveat - much as "nigger" can only be used by black people, so really "cunt" needs to be reserved to women. Men who stray into this turf are cruising for a bruising.

Of course Germaine Greer also had her say, as you can watch on YouTube here, where she makes a plea for a decent old German word over the current preference for a word derived from Latin and denoting sword-sheath.

But at least the word should be demystified, much like the vagina itself, so we don't get the sort of flashes of Victorian prudery given off by the Devine.

It's the same sort of thinking, of double standards and self-deception, which led Victorian women to go off to their doctors for a dose of treatment for their hysteria ... by being masturbated by vibrators.

Oh okay, the pond was reading this in a Cosmopolitan article while waiting for the doctor, but it's true, and you can find all sorts of references on the intertubes, which take up the matters explored by Rachel Maines's The Technology of Orgasm. Here, for example, or here.

That's the sort of fainting fit you get when plain women aren't allowed to speak plainly of plain matters, and instead perforce must faint at a nasty word used to describe a nasty thing to which nasty things are done ... or as Frank Zappa put it, nasty, nasty, nasty ...

Meanwhile, the Devine spends the rest of her piece explaining how Christopher Pyne is single-handedly going to save Australian youth, redeem Australian education, turn out wonderful Australian educators, and generally fix the education system so Australia is number one in the world.

It's hard to know whether she's describing a messiah complex, or a man in the grip of a Napoleonic madness, or whether both of them are simply prone to fits of delusional grandeur ...

The first mistake that both Devine and Pyne (oh they rhyme, how cute) is to think that ideology is the guide and the cure all for educational practice ... and that somehow it's all the fault of leftists and progressives .... as if people paid for by the federal government to teach creationism are somehow doing their bit for science in Australia ...

It's the kind of grandiloquent blather that will see Pyne head for a fall.

Does Miranda the Devine really think that having him labelled a "cunt" somehow in best Saint Sebastian style makes him a martyr and redeems him, and so the past week's total ineptness can be thrown off, and we can move beyond his Conski to a glorious future?

That sort of hagiography is best left to the good old Soviet Union.

Never mind, the pond has a guaranteed cure for the hysteria that seems to infect her, and the poodle Pyne, available courtesy the advertisements below.

The editors of the Sunday Terror might also care to give them a go, because they somehow seem to think that putting Akker Dakker and the Devine at the top of the digital splash page on a Sunday might help cure their Sunday circulation woes.

In your dreams, deluded ones, and so the pond returns to clapping and singing.