In which the pond is forced to apologise to the poodle Pyne, and is swept up in gob-smacking admiration for the paranoid ramblings of Greg the queen bed emissions emitting sheet ...

(Above: you can find that account here - screen cap, no hot links)

The pond is deeply embarrassed, ashamed and enormously apologetic.

In its last post, on the mistaken assumption that no politician could have been so deeply and offensively stupid, the pond suggested that a certain Christopher "oh I do love to be a Poodle" Pyne twitter account here, was a spoof, and that the petition emanating from that account - here - was the most astonishing and amusing social media comedy ever managed by a spoofing politician in the history of federation, or at least in the days of the full to over-flowing internet.

It turns out that the pond was wrong. As can be seen above, even the fake satirical Chris Pynes can't stand the heat in the kitchen, and have given the game away. 

The pond deeply misjudged the Poodle Pyne's character, and for that owes the honourable member and minister an apology. It seems, sir, that indeed you can be as monstrous a fuckwit deep down as on the surface you appear, and the pond congratulates you for this consistency of character ...

Why does it in any way matter? 

Well it seems the monstrous fuckwit just won't shut up when in the presence of a passing reptile:

Xian Curr is regaling us with a tale of a "blistering attack" by the poodle, at the very moment when he's an online laughing stock?

But let's take seriously the suggestion that there's an actual point being made, rather than yet another tired blistering attack on the elite hacks gathered at their inner city elite meeting point in Holt street, Surry Hills.

You see, even the dumbest production manager in the country - always brooding over their Excel sheets - will tell you that having the staff and facilities to produce five regional programs is going to be more expensive than producing one program in a centralised location and sending it to be re-transmitted locally.

Now if you want that sort of regional service, fine, but it'll need money. If you cut the money, then you'll need to streamline the services - everybody knows it, everybody does it.

Remember this, at the Conversation here?

Oh sure, Williams has gone, but the centralising has gone on, and now, in another part of the universe, we have the poodle Pyne launching a blistering attack and - oh for god's sake, can it be true - a petition to attempt to claw back the effects of a Cabinet decision, by a member of said Cabinet.

It doesn't get more surreal than this.

Now thank the long absent lord that education in this country is in a safe pair of hands, a man adept and aware as he travels the extraordinarily high speed service provided for this country by big Mal ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles - their fondest dreams come true - are making out like ABC-bashing bandits.

Actually, reptiles, the biggest losers in this are Malcolm Turnbull, Christopher Pyne, and in a curious way, the commercial sector.

The blithe assumption, for example, that SBS can claw millions more out of the ether by increasing prime time advertising, and no one will mind or be affected, is a classic example of the level of delusion at work in the government.

And Malcolm Turnbull's assault on Mark Scott and his empowering of the board, ensuring the political hacks on it will become the centre of political storms, is sowing the seeds for any number of controversies about the ABC. 

And what, in the end, if the government manages to degut and disembowel the ABC? 

Well it still won't be able to afford to maintain a full suite of regional services, and malcontents will be able to take to the internet, and mock the fatuous stupidity of big Mal and the poodle.

As for the notion that there's no punishment or payback involved in current activities?

Well Dame Slap bells that cat - as only Dame Slap can - with her header: A long-overdue whack. Show us how that's done, Dame:

Yes, they hate and fear and resent the ABC, and its bubbling to the surface in classic witch cauldron style, but it won't fix their own problems or their own insecurities, and in time, the payback to the payback will begin ...

Meanwhile, as well as a government of rampant, enormous stupidity - one that defeats noble attempts at satire - it seems that the ABC and SBS decisions might be the final straw, and finally the mainstream media seems finally to have worked out that Tony Abbott is a liar.

Why is this insufferable?

Well apart from being late-breaking, belated to the point of heart-breaking irrelevance, at no point in Tony Abbott, the ABC and SBS: when election promises become lies does Tony Wright trot out "liar, liar pants on fire".

So the pond could run a favourite meme, or even just a meme:

Or, as Paul Bongiorno put it on RN this morning apropos of the many broken promises, consciously made before the election, and consciously deliberately broken after the election, and the budgetary implications of said promises: it always did look like a magic pudding, and it always was ...

Yes, the routine's as ancient and as delusional as Norman Lindsay ...

Meanwhile, in its relentless quest to find comedy in the depths of tragedy - the pond was startled to look at this splash today:

No matter which way you looked at it, from the top, bottom or sideways, surely the sub - assuming they have any left at News Corp - must have been taking the Sheridan piss.

Okay, there's a never ending supply of Sheridan piss flowing all the time, but somebody must have known that Sheridan's emission control wasn't fine, and that there was a home truth in that.

Yep, even the accompanying illustration got the joke:

As for the article itself, it was as fine an example of echo chamber delusionalism, paranoia, xenophobia and seething resentment as can be found doing the rounds anywhere in the country, and in urgent need of a condom.

But it was also exemplary, in that it reflects the sort of tone the Abbott government, and its lick spittles in the Murdoch media have set. when dealing with any issue. It could be the ABC, but on any day of the week in Murdoch la la land, it will also be climate science.

Here, for example, is the opening outburst of mendacity and fraud:

Australia has done an exemplary job at controlling its carbon emissions and is on target to do an excellent job at reducing them. 

There you go. Exemplary, excellent?

They lie, and then they lie about their lies. Now for a whiff of paranoia:

Certainly Australia has done better on most measures than the US, though you wouldn’t guess that from Barack Obama’s patronising, anti-Australian speech in Brisbane. 

Now how about a whiff of delusionalism and denial?

You wouldn’t be able to discern the reality of Australia’s performance from most mainstream media coverage either.

