Bronwyn Bishop, and the poison apple tells me it's rumble in the Mosman jungle time ...

Is it wise for a woman who looks like this to use this kind of metaphor?

Poor Kevin believed he, as the snowy white haired leader had the devotion of his band of dwarves only to end up getting the poison apple from the evil Queen.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the most duplicitous of us all?”

Oh sorry, those bloody type-setter monkeys ran the wrong picture. This is the one they should have run:

Of course if they'd been cruel monkeys, they might have put up even more unkind images of the wicked witch, and even more unkind photos of dear Bronnie Bishop. Like this:

But after many years of painful instruction the typesetter monkeys are learning not to be sexist, and not to play the ad hominem card when attacking policies, and above all not to put in over-obvious pictures as a way of accompanying startlingly silly parables and metaphors.

Or else this site would just become a festival of loon pics. Instead of being dedicated to the loonish scribbles of the likes of Bronnie, and her latest outing Overpopulate and perish.

Wherein she must think she's being extremely witty comparing Kevin to Snow White and Julia Gillard to the evil Queen. Proving half a wit is sometimes worse than none at all.

Still, you have to admire Bronnie. The mud she manages to find by heading off to deepest darkest parts of the gutter is always piquant.

Especially when she manages to conflate immigration with boat people, when others in the Liberal party are at pains to pretend that the debate about the population number in Australia is all to do with serious matters involving infrastructure and sustainability, and now we need to rein in the numbers, numbers which just so happened to be let loose by the Howard government to fuel and provide labour for the mining boom, amongst sundry other booms:

A policy needs a commitment to a number. Tony Abbott has committed to an annual 170,000. But still Labor equivocates in the same way about stopping the boats. 143 boats bringing over 6,000 asylum seekers have come to Australia since Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard decided to scrap temporary protection visas and started handing out permanent residencies like confetti and closed Nauru.

Actually immigration numbers have precious little to do with asylum seekers arriving by boat, since they came under Howard by boat, and they came under Rudd by boat, and will continue to come, to be herded off to East Timor or Nauru, or some other handy 'out of sight out of mind, let's pay to hide the bunny' location, but it does have a lot to do with dog whistling and playing the Hansonite card.

And of course the Liberal penchant for paying women to stay home and breed and keep the kids coming makes for very odd bedfellows in a discourse ostensibly about sustainable population numbers, and the burdens on the infrastructure.

Here you have to adopt a mantra of the kind that was popular in the nineteen thirties in Germany, where it was necessary to breed the right kind of dinki di folk in search of the promise of inheriting the promised land, not to mention lebensraum (oh alright, Godwin's Law swear jar scores handsomely).

Yes, godzone in oz, and no furriners and outsiders coming to despoil our narrow island heritage, and take lamb roast off the table, but decent local oi oi oi's:

Our birthrate had dropped to 1.7 births per female – below replacement level. The baby bonus introduced by Peter Costello did see the birthrate rise to now 1.9 births per female and common chat around schools is that the first of the baby bonus kids are now enrolling in school. Some may argue that it was not the baby bonus that brought about the mini baby boom but the rise in the birthrate does correspond with the baby bonus and the cohort is known as the baby bonus kids.

Yes, by any decent score card, one dinkum oi oi oi Aussie kid is worth ten or perhaps a hundred migrants, certainly a thousand from some parts of the world, never mind if they have skills or a million bucks, or were lured here by the Howard government on the promise that producing a boom in the education sector by studying to become a hairdresser would be good enough reason to give said student residency.

While this kind of nativist rhetoric evokes memories of the old days of the White Australia policy, or for that matter anti-Irish Catholic nativism in the nineteenth century in New York, it invariably produces more heat than light.

Bronnie is surely in line for membership of the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, thereby qualifying herself for the label Know Nothing (a label applied to the nativists because they would invariably say in a Bart Simpson way that they knew nothing about the nativist secret society - more on all the forms of nativism here). It's remarkable to think that German Americans were distrusted for their love of beer and their language and their religion and their schools, long before the first world war got going. A love of beer! Surely that's enough to get you into Oz as a dinkum Aus!

The nativist fetish amongst some agrarian socialist Liberals is so bizarre that they'll happily add a 2% rise to company tax, as a way of supporting brooders and breeders staying at home to take care of their oi oi ois, which simply makes a nonsense of all the 'great big new tax' chatter and the evil of the mining tax outrage, and so on and so forth, as well as providing ammunition for those who think it would lead to price and inflation increases (Labor attacks 'big tax' Tony).

But you can't expect the likes of Bronnie to resolve contradictions in thought, as it's hard enough for her simply to roll out the "lycra clad louts good" party line.

Bronnie's solution to all this deviant complexity and difficulty? Why it's to turn Australia into the glorious shambles that bedevils the British and United States voting system:

Rudd was done in, in a secret deal to install Julia Gillard. Is it the Australian people to be done in as a result of the Labor-Green deal?

Perhaps the only way to avoid such consequences for the future is to abolish compulsory preference voting and move to first past the post or at the very least optional preferential voting as in many of the states.

But for the here and now the best outcome for Australia is to elect the Coalition to government under the leadership of Tony Abbott.

Yep, that's the way forward. Simplify and move to first past the post, thereby ensuring that there are just two choices. Tweedledum and dee. Or if you will, dee and Bronnie dumber.

No wonder the first cab off the rank in the comments section plaintively noted that you can't separate talk of population growth from talk of immigration, but how spiffing it would be to separate racist cant from talk of immigration.

But surely the most cynical contribution has to be that of one Shane of Melbourne:

Hmmm. Let’s look at this logically. Bronwyn says we are becoming overpopulated and must cut down our immigration intake. But we must give out middle class welfare to encourage people to breed. Two contradictory policies. As a taxpayer I’m paying for the middle class welfare, the maternity bed, the childcare place, the primary school education etc. However if I import a skilled migrant, I don’t have to pay for any of those things with the added bonus that if they get a job, they become a taxpayer. No Bronwyn, if you truly think that Australia is becoming overpopulated then the only logical position is zero immigration and an elimination of middle class welfare incentives to breed.

Well maybe it's not so much a logical position as a way of bearding the dragon, and bearding the hapless goose known as Bronnie is ever so much fun.

You can have the same fun watching Tony Abbott basting himself in his contradictions, ready perhaps to turn himself into prime Oz lamb, in Boost our babies, but cap migrants: Abbott:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is denying any contradiction between his aim to boost population by encouraging Australian women to have more babies, while at the same time trying to limit growth by cutting migrant numbers.

He expressed an ''an important distinction between the children of Australians and people coming to this country'' while facing questions about the difference between ''our kids and kids who come from overseas'' during a visit to a child-care centre in Brisbane yesterday.

He denied there was a contradiction between his pledge to establish a six-month paid parental leave scheme, which would ''boost population'', and his promise to rein-in population growth by scaling back some parts of the migration program if he wins the August 21 election.

Of course there's no contradiction because on the one hand there's the other hand, and on the other hand, there's the other hand. And it's certainly got nothing to do with a dislike of immigrants, or dare we mention the unmentionable, boat people:

''I am an immigrant myself and I will never be anything other than pro-immigrant ... I simply note the observation that [former Labor prime minister] Paul Keating made a long time ago that the best migrants are our own kids.''

Yes of course we luvs ya, funny furrin people, and sure a lot of us are sprung from furriners, and even boat people, but they paid ten pounds or more, and we've had enough of ya, now that we've had the pick of the best from Wales and London.

''I'm just making the point that there is no inconsistency between encouraging Australian families to have kids or making it easier for Australian families to have the choice to have children, and wanting to have a sustainable immigration intake,'' he said.

Ah well, if Paul Keating said it, that must make it right. Hang on, but Paul Keating's Labor.

Is this cryptic code by the master Liberal tactician that it's okay to vote for Labor to keep the company tax rate down? Since Labor is nativist, but also wants to help out the business sector?

Meanwhile the anticipatory bleating has already started:

Migration cuts 'hurt education sector'

Tourism fallout from immigration cuts.

Sheesh, it's getting hard to be an honest nativist these days. A genuine currency lad or lass.

What we need is a Gangs of New York type finale, with Bronnie and her gang out on the street, armed with razors and baseball bats, doing their nativist thing against the immigrant hordes.

I'm thinking of calling it Gangs of Mosman, but for some reason Marty's not taking my call.

Marty, Marty, it's a winner. You see there's this fierce witch, and she's got this poison apple, and she hands it out to the boat people, and then there's a fight and everyone falls down, and then the winners go home to breed and get handouts, and it's a bigger and better Australia, except it's smaller ...

Golly, driven mad and there's a month to go. Hang in there, while I whip up a concept for an outline we can turn into a treatment ... I know Marty will love it, and with Bronnie as star ... how can we lose?

(Below: oh yes, it's rumble in Mosman jungle time).

Gerard Henderson, Paul Howes, and the Green guide to the Greens ...

(Above: these bloody posters have been turning up all over Grayndler and I'm so sick and tired of tearing them down).

This is the time of year when the potentiometer should be cranked down from eleven to zero, so that the bisexual worm can slide smoothly across the screen without a ripple or an undulation, and there's quiet in the house, not even a mouse stirring, until election day has passed.

But of course for the commentariat, scribbling about politics right now is a form of ecstasy and terror, as they awake in wonderment and bewilderment, thinking of what might be beneath the upcoming Xmas tree.

The cynical average punter with enough experience knows it's most likely another jack in the box. The thought of Tony Abbott at the helm of the ship of state is best avoided, unless the notion that a massive depression is a helpful prelude to a wonderful bout of mania, while the thought of Stephen Conroy taking a vote for Labor as a vote for his censoring nanny ways - yes he's still on about it - is enough to turn any worm militant.

But commentariat commentators have different nightmares, and the one that gets our resident Polonius, Gerard Henderson, going in the middle of the night is the notion of middle class radicals.

In Radical roots seep through at the heart of Greens, he furiously scribbles about the dangers of:

... middle-class radicals who control the inner-city greens ... inner-city left-wing political activists, left-wing socialist-style party ... lifelong members of the pro-Stalinist Socialist party ...ex-communists and socialists trying to take over the inner-city branches of the Greens ... and middle class radicalism

Much of this is borrowed from Paul Howes, AWU heavyweight, numbers man and boogeyman evoker supreme, scribbling in the Sunday Terror, and it leads to a remarkable harmony of thought between Henderson and Howes, as Henderson suggests that inner city Liberals should vote for the Labor party, and put the Greens last.

His concern is to thereby ensure the likes of head kicker Anthony Albanese in Grayndler and Tanya Plibersek in Sydney and Cath Bowtell in Melbourne get up, and his favourite demonic boogeyman - watch out the green boogeyman will get you - is Lee Rhiannon, NSW Senate candidate, as he lovingly and lavishly describes her family's pro-Stalinist past.

Yet at the same time, Henderson has the cheek to suggest that voters should follow Bob Brown's advice and exercise their vote and their preference according to their taste and preferences.

So let's not conflate the Senate and the House of Representatives. Let's not conflate Sam Byrne standing in Graynder with Rhiannon. Sure Byrne is secretary of the Alfalfa House organic food cooperative in Enmore (you have to be local to know what that means), and he plays soccer with the Hurlstone Park Wanderers and he was on Marrickville council for yonks at a time when it decided to splash cash on a swimming pool rather than libraries, but however you dress it, he's not a Stalinist boogeyman. Do gooder, alfalfa lover, soccer player. These are legitimate terms of abuse, but please we might soon have to invent a swear jar for the Stalinist equivalent of Godwin's Law ...

Might not a vote for him indicate some dissatisfaction with the Bennelong funnel kicking in yet again, as planes soar overhead every five minutes, while women and the handicapped still have to get down a very big flight of stairs at Newtown railway station, as they have done for years?

Sure that's conflating federal and state issues, in much the same way as the federal government manages to conflate them in any marginal seat where they can splash the cash on bits of infrastructure to please the punters. Except the inner west, who are punished by Henderson and by the likes of their elected representatives. Abused all round all year ...

Grayndler is of course safe Labor, and so Labor safely ignores the seat, ensuring that in it sit, not a bunch of middle class radicals, so much as a bunch of pissed off, regularly ignored voters.

Never mind, as Antony Green - himself an Enmore icon and regularly seen in the streets of Grayndler notes - it's safe Labor, and his assessment is Labor retain.

But frankly when the Labor party starts doing the Stalinist dance, and blathering on about it in the context of Grayndler, backed up by Gerard Henderson, I'm suddenly inclined to shift my vote from the Happy Birthday party to one that's dangerously middle class, and therefore radical ...

It's the same story in Sydney, where the inert Tanya Plibersek is running, and the Greens candidate Tony Hickey is running. Now Hickey is a country boy, openly gay, living with his partner in Chippendale, is a TESL teacher and as close to Stalinism as my maiden aunt:

Tony has been involved in campaigns for peace, sustainable transport, workers' rights and LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex) rights. He was a founder of the Inner Sydney Greens, and is currently the NSW Greens’ secretary.

Besides his interest in multiculturalism, languages, education and politics, he enjoys running, cycling and sharing meals, movies and theatre with friends. (here)

Now this might be the sort of CV that sends Henderson and Howes into a dizzy tither, muttering darkly about Stalinism and middle class radicalism, but their fears do diddly squat for me.

Once again it's a never no mind for me as the infallible Green guide to the prospects of the Greens tells me that Sydney is a Labor retain though this is a seat where the Greens have a chance of finishing second. (here)

You can also consult the Green oracle about the Green running for Melbourne, which is really the only seat where the Greens have a reasonable chance, with a margin of 4.7%. Let's examine the Stalinist credentials of the Green candidate Adam Bandt, as found in the Green guide:

Bandt has worked as an industrial and public interest lawyer for the last decade, representing workers and their unions. He has been a partner at Slater and Gordon, holding a position previously held by Prime Minister Leader Julia Gillard. He represented construction workers before the Cole Building Industry Royal Commission, represented unions and workers during the Ansett insolvency, and states that he was involved in prosecuting some of Australia's biggest clothing companies for breaches of laws designed to prevent the exploitation of outworkers. Bandt lives in Parkville and has resided in the electorate of Melbourne for more than decade. Bandt finished second in this seat in 2007, and also finished second in the 2009 Melbourne Lord Mayoral election. Bandt describes himself as a book nerd and live music fan and is completing a PhD in Law and Politics at Monash University.

Dearie me, if Henderson had wanted to rail about Slater and Gordon lawyers working for those bloody unions, and book nerds and live music fans and their singular excesses, he might have been on solid ground.

Of course it might have produced a bit of tetchiness between those suddenly good mates Henderson and Howes, since Howes is after all a bloody unionist, but that's how it swings as the worm turns in the run up to the election, and boogey persons must be found.

Instead Henderson scribbles in a presumptuous way about the intelligence of voters, and proposes ways they should vote, and so ends up in a conga line of heavyweights chanting about how the Greens are all Stalinists. That sort of childish smear might have worked in the fifties, except when it comes to referendums to abolish the Communist party, but it has to do a lot harder work these days to cut the mustard.

Well here's a counter-vailing thought for intelligent voters. If happen to live in NSW and you don't think much of Rhiannon, duck down below the fold in the Senate vote, and fill in each box according to your preferences.

We do so regularly for the sheer perverse pleasure of putting fundamentalist Christians and other assorted ratbags last - that's worth ten minutes any day of the week, let alone voting day -and any Stalinists we discover will also be down at the bottom of the list.

If every voter in Victoria had followed their instincts, and carried on like a sensible loon, the likes of Steve Fielding would have been only a passing dream, instead of a Labor party induced preferential nightmare.

And then check out the preferences and tastes of your candidates for your local house of reps seats, and see who's standing and vote according to your tastes and inclinations, and not on the basis of the cards they thrust in your hands, and don't list to the saucy doubts and fears and head kicking ways of Howes and Henderson.

Because blather about middle-class radicalism - the sheer bizarre incongruity of the term - is enough to turn this quiet, seemly middle-class inhabitant of the pond quite radical. And Stalinist smear jobs - where all and sundry in a party are smeared by association with Lee Rhiannon, when the same could be done with any number of Labor party ratbags who once were on the radical left, not to mention the right wing fundie Christian smears that could be heaped on any number of Liberals - are about as useful as harking back to the nineteen fifties, and the days of the old Soviet Empire.

What's that you say? Henderson still lives in that past, valiantly re-fighting the cultural wars belonging to an era a half century out of date?

Yes of course, but that's always the way of the dinosaurs, and soon enough a radical change to the climate saw them become extinct ...

(Below: eek, a dangerously green politician peddling evil electric cars as a green solution to green urban issues. Quick, check out whether he's a Stalinist. What's that? A second airport for Sydney. Take that green interloper asking difficult questions and deal with them. Have you got the baseball bat that makes Balmain boys cry? Good ...)

David Burchell, and a goodly dose of Aristophanes and Bottom ...

(Above: Henry Fuseli evoking the artisan way, here).

Here at the pond we're determined to make David Burchell a star, a legend in his own lunchtime, a nattering nabob of the first water, a commentariat commentator up there with the best of them.

In fact, in terms of wordsmithing, as a prattling Polonius given to the pompous and the portentous, he makes the likes of Gerard Henderson look like a novice, a neophyte still waiting a year before he makes his conversion to preening prattishness complete.

How's this as a gambit in PM attracts the scorn of the ages:

When our political leaders seek to launch a public debate, you might speculate, they probably have one of two purposes in mind. They might be aiming for a tete-a-tete with their fellow savants in the political class. Or they might be attempting to initiate a wider dialogue with the general public, in order to placate their fears. Of course, for the political class - that sundry assemblage of commentators, opinionists and all-round passers of wise judgments, who take it as their day job to do the electorate's thinking for them - it stands to reason that the first objective must always be more interesting and urgent than the second.

Who would not wish, if they could choose it, to discuss the niceties of foreign relations with a select audience of accredited greybeards, rather than waste the pearls of their wisdom on the hoi polloi, that great disorderly mass of the uninformed, the apathetic and the inattentive?

Indeed. Who knows what it might mean, except perhaps that we should pay attention to that accredited greybeard Burchell, part of that sundry assemblage of commentators, opinionists and all-round passers of wise judgments who parade and pose before the hoi polloi, or at least those who fail to Think. Again., and so end up buying or absent mindedly clicking on The Australian.

Even better is Burchell's self-righteous opening, which in a delightfully smug way quotes Aristophanes sending up the likes of Socrates. Truth to tell, if Aristophanes alighted on Burchell, he most likely wouldn't be able to believe his luck, since it's only ever so often that you can find pomposity and impenetrable purple prose and sheer opaque density mingled together and ripe for satire.

Take this:

Yet now the sages, like Icarus with his waxen wings, have tumbled to earth. Thus too the choleric anger presently directed against the new PM from all quarters of the political class. People who have spent decades airily professing to be pro-feminist - just as they were pro-everything that made you seem cool without exacting any negative consequences on your career - now openly mock the PM's dress sense or her hair colouring, the provenance of her pearl necklace or the timbre of her speaking voice, as if this were the most delicious possible form of revenge.

Let's pause for a moment and wonder. Who are these people who have spent decades airily professing to be pro-feminist, who mock the PM's dress sense, hair colouring and pearl necklace?

Burchell seems curiously reluctant to name names. Does he perhaps take his stable mate Christopher Pearson for a pro-feminist type? Perhaps it's his other stable mate Janet Albrechtsen? Such a strident radical feminist. Or perhaps any of a half dozen other commentariat commentators stabled in The Oz, who get agitated by her accent or her red hair or her pearls? With not a pro-feminist amongst them ...

Could it be that Burchell simply loves the sound of his own voice, and actual sense and meaning is a secondary issue?

On and on he prattles in the same ode to a Grecian urn vein, but sadly he lacks a little of the Keatsian quality:

And yet in truth there is nothing very arcane or underhand about the political method followed by Julia Gillard since her elevation a few weeks ago. The electorate - spurned by Rudd as he gazed at his own gorgeous reflection in the river - had ceased to take seriously anything the government was saying. There was an urgent need to reconnect, to reassure, to start a dialogue.

Moreover (as will happen once a romance has soured), anxiety, disquiet, even low-grade paranoia were washing across the land, like a tempest in a wine cup, as the ancients liked to say.

Oh the epic failure in that scribble if we're catering to the hoi polloi. Surely this should read like a storm in a tea cup, as the drinkers of Billy tea were wont to say.

Oops, there I am, acting again like some unwashed member of the hoi polloi.

But no doubt you're wondering about the greater meaning, the deeper implications, and frankly I'm at a total loss.

Once it seizes our imagination, political paranoia has an endlessly creative genius: it delights in joining up one neglected issue to the next, in an endless sequence of cause and effect.

Soon enough we fear that the politicians must have dark reasons for wanting to swell the population, despite the overcrowding on our motorways and in our hospitals, and, in order to do so by stealth, that they propose to spirit additional immigrants in by the back door, out of a flotilla of leaky little boats.

Only, dare we say it, if you were a complete gherkin, and read too much of The Australian.

But as always when people gather and mutter darkly of political paranoia, the thing to observe is not the actual meaning but the finery of the phrasing. And cumulatively there is no need for sense.

You see Burchell takes a moment to roundly berate the 2010 Summit:

This marriage of minds, this gentle coupling of policy-wonk brains, this Socratic dialogue between bearded sage and eager acolyte, is surely what political debate was really invented for. If you doubt it you have only to recall the grand 2020 Summit of blessed memory, which hoisted the best and brightest together up into some luminous space among the stratocumulus for a vast celestial chitchat about their own personal hobbyhorses, to the exclusion of everything and everybody else. No doubt we are yet to witness half of the brilliant ideas that came out of it.

Uh huh, and then he has this to say about Gillard's gathering of one hundred and fifty citizens:

What we're presently observing is not so much a policy debate as an implied public conversation, carried out by means of rough policy signals, out of which Gillard evidently hopes to win back some grudging fraction of the electorate's trust. And yet, scorned and with its self-esteem bruised, the political class has winched itself back up into its basket among the clouds. The asylum-seekers discussion and the sustainability talk are treated as juvenile and absurd, when clearly they are meant to signal a promise that Labor will struggle towards an honourable compromise that most citizens can live with (although this will take longer than a few weeks).

The Citizens Assembly is wilfully misread as if it were a grand philosophical experiment in deliberative democracy, a miniature Athens, when clearly it is meant only to signal that the government is engaging with climate-change confusion in a Hawke-like spirit. (Surely the fact that Bob himself, that ancient calmer of nerves and flatterer of our collective self-esteem, was wheeled out to spruik it should have given the sages some kind of clue?)

What on earth does it mean? Could it mean Gillard good, Rudd baaad? Could it mean a gathering of elites baad, but a gathering of ill-informed dunderheads good?

Could it mean that Burchell fancies himself for a role in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but not as one of the nobles, perhaps more as an honest artisan, a Nick Bottom ready to wear the head of a donkey?

Who knows? Would it have been too naked and revealing to say "I'm in favour of the citizens' assembly and think good things might come of it."

This is his column's final par, and the mystery remains:

That rattling noise you hear from the heavens at present is not the thunder of the gods. It is the sound of the political class balefully observing the new PM's disgraceful inattention towards them, and collectively stamping their little feet.

Yes, but what does Burchell actually mean? What is he saying? What is the import of his message?

Is it too much to urge him to forsake metaphors, and speak, in a Sir Ernest Gowers way, plainly? Is it too much to recommend Plain Words to him, or perhaps a correctional course involving reading the complete works of George Orwell? Or perhaps just the ones available at Project Gutenberg?

I know he's stamping his foot about something, but is wilful obscurantist rhetoric and bizarre parables the way to do the stamping?

Whatever, the pond remains awestruck at the capacity for so much blather and indiscriminate wordsmithing, wherein actual meaning and point making is obscured in a way that even Polonius himself might find more than admirable ... more like breathtaking ...

We'd like to agree or disagree with Burchell, but for the life of us, it's so hard to work out what he's saying that agreement, or disagreement isn't a possibility. Guess it's time to rejoin that great disorderly mass of the uninformed, the apathetic and the inattentive ...

And head off to the TAB to make a bet. Which is that within a nanosecond, a week, or at the outside a fortnight after the Citizens' Assembly meets to consider Climate Change, it'll be done over by the likes of Burchell in the same way they did over the 2020 gig ... and "climate-change confusion" will continue on its merry way ...

Same as it ever was for the wise greybeards scribbling for The Australian ...

And the basis for the bet? This is what Burchell had to say about climate change way back when in No logic in Liberals' climate of paranoia:

Since no ordinary citizen can really assess how compelling the science is, all any of us can hope to say is that the best course of action is the more prudent one, and hence the one that promises less future damage to the planet.

Why there, no need for an assembly at all ... since the hoi polloi don't have a clue and Burchell has spoken for them ...

(Below: the Three Stooges in their homage to Aristophanes titled Hoi Polloi).

Paul Sheehan, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, and Felix the cat redux ...

Paul Sheehan is back at the Herald, and in the usual way, his morning's opus never fails to disappoint.

Mondays can now revert to a bout of rambunctious illogicality as a way to start the day, and Civilisation goes west, leaving empire on the edge of ruin is a fine opening salvo, or more accurately, spray, and not of grape shot, but of spittle.

Sheehan is enamoured of Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, and offers this as an example of groupie think as an intro:

Ferguson is not just a superstar within the international intellectual elite, the theme of his speech was sweeping in its scale and implications - ''Empires on the edge of ruin''. And he will not be just talking about the past, but also the present.

Yep, the next time you read Sheehan berating the unhappy, unfortunate influence of the international elite, or perhaps the inner west elite, just remember that there are elites, and elites, in much the same way as there are different boxes of chocolates.

Sheehan clearly has a taste for the millenarian elite.

He even evokes the word ''epoch''. As a professor of history at both Harvard University and the Harvard Business School, he has scanned the economic data over hundreds of years and come to this conclusion: ''I think it is reasonable to assume that we are living through the end of an epoch … Something that is really the end of 500 years of history … The great question is whether I'm right in believing that we're living through the end of the pre-eminence of the West … and the end of Western civilisation as we know it. This is a huge secular shift.''

Secular? Well in the sense of worldly rather than spiritual, we can gather what he means, but of course in the current debate, the word secular contains its own kind of dog whistle. And why five hundred years? Let's allow a decade here or there, but what's so significant about 1510 or 1500 or 1520 for that matter, that they should represent a starting point that we should now come to an end of?

As for epochs, it's the kind of mind set you will find amongst Victorian historians with a sense of Empire, a world into which Ferguson comfortably slips. It's quaint world, rather similar to the blonde blue eyed Nordic Jesus that manages to displace the coarse dark featured Jewish Semitic Jesus in the Anglo Saxon mind ...

But what, you might ask, has the Anglo Saxon mind got to do with things? Well first, a little detour to do with history ...

The trouble with Gibbon writing The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire (all twelve volumes of which are handily available at Project Gutenberg here, if you want to bury yourself in long ago scribbling, the hardest and longest and most dire read in my entire time doing history) was that he had a thesis to hand, and then wrote his history in a way that justified the thesis, never mind the odd contradicting and contradictory event.

The trouble with Ferguson is that when he seeks to write a history of events that have yet to unfold, he's using the past as a prop so that he can become a prophet or a seer, or in this case a millenarian, predicting doom and gloom and downfall, when in reality, all he has is his personal prejudice and opinion, as to how things might unfold.

Sure things will change, history shows that, but the how and the why always somehow manages to trick the prophet. But that never shakes their eternal righteousness and conviction, and the willingness of others to listen to their tales of doom and gloom:

The global financial crisis and recession have exposed and accelerated this shift, he told a private conference at Coolum in Queensland on Saturday (having arrived from London the day before). ''We are watching the disintegration of Europe,'' he said. Observing this process is like watching ''a fascinating real-time train wreck''.

The sovereign debt crisis in Europe, the United States and Japan is, he says, ''far from over. The situation is dire''. But not in Australia. Instead, he posits a different challenge for this country: ''We are shifting into an era of Asian dominance … Australia is effectively part of the Chinese economy … Do you want to be a colony of the Chinese empire?''

Of course the same blather about the end of empire was spruiked at the end of world war two, and the utter ruination of Europe along with it. But back then Europe was in utter physical and mental ruin. These days the life of a Parisian ain't so bad, not when the burka is the main object of tabloid concern.

But note the Ferguson dog whistle "Do you want to be a colony of the Chinese empire?" Of course the world was so much better when the Opium Wars were being fought, and Hong Kong was a part of Empire, and the Chinese ... well the Chinese knew their subservient lickspittle place in the panoply dedicated to the British Anglo Saxon Empire.

Put that way, I guess it's not so much a dog whistle, as a full on shriek, so let's cut to the chase at the end of Sheehan's column, and see why the Anglo Saxons have come out to play:

Having come to Australia, he (Ferguson) is taking pleasure at being in an English-speaking country were the economy is sound and the mood is optimistic. ''You have a fantastic opportunity to do things that other Anglo-Saxon countries can only dream of. You should be setting up a sovereign wealth fund like Norway.'' This would serve as a buffer to the inevitable downturn in the global commodities market and any stumbles by China. ''You had the golden opportunity, but it was frittered away in a pseudo-Keynesian spending binge.''

Anglo-Saxon? Well I don't think I've heard Australia called Anglo-Saxon in such a naive way since the nineteen fifties, or perhaps since Percy Grainger peddled his Nordic visions, and it certainly wasn't true as long ago as the first gold rush, which brought in unseemly hordes from all over the place and began to trouble the natural Anglo Saxon order of things, but even before then, before gold invited in the celestials and the Europeans, there were significant numbers of perfidious Celts of the kind so disliked and distrusted and mocked by Sheehan in previous pieces.

Since those long ago days there have been substantial changes to the make-up of the country, and to speak so glibly of the country's population as Anglo Saxon marks the good professor down for an F.

Let's be handsome and make sure it's an Anglo-Saxon F, lest he have an anxiety attack over it being a Chinese or Asian F.

Oh sorry, I got that wrong, he's giving others an F:

So much for Kevin Rudd's and Julia Gillard's claim to have saved Australia from the global economic crisis. The world's most famous economic historian has just given them an F.

Never mind, since there's a long standing feud running around Ferguson, involving the matter of Keynes, which Sheehan barely manages to grasp:

Not everyone is enamoured with Ferguson. For some time he has engaged in a celebrated debate with the most recent Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, the economics columnist for The New York Times. At the weekend Ferguson described their skirmishing as ''a sometimes ill-tempered debate''.

Ill-tempered? Well for that, let's troop off to The Times archive, lurking behind Chairman Rupert's paywall, but which you might manage if you're going there directly to view Professor Paul Krugman at war with Niall Ferguson over inflation as the pair got to arguing over stimulus and Keynes:

Krugman, an ultra-Keynesian, argued for stimulus spending. Ferguson put the case for fiscal conservatism, warning of a “rapid explosion of federal debt”. At some point, the “financial credibility of the United States will be called into question”, he said.

A few days later, Krugman returned to the argument in a withering put-down on his blog, describing Ferguson’s views as “really sad” and “depressing” and belonging to “the dark ages of economics”.

Ferguson shot back in a piece in the Financial Times. “It is a brave or foolhardy man who picks a fight with Mr Krugman,” he wrote. “Yet a cat may look at a king, and sometimes a historian can challenge an economist.” Krugman was “patronising” he said, before offering him a “refresher course” in the historical context of Keynes’s work.

You can’t offer to lecture Krugman on Keynes, however, without expecting the return punch to be a big one. Earlier this month, Ferguson wrote another piece for the FT, comparing Barack Obama to Felix the Cat: “Felix was not only black,” he wrote. “He was always very, very lucky.”

Krugman saw the opportunity to deploy the nuclear weapon of American academic arguments — an accusation of racism. “I cannot fathom the state of mind that led Ferguson to think this was a good way to introduce a column,” he blogged furiously. “Admittedly, it doesn’t really distract from his larger point, since as far as I can tell he doesn’t have one.”

As it was succinctly put in the posters for Jaws: The Revenge, this time it was personal. Over on the influential Huffington Post blog, Ferguson defended the intro, rather amusingly pointing out that Felix was just a black cat, “not an African-American cat”. Krugman shot back on his blog: “He’s a whiner too.”

Yes, it's a classic spat between right and left, between liberal and conservative, dressed up in low falutin' terms, and with the future unknown, neither in a position to be called a winner, though if you happen to be a free market small government non regulatory type of player, then surely it was Wall Street that managed to bring about the recent mini-collapse, rather than the Chinese, and as Krugman noted at the time, suddenly government had a role to play. (And there's a neat summary of Niall Ferguson v Paul Krugman at the Metropolitan debate here).

Sheehan of course is happy to forget the recent financial past, and the causes of the world-wide recession - it seems it's a problem created by Celts and by Europeans.

Krugman is an advocate of classic Keynesian stimulus by big government to ride out the current downturn. But Ferguson believes we have passed the point where deeply indebted governments can rely on yet more stimulus. He wants a gradual deflating of the debt balloon and more expansive monetary policy. He worries more about deflation than inflation.

While Krugman is an economist, Ferguson is an economic historian. It is a significant difference. ''Financial history can illuminate our experiences better than any economic model,'' he says.

His point is helped by the failure of most economics prognosticators to anticipate the near-meltdown of the global financial markets in 2008 and the near-depression this caused.

Yep, that's how to do a switcheroo. Let's ignore the silliness of saying that financial history can illuminate our experiences better than any economic model. Any historian will say that. It's a bit like those gherkins who say how understanding the causes of World War 1 is certain to help us understand how to stop World War 11 from happening. What's that, it happened anyway?

Never mind, let's admire the double flip with pike, and so avoid noting the way that most prognosticators, especially of the anti-government, non-regulatory intervention, let the banks and the markets and Wall Street do what they like, and invent whatever bizarre financial instruments they can invent, failed to realise the stupidity and profound implications of their posturing?

As for the rest of Sheehan's column, it's really just a bout of star fucking, as he celebrates Ferguson as a celebrity. Ferguson was married to journalist Susan Douglas, but now hangs around with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (wiki here), and he's prolific in his role as public right wing intellectual, ready to tour to the antipodes to give the Anglo Saxons advice on how to deal with dissident cultures in seminars and lectures, and ready to scribble books and front television series presenting his views.

While star-fucking is an admirable and estimable activity, especially for elites of an eastern suburbs persuasion, as they tuck in to their favourite fifteen dollar loaf of bread, it doesn't create much of a sense of depth. For that you might be better off reading Ferguson's apology for the British empire, Colossus and Empire, or perhaps watching or reading The Ascent of Money.

The television documentary version struck me as glib and superficial, the kind of thing you make in a way to bring the complex set of financial structures operating in the world down to thought bubbles capable of holding the attention a viewer's attention, without bothering to draw attention to the way this dumbing down favours simplicity over complexity. In that, Ferguson is truly a new age guru, and a child of screen culture, and surely as much part of the problem as any solution.

But since we're not really at that level of debate, we're actually down at the Paul Sheehan thought bubble star fucker level, there's one deeply disturbing aspect that might affect Anglo Saxons, though not someone like me, with my sordid mix of Celtic and Germanic blut in the distant past.

You see, Ferguson was born in Glasgow, and with that name, it's reasonable to have a suspicion that there's a little Celt there in the past.

And thanks to previous scribbles by Paul Sheehan, we know a deep truth:

England makes, the Celts take.

Oh no. Anglo Saxons everywhere, take guard ... your world is coming to an end ...

(Below: found here).

Piers Akerman, or how easy it is to get distracted from hypocritical dumbbells scribbling with forked tongues in cloud cuckoo land ...

Hypocrisy is probably the easiest charge to sustain against anyone wandering through this veil of tears.

Who at some time or another hasn't indulged in a little hypocrisy, if we take the standard dictionary definition as being the practice of professing beliefs, feelings or virtues that one does not hold or possess - in essence an act or instance of falseness.

Politics is littered with it, of course, charges and counter-charges, and I was intending to start out with another tract on that inveterate badger and pious hypocrite Piers "Akker Dakker" "the Billy Bunter of Greyfriars" Akerman, and his scribble A weaker kind of Kevin Rudd, if only because Akker Dakker is a sure fire way to fill in a dull Sunday.

But then I got distracted, because Akker Dakker is after all stupefyingly mind bogglingly tedious, whereas online dictionaries are getting better all the time, and naturally I'd gone off to check on hypocrisy.

Sure enough there were some excellent elaborations. I particularly like the expression "carry fire in one hand and water in the other":

To be duplicitous, to engage in double-dealing; to be two-faced, to speak with forked tongue. The expression comes from Plautus; it continues “to bear a stone in one hand, a piece of bread in the other.” Thus, the expression indicates that a person is prepared to act in totally contradictory ways to achieve his purposes.

This immediately led me to think about speaking with a forked tongue, used but not described by the dictionary, which led me to a wiki on the phrase, and this quaint bit of information:

According to one 1859 account, the native proverb that the "white man spoke with a forked tongue" originated as a result of the French tactic of the 1690s, in their war with the Iroquois, of inviting their enemies to attend a Peace Conference, only to be slaughtered or captured.

In turn the wiki provides a handy link to "doublespeak" which explains that it and "doubletalk" derive as coinages from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four world "doublespeak":

Winston sank his arms to his sides and slowly refilled his lungs with air. His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… - (Orwell, New American Library, 1981, p35)

And there's a handy link there to "unknown unknown" but we won't go there because we already know the known use of this knowingly delicious phrase, and we've already had to put a dollar in the Orwellian swear jar and the Rumsfeldian swear jar is full to overflowing, like the intertubes.

Meanwhile, the dictionary had tempted me back with "crocodile tears: and a dash of Shakespeare in Henry VI part II (thank the lord it wasn't part I):

Beguiles him, as the mournful crocodile
With sorrow snares relenting passengers. (III, i)

Throw in the exotic "give pap with a hatchet":

To do or say a kind thing in an unkind way; to administer punishment under the guise of an act of kindness or generosity. This expression derives from the title of an anonymous pamphlet published in 1589 and attributed to John Lyly. The image of an infant being fed with a hatchet gives the phrase its obvious ironic tone. The recipient experiences more harm than good, thus undercutting any illusion of good intentions and suggesting the possibility of duplicity at play.

He that so old seeks for a nurse so young, shall have pap with a hatchet for his comfort! (Alexander Niccoles, A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving, 1615)

Add in "mote in the eye", (Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brothers eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? scribbled Matthew), and the odour of sanctity (given a special odor if you use American spelling), and then the tasty biblical offering to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel:

Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you … for ye make clean the outside of the cup and platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. (Matthew 23:24-25)

Mention to talk out of both sides of one's mouth, which might take us back to the Roman god Janus or to the Hebrew bible, which makes a number of references to sword of mouths. Because I liked the concept so much, but couldn't handle the actual script for the concept, I clipped it (you can find it here in a purchase teaser):

Throw in a de La Rochefoucauld quote:

"Hypocrisy is a tribute which vice pays to virtue" [Duc de la Rochefoucauld Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales]

And wash it all down with an obligatory Oscar Wilde:

"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy" [Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest]

And you can see what serendipitous fun the intertubes offers for language and phrase freaks, almost enough to make you forget the likes of that speaker with forked tongue, Akker Dakker.

