In which the pond decides to meditate this Sunday with the bromancer ...

Hmm, thanks to the reptiles of the lizard Oz, we have the chance to look at the thoughts of Comrade Sheridan, clutching his little blue book, containing the thoughts of Chairman Tony.

The dear sweet considerate reptiles put it outside the paywall, and strangely didn't label it an EXCLUSIVE, though like many other stories, they have merely seized the chance to EXCLUSIVELY reprint a story easily found elsewhere... provided you're prepared to waste far too many shekels on a lickspittle fellow traveller ...

But first we have to make a choice.

Do we go with Tony Abbott in epic J'accuse Dreyfus mode, thereby encouraging the notion that a thuggish boofhead oaf was more than a lick of Kiwi boot polish on the shoes of the great Emile Zola ...?

Or do we go with Tony Abbott's sun god, a demonic fundamentalist Catholic warrior who would have been a noble contributor to the Inquisition if he'd had half the chance?

Well played reptiles to provide both options. 

It helps when reading articles such as Tony Abbott has morphed into Bob Santamaria:

It took a long time, but Bob Santamaria’s finally done it - we’ve got our first ever DLP Prime Minister. There’s no other way to describe someone who rips the guts out of education yet finds money for a school chaplaincy program; for a person who eviscerates payments to single mothers but still has a few bucks left over for family planning. This Budget marks a waypoint on a long march to possess the soul of the Liberal party. It’s intellectually incoherent: cutting services to all listening to a special interest group. 
And this is its weakest point. The claim is that this is somehow akin to John Howard’s first budget in 1997. It’s not. That was good to business and established the country for decades of growth. This, by contrast, is a flabby effort that reflects its self-indulgent craftsmen. It genuflects, grudgingly, towards everything discovered since the 1930s but the Catholic mafia (Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Kevin Andrews, et al) have demonstrated convincingly that they can shape government in their image. Indulgence available upon application; see the padre. 

Indeed, indeed, but before we move on from this Sunday meditation on these warriors for Christ, please allow the pond to get out a white feather and wave it vigorously:

During World War II Santamaria gained an exemption from military service. In 1972 Arthur Calwell, a leading Catholic Labor politician, confirmed that Santamaria had 'dodged' war service after Mannix had approached him to gain the exemption. When asked, Calwell stated "I want to put the record straight because apparently the Department of Defence cannot find any of the records, nor can the Department of Labour and National Service." Santamaria and two other men (Maher and K. W. Mitchell) were, argued Mannix, "members of the Secretariat of Catholic Action and that their work was equivalent to that of a minister of religion." Calwell said 'I regret my part in it... I want the country to know that these three men who have been pestering and opposing and demonstrating against the Australian Labor Party for the last 30 years were people who dodged military service'. He reflected on the Vietnam War and noted that all three supported it and "conscription of men for military service", adding "I regret that these people who benefited from our generosity did not beget any children who went out to fight in the war in Vietnam. Their sons were exempted, all of them, because they were employed in reserve institutions as were their fathers."Santamaria denied the allegation that he had ever sought an exemption and stated that 'if Mr Calwell repeated his statement outside of parliament he would take appropriate action'. Calwell moderated his statements regarding Maher, but not on Mitchell or Santamaria. In May 1972, previously missing records were found confirming Calwell's version ... (you can Greg Hunt the references here).

Move along people, nothing to see here, you won't find many politicians, of any stripe, with a military record. It's a lot easier to conscript others - country boys and the urban lumpenproletariat -so that they can get on with the business of being warriors for Christ.

And so let the inquisition begin:

This is always the way of boofhead, thuggee, oafish provocateurs of the disingenuous kind. 

Use a sense of grievance and entitlement to first of all malign Glen Campbell for syrupy goodness - boofhead thuggees hate The Sound of Music as well as hapless nice Glen - and having lathered up a sense of indignation, righteousness and rage, head off to the pictures looking for trouble, with the droogs ready for a bit of the old ultra violence.

Or at least heckling and disruption of the childish kind:

Frankly if anyone stopped the pond from watching a movie, by way of heckling or other carry on, all bets are off, and it doesn't matter whether the content's Battleship Potemkin or Triumph of the Will.

Talking movies are for the privacy of the lounge room; politeness dictates if you're in a public screening and you don't like the show, you get up and discreetly leave.

