In which it's full steam ahead for Victorians and full steam ahead for the tabloid commentariat ...

The pond was absolutely delighted to see that Denis Napthine has proposed a steam train in every home, and that Victoria will return to the golden age of steam, and so it's full steam ahead for every Victorian .... (can we get that old line in Fitzroy in working order?)

Yes, it's another ecstatic EXCLUSIVE from the HUN, showing all the balance and sophistication of Pravda in its golden age.

Meanwhile, the Bolter is outraged at the ABC for publishing left wing propaganda.

Well you have to read Murdoch rags to appreciate the real meaning of irony ...

What the pond now wants to know is when the HUN will be publishing directly from the Premier's desk .... oh there'll be EXCLUSIVES on a daily basis. No doubt the Premier will soon be promising a bicycle in every home:

Yes, it's full pedal power ahead, another EXCLUSIVE from the pond, still channeling the rage of road users in Gippsland ...

The Bolter is also outraged that Annabel Crabbe dared to mock the Great Man, in All quiet on the shirt-front. The querulous Bolter moaned:

Abbott is dumb and laughable and crass to demand justice from Russia on behalf of the families of 38 murdered Australians? 
Seriously?

No, Abbott is dumb laughable and crass for suggesting he was going to be as bold as brass and give Putin a shirt-front, and then in a series of pathetic backward steps, ended up suggesting that he'd give him a good talking to and stern words, until finally settling for a brief discussion.

Seriously! Pathetic!

You don't strut and crow like a rooster, then turn up as meek and mild as a lamb ... now let's see how he does as a result of his premature, self-aggrandising crowing ...

Diplomacy as a form of thuggery? Sadly Putin's a master of the art, and Abbott's skill level is thumping the wall near the head of a woman:

Now if you want a bit of genuine verbal thuggery directed at the Ruskis, head off to Nick Cohen's demolition of Russia Today.

Speaking of verbal thugs - it has to be said that the Bolter is a dumb lightweight in comparison - Will Self's review of Julie Burchill's latest memoir was a ripping read.

The last person to look to for such subtlety is Julie Burchill, who’s made – by her own admission – a fortune from writing the sort of ad hominem abuse that all too often is passed off as “comment” in our media. In truth, I’ve always thought of Burchill as a sort of newsprint Alastair Campbell; just as in his heyday Campbell intimidated the Westminster lobby journalists by flecking their faces with spittle and expletives, so she seems to win newspaper contracts by playing the part of sacredly authentic monster for credulous readers. I’m afraid I can’t really dignify her latest offering with the ascription “book”, nor the contents therein as “writing” – rather they are sophomoric, hammy effusions, wrongheaded, rancorous, and pathetically self-aggrandising. 
I wasn’t actually aware that Burchill was a philo-Semite of long standing, but if alcoholics are prone to reciting “drunkalogues”, then we might reasonably describe Unchosen as a similarly tedious “Jewalogue”. (And since Burchill descants at such length on her own prodigious drinking and cocaine-sniffing, we might reasonably see it as a drunkalogue too.) There isn’t a shred of reason in this text, which – one hopes because all the publishers it was offered to turned it down – has been produced by an imprint funded by subscribers including such beacons of enlightenment as Richard Littlejohn. I really don’t see it as my responsibility as a reviewer to catalogue Burchill’s repugnant gallimaufry of insults and half-baked nonsense; suffice to say, she believes everything the state of Israel does is just peachy, and she uncritically accepts ethno‑Zionism, endorsing the idea that some schmuck – such as myself – who grew up in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, has a “right” to my place in the Holy Land in advance of the 1.8 million Palestinians currently penned up in the giant internment camp known as “the Gaza Strip”.