Almost, because the pious cant and humbug of Akker Dakker still sticks in the craw, especially when he berates people about doing nothing about climate change, since he's spent these many years urging that people do nothing about climate change.

Sainted gnats and swallowed camels, how loonish can you get? I mean, sure, if you happen to believe climate change is real and deserving of action, get upset by Julia Gillard's fobbing it off with a specious citizens' assembly.

But if you happen to have made a career out of peddling saucy doubts and fears - oh okay blind ignorance and unscientific hokum and prejudices - surely you should be dancing in the streets, or reminding us all that Tony Abbott thought, like Akker Dakker, that it was all crap, and therefore nothing should be done, and so all was good.

But lo, and most amazingly behold, suddenly somehow, Tony Abbott has become a man of action on climate change, by sending off an army of noble environmental warriors, full 15,000 strong, to swallow the carbon as it belches from the coal-fired smoke stacks:

Since coming to office in 2007, Labor has done little but set up ongoing consultations with a seemingly endless series of committees when it once promised action.

Could it be, oh forked tongue camel, that there is no action to be taken, since the problem doesn't exist? Wrong, it requires Action Jackson:

It is to be hoped that Opposition leader Tony Abbott enunciates his position clearly and succinctly in this evening’s debate, and doesn’t cloud his message with a blizzard of confusing provisos and caveats.

Well we know what that forked tongue said, climate change is crap. And so over many years has Akker Dakker. And suddenly it's wheeled out as a way of applying a bit of 4 be 2 to Gillard over not taking action? At least leave that to people who have the credential of consistency of thought and belief ...

The only good thing to emerge from the column is the way that Akker Dakker is still brooding over the way Tony Jones cut him off during Q&A, yes, even though he was the token conservative doing the right thing by the ABC by showing up and honouring them with his presence.

To which we can only repeat: If only they cut him off for good, or he left in high dungeon ...

Oops, I see I meant high dudgeon, which curiously is a word whose origin has been lost, but seems to have been coined around 1600, and which you can find scribbled out in detail here, including the word endugine and a reference to Macbeth:

I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before.

It seems we also don't know the origins of bludgeon and curmudgeon, but I reckon if we could only track back to Akker Dakker's ancestors, the issue would be fixed QED.

Meanwhile, no such problems with Tim Blair. He's constantly delighted nothing's happening about climate change, since he and science are at one ...

And so the Labor party caters to the likes of Blair and Akker Dakker, while Action Jackson promises to fix the planet.

Second thoughts, I shouldn't have got sidetracked by the word hypocrisy. I should have settled for surrealism or bizarro land, or looney tunes, or cloud cuckoo land. By golly, that phrase has its own wiki too, here:

Cloud Cuckoo Land refers to an unrealistically idealistic state where everything is perfect. ("You're living in Cloud-cuckoo-land.") It hints that the person referred to is naïve, unaware of reality or deranged in holding such an optimistic belief. The reference is to the play, The Birds by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, in which Pisthetairos (which can be translated to mean "Mr. Trusting") and Euelpides (which can be translated to mean "Mr. Hopeful") with the help of Tereus, tired of the Earth and Olympus, decide to erect a perfect city between the clouds, to be named Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (Νεφελοκοκκυγία or Nephelokokkygia).

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer used the word (German Wolkenkuckucksheim) in his publication On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in 1813, as well as later in his main work The World as Will and Representation and in other places. Here, he gave it the figurative sense by reproaching other philosophers for only talking about Cloud-cuckoo-land.

Well at least he had other philosophers to reproach. Here on loon pond we've only got dumbbells like Akker Dakker and Tim Blair. Did someone mention dumbbells?

"Dumbbells" as a word originated in Tudor England – athletes used hand-held church bells to develop the upper body and arms. These bells ranged in weight from a few ounces to many pounds. The bells were flourished in various ways. This would have made a great deal of noise, so the athletes would take out the clappers so they could practice quietly; hence the name "dumb", as in "no sound", and "bell" – dumbbell. When strongmen started to make their own equipment, they kept the name, even though the shape changed. The etymology of the word "kettlebell" is similar.

I'm sorry. Did someone mention action on climate change? Let's put a clapper on that quick stix.

Never mind, here's a special edition of Action Jackson. Here's hoping you like the mod, radical hair:

Piers Akerman, and the badger takes on the stoats and weasels ...

(Above: Piers Akerman, out of the bunker, and on the ABC. And no the header's not a typo, though it contains a typo. Sure, he's off, but they're all off in Q&A, and what's a stray apostrophe between chums when theyre planning the socialist revolution).

We've been noticing an eerie similarity recently between commentariat commentators and the animal kingdom of late.

First there was that strange one degree of separation between Tim Blair and a macaw, and then the unnerving insight that Miranda the Devine was likely a super marmot.

It got us to thinking about Piers Akerman, and if not Billy Bunter, then what kind of metaphor might he make, and all at once, it came in a blinding flash. A badger.

Not the kind understanding badger you might find in Kenneth Grahame's epic tale of class struggle The Wind in the Willows, as the middle and upper classes unite to defeat the surly efforts of stoats and weasels and foxes to undo the natural order of things, and impose the Cockney accent on the world. No, that noble badger is just intent on the quiet life:

The Badger simply beamed on him. 'That's exactly what I say,' he replied. 'There's no security, or peace and tranquillity, except underground. And then, if your ideas get larger and you want to expand--why, a dig and a scrape, and there you are! If you feel your house is a bit too big, you stop up a hole or two, and there you are again! No builders, no tradesmen, no remarks passed on you by fellows looking over your wall, and, above all, no WEATHER. Look at Rat, now. A couple of feet of flood water, and he's got to move into hired lodgings; uncomfortable, inconveniently situated, and horribly expensive. Take Toad. I say nothing against Toad Hall; quite the best house in these parts, AS a house. But supposing a fire breaks out--where's Toad? Supposing tiles are blown off, or walls sink or crack, or windows get broken--where's Toad? Supposing the rooms are draughty--I HATE a draught myself--where's Toad? No, up and out of doors is good enough to roam about and get one's living in; but underground to come back to at last--that's my idea of HOME'

You see how it all fits. Piers Akerman loves to live underground in the right wing bunker called his mind, and he does so love to dig and scrape. And it's his persistent badgering that brings to mind the feral badgers that have been of late so upsetting Welsh farmers (Badger cull warning as Royal Welsh Show opens in Powys).

Not that we'd ever endorse a badger cull, or ever contemplate culling such a resilient hectoring badgering badger as Piers "Akker Dakker" Akerman.

But the trouble is, Akker Dakker's such a pest, and he wants to cull the ABC, never mind that the ABC persists in having him on such shows as Q&A, and The Insiders, thereby ensuring that I never actually watch these shows.

If you search the ABC (the search results might replicate here), you see there's endless appearances for Akker Dakker, along with plugs for his Daily Terror blog. And last week he was on Q&A yet again - as you can discover, if you have a cast iron stomach - by watching the show here.

Yet because he's such a hopeless gherkin or should that be badger, and because he's an indifferent television performer and a useless debater, Akker Dakker always then takes to his blog to re-fight the debating points he lost on television, as he does here, in Here is today's news - an ABC of bias.

Now you might wonder why - if the ABC is so full of bias - that Akker Dakker demeans himself by going on their shows. You might wonder why he doesn't simply keep to Sky News and the commercial networks. Then again if you're asking that kind of question, you simply don't understand that Akker Dakker loves the sound of his own voice and the presumptuous imperatives of his cultural warrior conclusions.

You might ask why the ABC has to put this hidebound cultural warrior, or should that be badger, on its shows. Is it to make viewers suffer? Well yes, but also to show that it's fair and balanced, and so open to all kinds of eccentric views and stupidities, only of course then to be berated by the self-same elephantine badgers for bias:

In the tradition of State-run communications and propaganda operations such as those operated by the Soviet Union during the dark days of the Cold War, the ABC invariably holds tight to the party line.

When it does veer and nibble the hand that feeds it, it inevitably does so from the left, never from the right.

It is not a neutral voice of the people. It does not represent all Australians. It is not your ABC.

Rather, it is effectively owned and dominated by a small but entrenched leftist elite.

Indeed. I've always thought of Maurice Newman AC as the head of a small but entrenched leftist elite. And there's little doubt that Mr. Keith Windschuttle carries on the deep leftist thinking of his youth, acting as a kind of socialist mole, rather than a badger, within the Corporation's board.

Come to think of it, former chairman Donald McDonald was also a likely closet socialist, his personal friendship with John Howard a disturbing indication of dangerous agrarian socialist tendencies. His ten year reign fostered strident tendencies towards socialism, helped along by the appointment of the radical feminist Janet Albrechtsen to the board.

But enough of all this chatter about the lurch to the left by the monied ruling class, and commentariat commentators. You see, what's really the stone in Akker Dakker's kidney is that in the cut and thrust of the telly debate, he clearly thinks he didn't win. There was Tanya Libersek peddling lies about Tony Abbott's glorious time as health minister, and poor Akker Dakker was hapless and incapable of correcting or doing anything about it, so beset by Labor party stooges was he:

The ABC permits Labor’s lie to stand on its programs because it is happy to do so.

It is not just the blatant propaganda that the ABC is prepared to air that draws viewer attention.

It is also the softer Green messages with which its programs are laced and, as importantly, the items it decides not to pay attention to that serve the Labor Party’s cause.

Yes, you can invite Akker Dakker on to a program, but because he's so incoherent and incompetent - or is that simply froth and foam on the badger lips making it hard to hear what the badger's saying - the ABC allows the Labor party to lie, and not the Liberal party. Not that the Liberal party is at any time economical with the truth ...

Worse still, and even more of an indignity for the badger is the ABC's shameless bias against sound political opinions:

Two days ago former Labor leader Mark Latham damned Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s population policy as a “fraud of the worst order” and “an attempt to con the people of western Sydney”.

His views barely rated a mention.

Thankfully Akker Dakker dealt with Mark Latham way back when in Half wit wisdom of a failed intellect:

The great worry is that in his (Latham's) forced retirement to home parenting he may see personal publishing as a new career.

His collection of quotations looks like a self-aggrandising work from a vanity press - and reads like one too.

It might have been better if he had just put out the Collected Insults of Mark Latham and Other Boofheads, but his inclusion of historical quotes, possibly in an effort to display his own self-perceived erudition, removes it from that genre.

Let’s hope the stay-at-home father doesn’t follow this up with Mark Latham’s Best Recipes or Gardening Tips.

In 1990, Paul Keating famously accused Wilson Tuckey of being “a dog returning to its own vomit’’ when Tuckey reminded him of unpleasantness relating to a former fiancee.

Latham, writing about his own remarks, deserves the same comment.

But that's Akker Dakker, always ready to forget what he's scribbled, but never willing to forgive. Perhaps what we need now is an Akker Dakker campaign for the ABC and its commentators - bring back the vomit! Pay attention to the vomit! Mention the vomitous views of the vomiter!

But that's the way of the badger down in the bunker. Everything is propaganda, and unless it's propaganda done the right way, then it's clearly propaganda done the left way:

Had a former Liberal leader - say, Malcolm Fraser - said anything even a skerrick as inflammatory about Tony Abbott, it would have made every ABC news bulletin for the week and warranted discussion by every commentator.

When former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke and his former mistress, current wife and biographer Blanche d’Alpuget, were launching her latest hagiography, the 7.30 Report’s Kerry O’Brien had them on his program twice.

Uh huh, and even more shocking, Miranda the Devine only wrote about them once.

He didn’t have time, however, to tell his audience of the more relevant breaking news of Gillard’s reported broken deal with the man she executed, Kevin Rudd.

Had the Coalition axed a leader three weeks out from an election, it would have received blanket coverage, with every nuance interpreted as turmoil in the camp.

Uh huh, but what a pity Peter Costello never had the guts.

Never mind, it seems it's all been plain sailing:

Rudd’s dismissal has been papered over and presented as a seamless transition even when senior ministers have abandoned their posts and walked out of Cabinet weeks before the election.

Which clearly indicates Akker Dakker has paid no attention to 24/7/365/366 leap year/∞, with its opening day exclusive scoop that former Chairman Rudd was in dereliction of his duty to save the nation's security by attending important poo bah meetings, and instead sending a delegate, eventually picked up by the Herald and other rags in stories like Rudd tries to defend record on security, and 'Kevin Rudd turned up when it mattered'.

But that's the badger in his bunker at his finest. Never let observable facts get in the way of extreme prejudice.

It also helps to throw in a dash of bitterness and bile and resentment:

Surely a newsman on a $375,000-a-year contract (for a four-day week, usually with two months and school holidays off every year) would be desperate to investigate the infinitely more newsworthy new Kirribilli agreement, which would have been of far greater relevance to viewers in 2010 than the rehash of the life of a character from the ‘80s?

The ABC’s Four Corners program made a point of presenting the life of each of the three most recent Opposition leaders, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott - presenting a particularly unflattering portrait of the latter by dwelling obsessively on his youthful exploration of his faith while totally ignoring his lengthy and continuing commitment to working to improve the lot of Aboriginal Australians.

Yes, and the lot of Aboriginal Australians has tremendously improved, as it did throughout the Howard years, no thanks in no small way to Akker Dakker's tremendous contributions to matters concerning Aboriginal Australians ...

Oops, I stumbled off into an alternate universe for a moment. Back to the real bizarro world:

There has not been and will not be a similar examination of Gillard’s long involvement as a key member of the extreme Left group, the Socialist Alliance formed by members of the old Communist Party of Australia.

Yes, indeed, nor has there been any explanation as to how Gillard seems to have abandoned climate change, like Tony Abbott, and stumbled towards Abbott's attitude on asylum seekers. This kind of outrageous right wing thinking might well see her ripe for a plum role on the ABC board in retirement ...

So what's the end result?

The public broadcaster once used to be known for its vigilance in not accepting political propaganda, but today the ABC acts as if it is happy to air it.

Hear hear, the sooner they get Akker Dakker off, the better. I've never heard so much gibberish and political propaganda on the ABC. At least with Tim Blair on the opening night of 24/7/∞, it was only mindless drivel. Alternatively, how about Akker Dakker take a manly stand and boycott the bastards. Either way, it'll be a win win for long suffering viewers ...

ABC chairman Maurice Newman is patently powerless and managing director Mark Scott is more interested in expanding his empire than demanding that the national broadcaster maintain any ethical standards of the controlling clique.

It is their ABC, not ours - and it is intent on growing its influence.

Yes, by including all those bloody chattering chardonnay sniffing commentariat commentators, out from their bunkers and bleating like the bloody propagandists they are ...

I know, I know, in its own way, it's a cunning plan to limit the reach and influence of the ABC.

If you listen too long to Akker Dakker badgering away, quite soon you'll go blind, or be dragged off to the asylum. And that means one less viewer, or two or a dozen, or soon enough five rating points.

But you see that's because we know the real truth, the truth Akker Dakker does not dare to tell.

It's their ABC, and his, not ours, and they're intent on growing their influence by penetrating ABC programs like a bunch of right wing propagandist cells ...

Strike that badger metaphor, think cockroaches ... doing the work of their controlling clique ...

(Below: a badger. You might think it cute enough for a children's book, but be warned, badgers can be short sighted, and combative, and emit a long-drawn scream, reason unknown - here).

Miranda Devine, Tilda Swinton, and the musings of a really silly marmot ...

(Above: an amusing Tilda Swinton graph, found accompanying Overcome by Heat and Inertia).

According to NASA, 2010 is on course to be the planet’s hottest year since records started in 1880. The current top 10, in descending order, are: 2005, 2007, 2009, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2004, 2001 and 2008.

Hot is the new normal. (Overcome by Heat and Inertia).

The response of US legislators to the issue? To do nothing.

The response of the Australian Labor party? To rope in a hundred and fifty citizens for dope a rope treatment, in the hope that by the fifteenth round exhaustion will set in, and no one will remember what the fight was about.

The response of the Sydney Morning Herald? To publish an article by Miranda the Devine, in which the art of having your cake and eating it too, is honed to perfection.

You see, as well as being the most neurotic and silly columnist in the Herald stable, Devine is firmly in the climate change denialism camp. And please, none of this guff about the word denialism being objectionable, because it links to the holocaust. Being in a state of denial is natural for the likes of the Devine, she's in denial about most things - say Mel Gibson's fundamentalist Catholicism, or the pleasures of bicycling, or the joy of coffee - and climate change is just another chance for her to exercise her perverse denialism.

The trouble is, of course, that the public debate about climate change has been ruled by the chattering classes. Want a short definition of the chattering classes? Tim Blair, Miranda the Devine and Janet Albrechtsen chattering away on the ABC ...

Now here's how the chattering classes have their cake with cream and eat it too, as given an exemplary outing in PM's so sure Bob's your uncle. You see, their cake is the same as it ever was. Climate change isn't a moral issue, certainly not a practical or scientific issue, more like a venial sin, which might get you few days in purgatory, which might be warmish, but nothing like the warmth you get from the fires of hell ...

And any way, as the Bart Simpson defence confirms, it wasn't me and I didn't do it.

In a new book, the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter says emissions trading schemes are a token offering by governments to get green campaigners off their backs, and have been championed by opportunistic financiers as a win-win solution to climate change, even though they do nothing to alter world temperatures. In Climate: The Counter Consensus he also points out the alarmist argument on human-caused climate change has been beset by the sort of ''noble cause corruption'' of science that had the Wood royal commission destroy police careers. The book - the first print run sold out in days - taps into disquiet about the scientific ''consensus'' on climate change in an electorate unlikely to be duped so easily again.

So there you have it. There's your cake, and now you get to eat it all over again. Yes, once again the dog whistler gets her dog whistle in about how this best seller reveals the hidden truth about the scientific consensus, and blathers on about noble cause corruption, as a kind of shorthand which has actually no element of science within its purple distorting prose.

Then you get to eat it all over again, because you can act all pious about real solutions, and berate the Labor party for failing to develop real solutions, for a problem you don't believe exists. Naturally this allows you to play four aces, with a standard red herring of epic proportions:

As the former treasurer Peter Costello said on Thursday night at a Quadrant dinner in Sydney to launch his father in-law Peter Coleman's new book, The Last Intellectuals, while the political class may have given up on an ETS this election, the idea is as strong as ever in the education system.

The last intellectuals? Well we now the Devine won't be in that one. Here's the red herring ploy:

''This argument will come and come again over the next 30 years,'' Costello said. ''But if you really want an ETS and you don't want to wreck the economic fabric, there's an answer staring you in the face … nuclear power … I'd love to see Australia bite the bullet and take that on.'' Fat chance of even a debate about that with the Greens in the passenger seat.

Well of course if you believed climate change was real, then you'd take on the Greens and have a debate about that one - especially if you have the privileged position of a regular column in the Herald - but of course it's just a fatuous aside because the Devine is a climate change denier and she really deep down doesn't see the need for anything like that, not when we can go on burning coal for a thousand years, the estimated running time of the third reich.

Instead we have the usual galumphing towards a smear:

Thus Gillard's policy, like everything else she has done since becoming Prime Minister, is aimed at giving the impression of being all things to all people - respectful and flattering to the ''decency and plain commonsense'' of those with whom she disagrees, while quietly reassuring those who know she is on their side that they'll get everything they want if they just keep mum until after the election.

C.S. Lewis would recognise her ploy of beguiling the masses with endless supplies of Turkish delight, just as her lookalike, actress Tilda Swinton, does as the White Witch, Jadis, who froze Narnia in the Hundred Years Winter.

Tilda Swinton? Why suddenly I'm warming to Gillard. Tilda Swinton's got style, and let's face it Narnia would be as dull as ditchwater if it relied on that gormless pathetic lion, and the silly terribly British children. Dear lord how I hated that long suffering righteous pompous supercilious gratuitously offensive and morally superior lion. And come to think of it, Turkish delight is much better than cake to have and to eat.

I'm still thinking of the best role for the Devine - you'd have to rule out cheerful beaver or lumbering bear, and think something more like a faun, bright and perky on the surface, and deeply dumb below.

Certainly C. S. Lewis would recognise her ploy of beguiling the masses with double edged sophistry, pretending she gives a stuff about climate change when she really doesn't believe in at all, and may therefore in the process lead Gaia into a hundred years summer.

Oh yes, stupid rhetorical points are so easy ...

But where was I? Well yes, it's the arrant nonsense of scribblers pretending that they care about climate change policy, and criticising Julia Gillard from the viewpoint of people who actually do care about where the world might be heading. Here's one such firm critic adopting a quite reasonable point of view:

Julia Gillard's new climate policy released yesterday is a marvel to behold. A melange of bewitching hokery-pokery and beguiling flummery, it is designed to get her through the election unscathed, with a tinkling laugh and a confident toss of the red head. Orwell could not have crafted it better. Lo, a new climate change commission to propagandise the people … er, ''explain'' the science of climate change.

Behold, a ''citizens' assembly'' of 150 ''randomly selected'' volunteers to deliberate for a year on whether Australia should have an emissions trading scheme. The chosen ones will be subjected to a ''rigorous process'' to establish consensus, Gillard said. After 12 months of duchessing, subtle bullying and brainwashing, what kind of consensus will materialise? ''If I am wrong, and that group of Australians is not persuaded of the case for change, then that should be a clear warning bell that our community has not been persuaded as deeply as required about the need for transformational change.''

As required by whom? And by what sinister means are we to be more ''deeply'' persuaded?

No mind that we already have a citizens' assembly - a democratically elected Parliament.

Yes, I know, that's Miranda the Devine, pretending that deep down she gives a toss, when in reality she's just a tosser.

She immediately undoes her imitation of criticism from the left by heading off on a Greens conspiracy rant. By golly, if the Greens get the balance of power, never mind climate change, the end of the world is nigh in almost every area:

There's a lot more Brown and the Greens want if Labor wins: mandated zero net greenhouse gas emissions, the effective end of coal-fired power generation, phasing out of coal exports, a ban on new coalmines or power stations, removal of GM crops, and active discouragement of cars. They want a ban on the exploration, mining and export of uranium, and closure of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, which produces medical isotopes used for cancer treatment. They want to restrict funding of private schools. They want to abolish mandatory detention of asylum seekers, and to expand the definition of refugee to include ''environmental'' or ''sexuality'' refugees. They want to legislate for same-sex marriage, tinker with age of consent laws, establish ''intersex'' as a legal gender, fund gender reassignment, require government to consult lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex people on policy, and provide easier access to abortion. On drugs, they are harm minimisation all the way, with more needle exchange programs and injecting rooms. And be prepared for a barrage of nanny-statism, starting with a ban on junk food advertising.

And all in the first month of government! But hang on, I see the Greens haven't got a policy which will prevent the bulk of hot air currently escaping in to the atmosphere ... banning the blathering of the chattering classes on the ABC. Yep, Tim Blair, Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda the Devine ...

Because you see it's the result of the government blowing in the wind of blather from the likes of Devine that they've invented their current gormless policies on climate change, which have flowed on from three years of gormless inaction and dithering in a most hapless way.

Meanwhile, by outlining Greens policies in such a cogent way, the Devine makes the best case yet for a vote for the Greens ... unless of course like Tony Abbott you're threatened by gay people, or like the Labor party threatened by the thought of what people might say or think or do if you actually worked towards gay marriage ... Or recognise that you might actually talk to gay people about policy. Quelle horreur ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, Is Climate Change Leading To Super Marmots? Silly scientists, don't they realise there's no such thing as climate change. The super marmots are just eating too much. They're having their cake and eating it too ...

But at least it gives me the perfect role for the Devine in the next Narnia film. Can't you just see her as a super marmot? Feasting on Turkish delight ...

(Below: a Rocky Mountain marmot, found in Climate Change creating 'super marmots' that are bigger and more abundant ... another example of Tilda Swinton as scientist?)