Has anyone got a mop?

(Above: a guide to Murdochian editors or an old internet meme dug out of the ground and once more doing the hoary social media rounds? The pond merely reports).

Some days the pond is grateful that it covers the right wing commentariat rat bag dead beat night beat side of the street for the daily ...

Watching Bill Shorten make a fool of himself getting it wrong, or watching Stephen "let's have a great big intertubes filter" Conroy blow his stack, and thereby distract from the way the government is shamelessly using the military and the navy as a shield to avoid scrutiny of their policies. Patriotism, the first refuge of the scoundrel ...

Or marvelling at Tony Sheldon advising that there'd be union action to bring Qantas to its knees ... presumably because Alan Joyce hadn't done a good enough job...

Yep, let's have a strike right now and really restore customer faith in Qantas services ...

That said, is there anything more bizarre or surreal than Alan Joyce attempting to mount a charm offensive and save himself by flinging himself at government?

As if the abortive excursions into Asia should just be dismissed as a genial folly. Joyce was advised years ago he was on a Don Quixote windmill hiding to hell, and only now do we read Qantas pulls back from Jetstar's Asia expansion.
While also we read, long after crashing into mountains in Antarctica and oceans of debt, Air New Zealand profit leaves Qantas in the shade.

The bloody kiwis. You can't even do an Alan Joyce Kiwi sheep joke ...

What's astonishing is that Joyce is still in his job. Five years is way long enough to remove the Dixon curse, though lordy lordy there surely was a Dixon curse ...

Here are the real villains of the piece, the really inept people responsible for all that's gone down ... the Qantas Board of Directors. They picked the wrong man, who devised the wrong strategies and even worse was allowed to implement them, and now through thick and thin they've stuck with him. Come on down Leigh Clifford, AO, Maxine Brenner, Richard Goodmanson, Jacqueline Hey, Gary Hounsell, William Meaney, Paul Rayner, and Barbara Ward ...

It was too much for a loon to bear, and the pond desperately needed a laugh.

Quick, where else to turn than the Daily Terror, the least trusted newspaper in Australia.

And here's why it can wear that badge with pride, and maybe that St Andrews notice should be put up in its inner city elite toilets:

Number one on the digital rotating faraway tree splash of doom, and at the bottom this is how Kurti is identified: Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.

Head off to the CIS here, and you discover what it should said: Peter Kurti is a god botherer with skin in the game ...

Now Kurti is entitled to his special pleading for his special pet god bothering projects, like keeping all sorts of gods in the classroom, but it surely helps to know where he's coming from. If only the tag had been true to label, and read along the lines Peter Kurti is a god botherer at The Centre for Independent Studies..

Then if you went on to read Don't expel God from our children's classrooms, you'd expect to cop this sort of gibberish:

Kevin Donnelly, a leading conservative education commentator, says there should be more religion, not less, in our public schools. He wants to see our kids better informed about the world’s great religions. Being taught what to believe about God — best done at home or in places of worship — is very different from being taught what others believe about God and how those beliefs shape society.

You can see how this sort of Ponzi scheme works. Religion's a problem, so we all need to spend more time discussing the problem of religion:

Western countries are working hard to hold Islamist extremism in check but we have already seen placards calling for beheadings carried through the streets of Sydney. 

Meanwhile, on the basis of fair dibs for all, the federal government funds Islamic schools, some with a fundamentalist streak, Scientologists, Exclusive Brethren and so on ...

We have a duty to teach our children diligently about religion so they will be better equipped to respond when religion turns bad. 

Uh huh. So now we need classes to correct the funding model of the federal government by explaining how they're funding religions that can turn bad.

It is because Australia is a secular country with no religion favoured or imposed by the state that the classroom is the best place to learn. 
We should be encouraging teachers to give religious and non-religious students alike the very best opportunity to learn about different religions. 
Don’t boot God out of the Australian classroom.

And which god is that?  Shouldn't that be don't boot out all sorts of gods, and L Ron Hubbard from the Australian classroom ...

Oh okay, it was starting off by talking about secular elites that got the pond going.  That's a bit like Alan Joyce saying he's got a business plan ...

Is there anyone else around who can prove that the floors are in serious danger in Murdoch la la land on TGIF day? Easy peasy:

Yep comedy gold, and scribbled direct from the bunker where Chris Mitchell runs the fortress and cultivates a mentality and a climate science denying cult right up there with the Branch Davidians.