Which is to say that most mainstream print and online media - controlled by one Chairman Rupert - is according to Sheridan totally useless.

On and on Sheridan goes with his emissions, each emission in even more urgent need of a condom:

For this there are three main reasons. 
One, Labor under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard built up a vast array of climate change propaganda bodies. These are essentially a misuse of taxpayer funds to promote one highly skewed interpretation of what’s been done and what needs to be done. They consistently present a false picture of what’s happening internationally mainly by presenting facts in a misleading or distorted fashion. Sometimes the distortions are so great they are virtually making new facts up altogether. 
Thus they will talk about tiny pilot carbon emissions trading schemes, which charge zero dollars and have no measurable economic impact, as though they are the equivalent to the huge and punitive carbon tax Australia had under the Gillard government which the Abbott government repealed. Another distorting trick is to present the vaguest aspirations of foreign governments as actual policies operating today. Northern Hemisphere politicians are brilliant at grand visions and no implementation. Even Germany is now abandoning its 2020 targets. 

Uh huh. That'd be the huge and punitive carbon tax that led to hundred dollar leg of lamb roasts within months of its implementation. Not to mention the complete disappearance of Whyalla ...

What's even more astonishing is the lazy way that Sheridan takes an "other" - this time other journalists - and berates them for thought crimes. This is how you tell lazy - "too many", "some":

Too many journalists are lazy about looking at the international facts instead of relying on material generated by the taxpayer-funded propaganda bodies. Some journalists, bereft of any other transcendent belief, have internalised opposition to climate change as a kind of secular religion, a cause which requires moral fervour rather than cool analysis. Certainly there is not much empirical research. 

Oh bugger the pond dead, not the old secular religion routine, now so hoary and ancient that the whiskers have whiskers.

How about a dose of science?

My own interest in this issue derives mainly from being a journalist involved in foreign affairs. I don’t think I have ever written about the science of climate change. The long pause in warming is surely intriguing and seems to be leading to some fascinating scientific re-evaluation. But my interest came from the travel I do as the foreign editor. It was abundantly obvious to me that virtually no other country in the world, and certainly none in Asia, had anything like our carbon tax. 
The seminal report by the Productivity Commission confirmed what my travels and interviews of foreign politicians and officials had made clear. Australian journalists have generally so little contact with Asia that their only reference points are Europe, and the statements of Democrats and their sympathetic think tanks in the US. 

Yes, only Greg Sheridan travels the world, only Greg Sheridan talks to foreign politicians and officials, and apparently only Greg Sheridan has access to a seminal report prepared by one of those bodies of useless bureaucrats.

So is there anything else to add to this tale of self-centred regard? Of course there is:

The third reason it’s been hard for the Australian public to get an accurate picture of what’s happening overseas is that the Abbott government is so generally constipated in its communication strategies. Perhaps this is changing today. Environment Minister Greg Hunt is releasing figures and graphs prepared by his department which show definitively Australia has made its fair contribution. Tony Abbott remarked yesterday in an obvious reference to the US: “We do deliver on our reductions targets, unlike some other countries.” 
Hunt has generally been one of the government’s most successful ministers, having been one of its best opposition shadow ministers. But how come these figures and graphs have been released in this way only today? 
The Abbott government believes it shouldn’t be a prisoner of the media cycle and that it shouldn’t use government bureaucracies to create pro-government propaganda. That’s all very well but too often it is simply not contesting the media cycle. And its self-denying ordinance on misuse of the public service is so excessive that it cannot even get government departments to communicate plain truths which are not contested internally at senior levels of the bureaucracy. 
The government has a giant bureaucracy at its service but communicates information on a samizdat basis, like hunted dissidents in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism, whispering truths in the darkness. Policy departments routinely run seminars and produce information brochures. How come there has been nothing like this from the Abbott government on Australia’s actual performance, or on the decline of national carbon taxes? It’s not enough for ministers and MPs to have their talking points. 

Frankly, the pond couldn't make this sort of stuff up, nor could it pound a keyboard with this sort of nonsense without chortling at every key stroke.

I mean, moving from a secular religion to ...

...communicates information on a samizdat basis, like hunted dissidents in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism, whispering truths in the darkness.

What sort of weird world does Sheridan inhabit?

Let's just say it's a paranoid one:

The Labor side of politics has always understood much better than the conservatives the insight of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that real, long-term power emerges from the long march through the institutions. 

Which is to say that Chairman Rupert isn't involved in the funding of a climate denialist behemoth:

 There is a quaint and anachronistic fiction in Australia that corporate behemoths fund all manner of political activity. In fact Australia’s tiny handful of free market think tanks are chronically underfunded and run on a shoe string. 

Yep, the reptiles at the rag do their climate denialism on a shoe string ...

And so on and so forth ...

Meanwhile, Janet Albrechtsen's contribution to the ABC's cost cutting this very morning?

Get rid of tech checks ... because sloppy paranoid shit of the Sheridan kind should be good enough for everyone ...

Okay. The pond has its own suggestion. Cease all broadcasts, activities and transmissions in South Australia. Stop right now. Pull the plug, switch the switch to "off".

They voted for the poodle. They deserve to be punished. Let it be a collective punishment. Let them suffer ...

Make no doubt. The agents of darkness are out in force now, empowered and with evil intent on their minds ... the thought police, intent on removing humour, and turning the world to chanting their mindless mantras, explaining how it's all the fault of inner city 'leets - because Dame Slap herself is a real country bumpkin - and what we need is a regional salt of the earth mindset.

Mindless, awesome stupidity, and none so stupid as Dame Slap ... until that snap in the box, the poodle, bounced into view ...

By golly, if you asked a genius to invent the poodle, they'd lack the imagination required.

Pope caught the mood and more Pope here.