And what was the point that was made, and would have led to the pond wielding a heavy clog? Well, surely the point was that boofhead thuggees just love a bit of the provocation and the violence it produces (something the pond will remember when Sheridan gets on to talking about Sir Tony, who'd never punch a wall, and his gallant, courtly, knightly attitude to women),

The pond remembers both sides in student days - vulgar, noisy, screeching mynah birds, the plague of student life - and one of the reasons that the pond decided the Catholic push were just a bunch of wannabe Francos ...

But let's go on with the trouble-makers making trouble, aka brave Christians against the world in a new crusade, with former military policemen for protection:

Yep, branch stacking is that easy.

Let's just do a Greg Hunt on that term:

In Australian politics, the term branch stacking is used to describe the act of recruiting members for a local branch of a political party for the principal purpose of influencing the outcome of internal preselections of candidates for public office. It has become controversial in Australia after several inquiries or contests which received mainstream attention, and most political parties now have clauses in their constitutions which allow "head office" intervention to resolve alleged stacking, with penalties for those who engage in it. Branch stacking itself is legal under Australian law, but some activities like providing false information to the Australian Electoral Commission can be prosecuted as fraud. (Greg Hunt it here).

Of course branch stacking is usually seen as a Labor party sin, but as Liberal Club stacking demonstrates, it's an art learned and easily abused by adolescents in quest of power.

And so to some further tormenting of Saint Tony as he fought for truth and fundamentalist Catholicism, and in the process, perhaps there's time to do a little Freudian analysis:

There, you see. The sidekick, the Sancho Panza to the tilter at windmills, Don Tony, for a moment suffered the delusion that he could be the leader, el presidente, and was soon enough slapped back into his proper place, which was to act as apologist, a forelock tugger ready to reassure us that he knew the real Tony Abbott, and he certainly wasn't a braying ass in a movie theatre.

Which brings us to the most important work of the apologist and explainer:

But here's the thing Sancho. You are accusing Ms Ramjan of bad faith, and of telling a lie, you're just using weasel words in the way you go about it, perhaps in fear of a defamation action.

Let's remember. How many backed down? 

News Ltd apologises to Barbara Ramjan over Tony Abbott punch story.

Andrew Bolt the latest to apologise over Tony Abbott's wall punch.

Now the pond wasn't there, and in that case, the discreet response is simply to admit that you didn't know what happened, not to blame what's said on memory loss or confusion or fallibility or fling around words like "good faith" when the intent is to display bad faith ...

As for the rest, what you've written to that point, attempting a character reference - he was too noble to have done such a thing - has been nobbled by your portrait of a braying ass in a picture theatre, ready to use his rugger bugger skills on the lefties ...

That's the point at which the apologia gets risible:

Oh dear, "animal spirits". So that's what wall punching gets called these days?

But do carry on as if you're in a carry on movie:

Oh please, please, please, please, not the all day sucker, wouldn't hurt a fly, butter melts in his mouth routine:

So it was in student days, and so it was later ...

And now drum roll please, as we build to the punch line:

He joined the ALP?

So what does that tell us? Well perhaps not what Greg Sheridan thinks ...

But it confirms what the pond has long argued, which is the propensity and capacity for the true believers to switch sides, provided that the other side offers a similarly rabid and hard line outlook on life.

Scratch a Maoist, and not far below the surface, you'll find a fascist, and vice versa.

Scratch the hippies and the lefties selling scented candles, and you're not too far away from rabid capitalists - it always perplexed the pond how the lefties it knew somehow managed to amass a quite presentable amount of worldly goods, and sometimes even a Swiss bank account.

Scratch a hard line rabid religious fundamentalist of the Catholic kind, and you're one step away from a rabid angry atheist, or vice versa. And scratch members of the two major political parties in this country, and you'll find they're not so far removed from each other, because it's always been a club, and as the concept of professional politicians has grown, the easier it's been to share attitudes and the perks of office. (Come on down, Bill Shorten ...)

The pond blames it on the era of relatively free education. While some used their free time profitably in university - listening to music, reading literature, smoking dope, fornicating like cats - the political class conducted tribal wars of total irrelevance to most attending university. Student politics came with the luxury of time, an indulgence fomented and overseen by senior ideological warriors who needed their puppets on campus ... like the Catholic church, which at the time still had money and clout and even now can see its warriors running the country ...

When all most students wanted to do was watch a movie in peace and quiet and discover their thoughts about the world and get on with the business of living.

Instead there was always the hectoring and the badgering and the wall thumping ...

And now the fuckers are trying to excuse their inexcusable behaviour, snouts deeply in the trough, while they keep doing it to the whole country ...

What else is left, apart from slightly hysterical laughter, and more Moir here.