And Self was only just warming up. You can read the rest here, if you haven't already, but the pond can't resist quoting the final par:

About 12 years ago I profiled Burchill for the Independent on Sunday. I wrote then that she presented the bizarre spectacle of an intelligent woman who had spent her entire adult life making herself more stupid; this process has now reached its inevitable conclusion, and she has become to all intents and purposes moronic. If I were still a Jew I might have cause to reject her overtures, but thankfully, having resigned from the club, I’m no longer in any danger of being bothered by this particular barroom bore.

Already the Graudian has followed up by placing it in the Top five most scathing book reviews, though perhaps it's not the company Self would like to keep because it also features fatuous fops taking shots at John Keats, Walt Whitman, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

But it did also feature the immortal original Dorothy Parker on A. A. Milne:

‘Well, you’ll see, Piglet, when you listen. Because this is how it begins. The more it snows, tiddely-pom-’ ‘Tiddely what’ said Piglet. (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent’s mouth.) ‘Pom,’ said Pooh. ‘I put that to make it more hummy.’ And it is that word ‘hummy’, my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.

These days the tonstant weader fwows up reading the child-like simperings of the Murdochians in the presence of a Liberal - any Liberal will do, as Denis Napthine proves today.

But it's not just the HUNsters and the Bolter that provide all the fun.

The pond has been remiss in failing to attend to the Daily Terror, or its particularly malignant über-tabloid form, the Sunday Terror.

There are, as always, rich treasures to be discovered.

Miranda the Devine, for example, was shocked and appalled by Noel Pearson's speech, determining that he had given better speeches, braver and truer, without actually bothering to dig out any actual examples of said braver and truer speeches.

In typical Devine form, she used the occasion to sink the boot into Whitlam - kicking the dead is so much fun - but was forced to dance warily around Pearson, before coming up with these concluding pars, which verge on the bizarre, and would certainly have got the original Dorothy P. going:

For starters, white skin and privilege don’t inoculate you from discrimination and heartbreak. They just don’t provide easy excuses.  
I could say that Noel Pearson, a strong man with a deep voice and commanding presence could never understand what it is to be a ­hesitant young woman in a room of VIPs. 
Or what it is to be an awkward boy with skewiff glasses and borderline Aspergers who won’t look people in the eye because of the shame he carries from schoolyard ostracism. 
Empathy is what makes us human, the ability to imagine a life unlike our own, to understand ­another person’s anguish. It’s what differentiates us from animals; its absence is evil. You don’t have to walk in another person’s shoes to understand; you just have to be able to imagine. 
If Pearson thinks Whitlam is the rare privileged white person who understood discrimination, then he imagines an Australia devoid of empathy, which is a mean view of his fellow citizens. 
If you believe in equality, you don’t tell Australians who weren’t in that hall, who voted Whitlam out of office in a historic landslide and who reject his myths that you doubt their empathy. (the rest here)

WTF? How did borderline Aspergers get into that rant? And how about conflating the devastating impact of racism with being a young thing in a room full of VIPs?

Truly weird and wonderful, and suffused with a particular form of guilt-laden mortifying Catholicism.

But okay, the pond will bite, let's see how the Devine practises the empathy that makes us human and differentiate us from the animals:

If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies. (here)

Yes, hang 'em high, hang 'em hard. There's knock down empathy for you, as the pond's old mate Humpty Dumpty would say ...

As for Pearson, the reason that the Devine was on tippy toe is that way back when - as in this April 2011 posting here - Pearson was the golden boy:

Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has done more than anyone in Australia to put the boot into the concept of passive welfare, or “sit down money”, as a poison that has weakened family life in marginalised communities and destroyed the social norms that used to protect the vulnerable. 
Tony Abbott, who is close to Pearson, and has spent weeks working in Cape York communities, was singing from the same song sheet before he became Opposition Leader - when he was Employment Minister in the Howard government and in his 2009 book, Battlelines.

Now that he's jumped the shark and nuked the Whitlam fridge, Pearson can expect the jaundiced eye of the commentariat to give him a right old pounding.