If you drink the kool aid, you're likely to be exceptionally paranoid about inner city, sneering secular elites, Fairfax and the ABC. This is how it runs, with Miranda the Devine here channeling the Caterists:

Cater’s thesis, formed during the 2010 election, is that Australia has become increasingly polarised, not between right and left, but between people he calls the insiders and the outsiders. 
A new ruling class of university-educated “progressives”, “sophisticates”, “elites” and “latte-sippers” have emerged as an un-Australian clique trying to lord it over everyone else. Controlling media, law, education and the political class, they threaten Australia’s great egalitarian democratic project: “For the first time there were people who did not simply feel better off but were better than their fellow Australians. 

Yep, a parrot reciting the insights of a macaw as both fly in ever diminishing circles before disappearing up their fundament ...

So if we head off to circumnavigate the lizard Oz paywall, like modern intertube Magellans, and read Geoffrey Luck's In hiding, ABC only increases the suspicion of bias, what do we find?

Ah Joseph Goebbels for an opener...

The first refuge of the Godwin's Law breaking scoundrel who doesn't even deign to offer a dollar to the Godwin swear jar.

But that's this you say? On the actual article, Goebbels seems to have done a bunk, taken a powder, disappeared, perhaps even snatched the swear jar:

Was the Goebbels reference too much, too naked for the reptiles? Or did they feel the need to goose up Luck's offering?

No matter, these minor mysteries are sent by the Murdochians on a daily basis to intrigue and delight the pond.

Just as much to the point was the delightful way that Luck has clearly imbibed the kool aid:

This red herring, straining the truth, enabled him to deflect the senators’ questions about recent contentious broadcasts and news reports: the navy’s torture of asylum-seekers; the “sicko garbage” and smutty stuff of the New Year’s Eve broadcast; the vulgar Chris Kenny dog skit; and the unchecked damaging Media Watch statement on this newspaper’s finances.

Now there's a nice dose of humbug and moral outrage, replete with the current crop of reptile complaints and grievances against the ABC, but the richest was that little word "damaging".

Clearly Media Watch's statement on the lizard Oz's finances was damaging to Chris Mitchell running his fortress, no matter that it was only an argument about the size of the loss, never revealed by the reptiles, as opposed to the rag routinely making a sizeable loss. What a sensitive flower and petal he is, with a nice touch of paranoia to boot.

But who else might find it damaging, at least outside the fortress? The stock exchange? Investors? Readers?

No, it's just a bunch of navel gazers busily gazing at their navels as hard copy newspapers continue their slow inexorable slide into complete irrelevance, and finally to tree-saving nullity.

But the pond hopes that all the same, Luck gets a gig at amongst the reptiles. He surely has all the necessary style.

Scott is given to anodyne answers, Paul Barry is a recalcitrant presenter given to mischievous reporting, the ABC and Scott are given to weasel words and neat quibbles, and there's an entrenched policy of denial and evasion, rights of listeners and viewers whittled away ...

Fortress ABC, built over three decades, now can and does repel complaints about all but the most outrageous breaches of editorial policies and the code of practice. 
The increasingly legalistic tests applied mean that the overall impression of a report or program cannot be examined; lack of objectivity is often in the whole, not the part, and the ABC refuses to see the wood for the trees. 
The irony of the ABC’s defensiveness is that it increases suspicion of its biases, even among those who support the concept of a national broadcaster.
 If it will not reform itself, transparency must be imposed through the creation of a properly independent external body. This could be a prime task for a new Dix inquiry, now long overdue.

Indeed, indeed, shocking and outrageous stuff, and so damaging to the national psyche.

Does Luck pause for a moment at any point to consider the way the Murdoch press handles complaints and buries them in the back pages and ignores the complete uselessness of the Australian Press Council?

Sorry, none of that sort of nonsense in Fortress Australian when it's Fortress ABC that does it all wrong.

Waiter, we need another magnum of kool aid.

And there we were thinking that we'd like to lodge a complaint on behalf of Joseph Goebbels to Fortress Australian.

Forget it Jake, the floors need a decent scrub, and remember, it's Murdoch town ...

(Below: meanwhile, the pond is trying to whip up a campaign to see Alan Joyce awarded a medal, the order SC, or Services to Cartooning, because he's done bugger all for Qantas staff and former regular Qantas customers. And more David Rowe here, and Pat Campbell here, golly do they owe Alan Joyce big time).