Stiffen the sinews, and once more into the hive mind ...

(Above: great cartoonists think alike. More Rowe here, and more Popery here. By golly is this federal government the gift that keeps on giving to cartoonists and so to us all, and are these the very best cartoonists for these troubled times, or what)

Poor hapless Holden.

In leaving:

GM cited a "perfect storm" of "the sustained strength of the Australian dollar, high cost of production, small domestic market and arguably the most competitive and fragmented auto market in the world". (here)

Talk about being off song and off message. No wonder they're leaving.

Lad, lads, and the odd, token window-dressed-in lass, no carbon tax?

Please allow the pond to re-phrase for benefit of Tony Abbott and long suffering Peta Credlin:

GM cited a "perfect storm" of "the sustained strength of the Australian dollar caused by the carbon tax, the high cost of the carbon tax, by away and away the most malignant cost on production labouring under the carbon tax, a small domestic market  shredded by the carbon tax, and arguably the most competitive and fragmented auto market in the world, created and sustained by a wicked carbon tax". 

Well that's enough of mindless three word slogans for the day, and it's off to the mines to see the parrots go about the business of polishing knobs and doing the hagiography waltz.

Oh they're all at it today, with the bouffant one front and centre:

Uh huh, well that's a fair summary of the crocodile tears of Abbott and jolly Joe Hockey - especially after jolly Joe showed he couldn't punch above rice bubble strength with the agrarian socialists - but meanwhile, since it's a day for the blame game, shape-shifting and shameless denialism, the pond would like to draw attention to the real culprit.

Here's Tim Blair, crowing in his usual petrol-head way a year or so ago:

Yes, never the cost of petrol, love the V-8 and other engines because they're as noisy as all get out.

Blair, of course, is of the school which measures penis size as being directly correlated to size of muffler (engine block and cylinders can be used in an emergency).

Flash forward:

That's it, that's all?  Where's Blair's V-8 sun king god these days?

In all the fuss and the hoo hah, the pond was most moved by Paddy Manning in Crikey, actually bothering to take a V8 SSV Commodore for a spin, as you can read in Road test: does this car and its makers deserve to be saved? (may be pay wall affected). Manning concluded it was a well-made, "awesome" car, with all sorts of bells and whistles, and then:

After some 402 kilometres of city and highway driving, however, my first tank takes 61.7 litres costing $102.40, and I’ve got a bit over 15L/100km. Fun, but clearly ridiculous in an age of inexorably rising petrol prices and worsening climate change. The clincher: at $51,490 recommended retail price, on a modest journo’s wage, I could never buy one. With two kids and two dogs, in the market for our first new car last year, we considered a Commodore wagon, but the V6 starts at $41,099 and instead we paid $32,000 for a two-litre, four-cylinder diesel VW Transporter with rear seat and windows that does 800km-plus on a tank and should go forever.

So who's to blame?

Well let's give credit where it's due. It's the deadhead, rev head, petrol head, V-8 dunderheads of the Tim Blair kind who can take the credit, with their macho mindless strutting, which saw Holden nail its brand to the mast of a technological dinosaur.

How much of a luddite dinosaur was Blair in his muffler-sniffing hey day?

Well if you want you can read his 35 reasons why V8 Supercars are better than the NRL, AFL and cricket (may be paywall affected), but the pond refuses to offer any liability insurance should a reader experience an instant drop of ten IQ points - you could be like the pond and stop after 10 mindless attempts at fatuous nonsense and alleged humour.

Amongst Blair's points:

2. V8 Supercar fans demonstrate their loyalty by buying Fords and Holdens, thereby boosting the local economy. NRL and AFL fans demonstrate their loyalty by buying scarves and caps, thereby boosting the economies of Asian sweatshops.

And so on and so forth. Mind-numbing stupidity and a denial of market trends and forces at its finest ...

But the pond can't spend all day dallying with petrol heads - perhaps Blair and the Murdochians should have Opal fuel pumps installed nearby so that the impact of the V8 petrol sniffing is snuffed out - because we have a fine example of ABC-bashing to hand.

The pond was wondering why almost everyone has ignored the ABC story doing the rounds involving leaked John McTernan emails, as summed up in Leaked John McTernan emails reveal approach of Julia Gillard's spin doctor.

There's some juicy stuff in it, not least Mark Latham, but Fairfax was slow off the mark with Obscene language of Julia Gillard media adviser John McTernan revealed in emails leaked to ABC.

And the grumpy reptiles at the lizard Oz offered only a short gloss in Gillard's foul-mouthed flack John McTernan exposed (behind the paywall but never mind, it's totally lame).

Sob. Poor old reptiles. Scooped by the ABC again.

The pond is standing by for a blizzard, a blitzkrieg of denunciations from the reptiles explaining why it was outrageous that the ABC dared to run with the story.

Why, it's a dead cert repeat of the cardigan-wearers' support of the leftist Snowden Graudian alliance, yet another example of their wretched used of confidential information to undermine the federal government ...

Oh dear, the pond seems to have got that a bit muddled and confused. Possibly it doesn't matter if it was the previous federal government

Never mind, readers will be entranced by this howl of pain from Greg "Abbott was my best friend … We talked over everything. The meaning of life, the purpose of politics, who’d win the rugby league grand final, what girls we planned to ask out, petty squabbles we might have had with our parents" Sheridan (check out more of that bromance here).

Now you might wonder how any alleged journalist would ever surface again after writing such nauseating tosh, but truly Appointing a BBC figure to judge the ABC's bias is beyond parody is ... beyond parody.

Yes, appointing a best friend to check on the best friend bias in Sheridan's scribbling would be beyond parody, much like the rest of Sheridan's bromance scribbling is beyond parody (even if providing an excellent parody item for The Monthly).

Happily, Sheridan conforms to all the requirements of the Murdoch hive mind in his latest piece, denouncing the leftie cardigan wearers at the ABC, and of course denouncing the Fairfaxians:

Increasingly, the Fairfax newspapers and the ABC are joined at the hip, and personnel cross easily between the two organisations, which both share the same centre-left, green left and sometimes further left attitudes. The Financial Review, under Michael Stutchbury's editorship, is a bit more diverse than the Fairfax norm. Joye has become the Fin's most serious analyst on national security matters, and in several columns was highly critical of the ABC's behaviour in the Indonesian saga. But many of the ABC's defenders at Fairfax, and at the ABC itself, have been not only abusive but dishonest in the way they have sought to misrepresent the arguments of the ABC's critics.

Yep, the hive mind is alive and well amongst the reptiles. Perhaps we should now be talking of bees? Or wasps? Or maybe just common termites.

It's all standard bog stuff, and the pond leaves it to readers to take their pleasures as they find them. If you're not with Sheridan and the reptiles, you're against them, no shades of grey, no divergences, no alternatives will be permitted and allowed. If you can't get on board the group think, why you can't be a member of the group.

Where it gets truly funny is when Sheridan gets very defensive about being pinged for scribbling a story about the Snowden leaks.

As long established on these pages, the pond loves a game of Twister, and by golly Sheridan is an expert at the game:

What was telling about the response of both the ABC and Fairfax to these (Sheridan's fatuous) arguments was the total failure to engage with them at all, and instead resort to straightforward sneering and abuse, even in pieces ostensibly calling for a better standard of debate.
The next Monday, I published a story about what information future Snowden leaks might contain but did not print any confidential documents and provided the context of the story. 
This led to the most childish accusations from the ABC and in Fairfax publications that I was being a hypocrite - criticising the ABC and then doing the same thing myself. 

Uh huh. Of course he was, except of course, in the world of the deluded, he wasn't.

Virginia Trioli and Michael Rowland sneered at me, without engaging my arguments - it's notable how much content-free sneering goes on at the ABC - on morning TV. Jonathan Holmes, writing in The Age, claimed I had not criticised the Americans for allowing a junior figure such as Snowden to have access to such information, nor had I acknowledged that Scott had raised this as one element of public interest in the story. In fact, I had quoted Scott verbatim on that in my original piece. But also in many, many pieces before that, I had made exactly that criticism of the Americans. I don't mind Holmes abusing me - that's fine. But accusing me of not raising issues I've written about at length is either dishonest or lazy. 
Laura Tingle in the Fin implied I was peddling a News Corporation line, even though the analytical route I took was similar to that of her colleague Joye, who presumably is not a News Corp stooge. She described my Monday news story about future Snowden leaks as "bizarre" and said I thought it was OK because I am not from "the Left". It's sad to see Laura reduced to this level of infantile and dishonest abuse. The quality of her journalism has declined steadily through the years, although she never displayed any serious interest in national security or foreign affairs. But she apparently felt no need to engage with the arguments I actually made about responsible and irresponsible ways to deal with national security stories. Instead it was enough to engage in generalised abuse. The irony of this in a column allegedly lamenting the poor quality of the national debate is striking. 
As her colleague Joye has argued, and as Spigelman's tenuous defence yesterday conceded, there is a real debate to be had about the ABC's handling of this acutely sensitive national security story. But that debate certainly won't be had on the ABC or in most of Fairfax. For that, we are the poorer.

It's a ripper, on every level and in every way. Calling for a higher standard of debate and then denouncing critics as childish. Denouncing content-free sneering and then indulging in a bucket-load of content-free sneering. Talking about others being dishonest and lazy, and then resorting to the convenient tags of "leftist", as if that one word was a QED argument.

And above all for getting agitated about Laura Tingle suggesting Sheridan was peddling a News Corporation line, while writing a fatuous column that once again regurgitated, intact, in every way, shape and form, the current News Corporation line on its mortal enemies at the ABC and Fairfax.

A crusade now as monotonous and tedious as it is repetitious, and now classically with Sheridan disappearing up his fundament as he slashes at his enemies while re-hashing all his old talking points, the same talking points everyone else at the Oz has been talking about for yonks.

The irony of this in a column allegedly lamenting the poor quality of the national debate is striking. 

You can say that again. But Sheridan has no sense of irony, so the irony of his talking about irony was generally lost in a most ironical way.

Could the pond at least propose a different ending for his piece? A happier one:

As the pond has proposed before, there is a real debate to be had about the bizarre crusading attitude of the reptiles at the lizard Oz, who as their ship continues to sink, seem determined to do a scorpion on the frog, and bring the whole sector down. Their inability to handle being scooped on a very newsworthy national security story is but one example. But that debate certainly won't be had in any Murdoch paper infected by the corporate mind hive throughout the land. For that, we are the poorer.

You know, it's just not enough to assert that it's all a breach of national security and it's all the fault of leftists.

Meanwhile, don't expect anyone at News Corp anywhere at any time to publish a story like Snowden smashing the shackles of totalitarianism. (may be Crikey paywall affected).

The hive mind, and poor old hive mind Sheridan in particular, couldn't handle it and would explode ...

(Below: and so to a Steve Bell for a change of pace, and more Steve Bell here. Caution, this may take you away from the hive mind)