Speaking of political correctness ...

The pond has to admit that it hasn't thought about Peter Baldwin for many a year ...

The last time it did, his image was a trifle battered, as you can see by trotting off to Kate McClymont's 2005 piece at Fairfax, Lid lifted on the ugly '80s.

Is it possible to imagine a worse example of thuggee-ism run rife on the Labor party and the union movement?

Well of course it is, after all the Painters and Dockers showed how to bung on a do, but the Baldwin battering did evoke the rottenness at the core of NSW Labor, and who else should get an honourable mention than the pond's old favourite, the Swiss bank account man ...

Now, Joe Meissner, one of the central figures in the controversy, has broken his silence. Meissner, an importer as well as one of Australia's top-ranked poker players, claims it was "suggested to Tom [Domican] that Baldwin be fixed up and it developed from there". Meissner claims that Domican organised two associates to do the bashing. 
When asked who had suggested this to Domican, Meissner replied: "Who else, our good friend Graham [Richardson]. Ask him."

Then follows the obligatory Gra Gra denial, and a ripping good read, where Baldwin at the very end acknowledges that the party was at the time of his bashing in the grip of criminally-oriented machines ...

Now this should be borne in mind when reading the shouting at clouds effort from Baldwin in today's Oz ...

Could anything in academia land match the sort of outrageous violence put on display in NSW Labor, apart from crazed Islamics or the west in war monger mode?

Now it was around this point that the pond was reminded - growing up as it did in a lumpenproletariat family generously populated with alcoholics - that the one consolation that we had to keep us content was that at least we weren't like the Chinese who lived across the road, running a cheap restaurant for working class drunks in search of Chinese and Australian meals.

They sent us 'luck' soup leftovers as a kind of generous pity for the white trash that spent all the household money on grog, but we knew we were innately better.

And even better, at least we and the Chinese weren't black. At least there was someone lower on the totem pole of life, deserving of contempt and hostility, and always to hand for a display of ripe superiority, of the 'let's go boo a good footballer' kind.

Somehow Baldwin seems to remember it differently:

So there goes another one, wittering on and on in reptile la la land about political correctness and the suffering of American cops, and how it's blacks killing blacks that's the only issue deserving of interest, and moaning about fear and loathing of Western civilisation and all its works ... and there, looming in the pond's mind, was that bashed face of Baldwin as a fine example of Western Civilisation and all its Works ...

Of course Baldwin himself isn't exempt from a little political correctness.

It seems it's okay to pillory Germaine Greer for pointing out the obvious connection between female mutilation for beautification to please males, and male mutilation of female genitals to please males, but it's quite ironical to pillory Greer for pillorying TG folk ...

And so transphobia is just a passing irony, and so is voluntary cosmetic surgery of the "let's stuff some plastic bags in the boobs so the udders will look extra keen and bloated" kind, and so the pond realised it was hopelessly out of touch, and perhaps even politically incorrect ...

Well the pond is as intolerant of intolerance as the next intolerant person, even if the pond was left with the disturbing thought that Baldwin might have some issues with the black and white thing.

But speaking of political incorrectness, and the wretched way the commentariat fling about PC with the insouciance of a kumbaya dismissal, perhaps the next time Baldwin wants to have a rant about universities as the source of all wickedness, and the cause of the decline and fall of western civilisation, perhaps he might spare a thought and a rant for fundamentalist Christian puritans in the United States, and the way that network television tugs its forelock to them and their puritanism...

Sadly this might require a sense of humour ... along with a little perving at art ...

And so to the joke, which will already be familiar to many, but for those who missed it ...

Strange, and there was the pond thinking it was the universities that were PC, and all along it was Fox and the rest of that really weird tribe ... 

And so Colbert scores an easy mark, but at least there's someone on network television marvelling at the folly of it all, as American fundamentalism more and more resembles Daesh fundamentalism, and Baldwin misses the point ...