And he might find his relationship with Abbott less cheerful in the future. They run a hard ideological line in the world of Abbott, and it must kill Abbott to know that Whitlam was much loved, while some have even managed to forgive Malcolm Fraser, but Abbott has been the most loathed Prime Minister in a first year of government in many a long year ...

Let's see how Peta deals with a Whitlam worshipper ...

Meanwhile, in other matters arising from the Whitlam farewell, the bloated carcass of Akker Dakker floated into view:

The commentariat love to give Blanchett a pounding - she's pretty and rich - but it takes a real cheek for Akker Dakker to advise that nothing in life is free. He thinks scribbling crap for the Terror is worth a generous emolument from Chairman Rupert? Sorry, he's been on a pension for services rendered to the empire for yonks, a generous quasi retirement where he's routinely allowed to make a goat of himself and nobody much minds - though even the ABC began to realise he wasn't worth the pain, and dropped him from Insiders when he recycled an old joke about hairdressers being gay. Here he was yowling to the media arm of the reptiles:

Akerman told Media: “My remarks were in response to a suggestion raised by others on the program. I did not endorse the speculation. I certainly did not apologise, but said no hurt was intended by my remarks. 
 “The ABC News management did not contact me to share its view: totally unprofessional of them. Nor did it tell me I was under review.”

What a boofhead, but where did the latest outing get comical, as is always required for a pond listing?

Among the examples she offered of her generation’s expression was a 2004 film called Little Fish: ‘‘A story like Little Fish would not have been told without the massive changes to the Australian cultural conversation initiated, and shaped, by Gough Whitlam’s legacy.” 
 I was one of the unfortunate few viewers who, having contributed to the production of the film through my taxes, ­actually paid an admission fee to see what they were creating with my money. In truth I found it to be one of a number of bleak movies made with taxpayers’ money which depicted sleazy drug addicts doing what most drug addicts do – lie and cheat and destroy lives.

Well Akker Dakker should know. Here's the Hon. R.S. L. Jones in the NSW parliament in September 1997:

The joke is that Piers Akerman, when he lived in Albion Street in the 1970s, used LSD and marijuana regularly. He also used cocaine regularly when he was in the United States of America, in Los Angeles and Washington. I have spoken to someone who shared a number of cocaine lines with Piers Akerman. He was a drug addict. He also sexually harassed young female employees of News Limited in Washington and was sent back to the United Kingdom, where he tried to become the editor of the London Times but was denied that. He tried to get a job recently with the Sydney Morning Herald but was denied that, too. Here we have this hypocrite who is working hard to oppose what would have been a very useful reform in the drug fight in this country and now he is working against the interests of the community by torpedoing that. He himself was a drug addict and he still is a drug addict on legal drugs to this very day.

Uh huh. Of course the pond doesn't support this speculation. While the pond hasn't apologised, no hurt was intended by reproducing those remarks.

Now how do you plead Akker Dakker?

Of course Blanchett was merely supporting the myriad of myths that now enshrine Whitlam’s legacy. The legends have grown since he was sacked in 1975 and flowed ­freely since his death on October 21, almost all of them untrue.

Of course Akker Dakker couldn't even be used as a shoelace on a Whitlam shoe. He's a malignant man, a gnat without a vision, except for being paid for an endless flow of nattering negativity. And they say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Akker Dakker has been dining out, courtesy Chairman Rupert, for decades ...

What else arising from the Whitlam affair? Well, there's still no third party confirmation of Mark Latham's claim that the Bolter's wife yelled at him as a result of the way the Bolter wrote up the farewell.

In the old days, this would have led to charges of being hen-pecked, and male psychiatrists would nod wisely about why the Bolter has become what he is today... some might even begin to speculate about Hitler's love life, in shameless breach of Godwin's Law.

But enough of putting the Bolter on the couch.

Now, with a week to go in the spring racing season, it's time to farewell it with a First Dog cartoon and more First Dog here: