Bugger all wit, bugger all wisdom this lightweight Thursday ...

How offensive does it get on a daily basis?

Well there's always the wit and wisdom of Bob Carr.

Back in the day they could only get 122 pages out of the wit and wisdom of Billy McMahon:

It is, of course, a noble tradition in Australian publishing, though they could only get 96 pages together for this one:

'If homosexuality is a fashion statement, it is a very dangerous fashion statement. '

Don't keep it in the family Bob. You tell 'em Bob...

Meanwhile, the reptiles at the Daily Terror are having a field day with Bob Carr, but for once, who can blame them?

All the same, the pond was deeply shocked and horrified.

No, not that Carr was in charge at the time that Eddie Obeid began his rise to infamy, or that Sydney copped Olympics rather than infrastructure during his reign, or that Carr could conflate first class PJs with the unfortunate fate of Palestinians in the middle east, or that single-handedly Carr has done more to tarnish the Labor party than a gaggle of faceless Liberal heavyweights - all that was to be expected - but that the Terror should use the quaintly English word "tosser", instead of the honourable Australianism, "wanker".

Sad to say, the cane toad Currish Snail committed precisely the same thought crime:

Both words come from across the sea, of course - the whole bloody language did - but "wanker" has always been the Australian word of choice.

As usual, even in a worthy cause, the Terror and the Snail manage to dishonour Australia. Luckily for them, Bob Carr manages to dishonour Bob Carr and the Labor party without raising a sweat ...

As always with Carr, the pond has mixed feelings. Contempt that he immediately broke his promise to hang around in the Senate - politicians are so used to lying they expect people to see a broken promise as just another day's business - mixed with fear and loathing. Imagine if he'd actually hung around in the Senate, instead of strutting around like a plucked peacock ...

Can anyone come close to Carr? Well credit and a big shout out to Joe de Bruyn for doing his level best and handing the reptiles an EXCLUSIVE:

Do a Greg Hunt if you like on the rabid Joe, here, but the best the pond can say is that it seems like Joe and the Bolter would find a lot in common, and perhaps should set up a political party together. Go double dutch if you like:

De Bruyn has come under scrutiny for voicing his conservative views while being secretary of a trade union and holding a position on the National Executive of the centre-left Australian Labor Party. He has repeatedly voiced opposition to abortion, and to legalising same sex marriage. At a quarterly SDA members meeting in February 2011, de Bruyn moved a resolution against gay marriage, without giving any members a chance to speak or vote on the issue.

Yep, that's honest Joe's idea of democracy in action.

Meanwhile don't propose a cup of coffee to Joe. He'd probably see it as a manoeuvre for factional advantage ...

Dinosaurs the lot of them ...

But, you say, all this is well known, and it's the pond's job to do a Randy Stone and cover the wanker right wing commentariat for the daily pond ....

Ah, those were the days of OTR, and more on Randy - who was in fact never randy - here ... though he could always spot a wanker at ten paces.

Speaking of wankers at ten paces, the pond reserves a particular hostility, fear and loathing for people writing about the private lives of others in order to churn out a bit of cheap copy.

Cue the wretched Paul "Magic Water Man" Sheehan, scribbling away:

Sheehan shows no sign in Peaches Geldof's life not so peach keen of having met Geldof, even in passing.

The usual style for that sort of colour piece goes something like: I once saw John Lennon standing on the corner of west 54th and Broadway, and the intimate contact made me determined to set down the full story of John Lennon the man I knew ...

How low does Sheehan go? Well he starts off quoting the resident doctor on ITV's This Morning program, courtesy of the good doctor's thoughts as they were refracted in the tabloid Daily Mirror.

Now there's journalistic research at its finest.

Now leave aside the reality that you could, if you wanted to stroll in this particular gutter, by heading off to the Mirror on the intertubes. Pause instead to wonder why the Fairfaxians would bother to print - nay to feature - this sort of common gossip clucking and tut-tutting, except as the lowest form of click baiting trolling village green twaddle.

Does Sheehan have any novel or interesting insight to offer into Geldof, her life or her death? Nope, because it's all cobbled together from a cursory compounding of news files, which the pond won't bother to reprint here.

What's just as offensive as Sheehan's foray into Geldof's life are the life lessons for young women that he draws from it. How hypocritical does the stench get?

Scrutiny: then there is the new pressure from social media, the peer scrutiny, the semi-public profile, the capacity to project a public image. 

See, it has nothing to do with ghouls like Sheehan checking the runes and the tea leaves, it's the social media, and peer scrutiny, and the semi-public profile, which is presumably a bit like being semi-pregnant.

And then there are the other generalisations:

Image: the images presented of feminine beauty have never been more oppressively and unforgivingly outlandish. The freakish body type of the tall, thin, leggy model is presented as the feminine ideal. These images are often airbrushed or photo-shopped or film-edited into even more outlandish unreality.

Oh indeed, indeed. The pond simply can't think of or imagine another time when women might have been objectified:

Mummy, mummy, where did all the pubic hair go?

Perhaps Sheehan fancies himself as being in the grand tradition of Norman Mailer, though when you look at it, Mailer had a few issues:

Mailer did not actually kill any of his wives (unlike the French philosopher Louis Althusser, who strangled his), but he stabbed his second wife twice in the neck and his fourth accused him of beating her. His fascination with hyper-masculinity drew him to boxing; it also resulted in tragedy when Mailer was instrumental in securing the release of a convicted killer, Jack Abbott, who then stabbed a waiter to death. (here)

Hmm, perhaps it's time for the pond to extrapolate from Mailer's life to make a few gross generalisations about men.

Sorry, that would mean interrupting the generally grumpy Sheehan's stream of drivel:

Weight: a fetish with weight is reflected in the great majority of women being dissatisfied with their appearance according to numerous social surveys. It is reflected in the current mania for hard exercise among many young women (and young men, for the same reasons).

Oh indeed, indeed. Where could all that have come from? Why the mania is completely preposterous:

Hmm, is that a lump in the lycra, or is the PM just pleased to see the photographer?

I know, I know, the pond is wilfully misusing a Mae West quote.

But West had other quotes, ones that nailed the likes of Sheehan to the wall:

Or in the case of Sheehan, what they write:

Excess: the number of young women who are bulimic, anorexic, self-harming, binge-drinking or taking illicit drugs is, collectively, as high as it has ever been.

Now that sounds impressive, for a nanosecond, as if actual research has been done, statistics compiled and analysed, findings reviewed and cited ...

And then you pause to contemplate what Sheehan is actually saying.

Excess, in one form or another, collectively, is as high as it has ever been. Or presumably, contrariwise, as low as it has ever been, or perhaps, if we're inclined to avoid the little or the big end solutions, collectively, as median as it has ever been ...

It's gibberish, just like all the other gibberish that saw Sheehan seize on Peaches Geldof's life to dump on young women ...

Yep, it's a proud tradition that goes back to Exodus and no doubt was alive and well before that:

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live ...

As for why anyone would want to read the preening Bob Carr, or the second hand regurgitated insights of Paul Sheehan - with about as much substance as the mound left by a dog after it's eaten a little Tamworth grass - remains a mystery to the pond ...

But that's the lightweight out of the way for the day, and time to get on to a serious matter.

Yes, that hagiographic serial knob polisher and philosophical fellow traveller Tim Wilson has been out and about in recent days, explaining just why he can vary his views on free speech according to the days of the week, and a change in the direction of the wind.

Hot air works that way.

You can waste precious minutes of your life, if you like, reading Free speech, the public service and civilising behaviour - "Sigh" - if only for the pleasure of observing the many contradictions inherent in the argument, which seems in a nutshell to amount to this:18C bad; making sure public servants toe the line good...

Apparently it's all part of a "voluntary" code of conduct, if you understand "voluntary" to mean sign this, or piss off and go starve or try to live on the dole ...

The pond could never quite believe that Wilson had let loose on Twitter his real idea of freedom of speech. It all seemed like a bad dream, or an internet meme:

(found here)

But it seems Tim "send in the water cannons" Wilson really did tweet it, and now expects his maundering hagiographic knob polishing defence of the government and the Bolter to be taken seriously.

Which makes the pond ever so grateful that there are cartoonists like Pope to send up the rambling, prattling, prating, blathering, chattering, jabbering, gabbing, gabbling, babbling idiots as they go about scribbling their drivel ...

And that's the very last lightweight hypocrite for the day.

Call in the Pope, the one that resides in Canberra, and more of the Pope that's better than the Roman papish pope, here: