Now here's a fine choice ... would you like your loathing straight or mixed with self-loathing, and should it be shaken or stirred or frothy and foam-flecked?

(Above: as always, the pond merely reports, and you decide).


As winter clutches at the heart with its cold, clammy paws, a few statistics to cheer and warm the hearth:

The Bolt Report May 12th 2013 Five city 111,000
The Bolt Report May 19th 2013 Five city 132,000
The Bolt Report May 26th 2013 (*)

(* insert the correct figure and win one of thousands of exciting opportunities not to watch the show)

Even more amazing, the incredibly dull Financial Review Sunday on its launch beat The Bolt Report 197,000 v 147,000 on May 5th.

Meanwhile:

Media Watch 21st May 663,000. (as always, thanks to the TVtonight folk for reporting the figures that count, and the figures that don't count).

Oh it's no wonder he wanted the gig. And it's no wonder they didn't even begin to think about a ratings loser.

What, how petty, gloating, mean-spirited you say?

Well yes, but only in the spirit of the Bolter, as mean-spirited and spiteful as anyone in the game... so roll on Sunday and another day in bed with nary a thought of the Bolter. Oh it's a long long time since Video Hits ruled the airwaves ...

And speaking of dropkick losers, when the pond dropped in to its usual Doonesbury fix, it copped this:

Each and every one of you are mentally fucking retarded and you should be euthanized... Only the stupidest of the stupidest people end up on juries. (Oh okay, the pond isn't inclined to asterisks).

Put it another, slightly lengthier way:

I want that jury to know that each and every one of you are mentally fucking retarded and you should be euthanized because, as Darwin said, you have naturally selected yourself. You are the weakest members of the herd. Goodbye!

Hello?

Google it up, and you're led to The Hollywood Reporter, and a story where the header almost says it all, Convicted Girls Gone Wild Mogul Joe Francis Breaks Silence: 'Retarded' Jury 'Should Be Shot Dead'.

What a great town LA is, and by golly that Double Diamond Bomber X cabernet must be a mean drop.

But what was more poignant was the hangover, worse, it's likely, than the third hangover movie:

I deeply regret the remarks attributed to me in the interview with the Hollywood Reporter. They were hurtful and do not reflect my true feelings. While I disagree with the jury's verdict as I am completely innocent of the charges and intend to appeal, I was afforded a fair trial, and if I lose at the appellate level, I will reluctantly but fully accept the jury's verdict. This was a 6 hour interview with The Hollywood Reporter where I detailed to the reporter all of the evidence and why I believed the evidence showed I am 100% innocent. The reporter also interviewed my attorney David Houston for over 3 hours, but failed to include one shred of evidence from the trial that proved beyond a reasonable doubt my innocence. I did NOT commit a crime at all whatsoever. All that was publicized were my most intemperate remarks that were borne out of frustration but with no intent to cause anyone harm. I am not, nor have I ever been a violent person. My comments are appalling, but anyone who has ever been wrongfully convicted of a crime that they did NOT commit would be as frustrated as I am. I want to apologize to all the jurors, the court, the City Attorney and my attorneys for my comments that were manipulated by the media, and please know I am truly ashamed of my conduct. I am truly, truly sorry. I hope everyone will understand I was not being serious and that I fully and deeply apologize for my remarks. (as usual, at Gawker here, sending the apology up silly).

And now is there a warm crawlspace somewhere. No, forget the red, we're all off the red ...

Truly, the intertubes are wonderful, containing as they do news of two shows the pond has never watched, and never will. The Bolter Report delivering dull ratings to Ten, and Girls Gone Wild, though it's a fair bet that Girls Gone Wild is more entertaining and quite possibly more ideologically correct ...

And if that doesn't get you off to a super-charged weekend of pleasure, why you only have to turn to the reptiles at the lizard Oz, for that refined taste of corn-fed squashed geese on toast.

Yes, there's a wonderful abundance of squawking geese out and about today, and the pond regrets that urgent business limits the amount of attention that can be paid. But let's do a roll call anyway:

Yep, there's Angela Shanahan having an anxiety attack about Tony Abbott, in Misguided proponents of marriage equality trying to defy gravity. (behind the paywall for your mental safety)

Amazingly gay marriage now exists in many parts of the world and the sky hasn't fallen. Those skyhooks must be working.

What's more amazing is that the lizard Oz keeps publishing Shanahan as she goes over and over the same old ground, like a neurotic fundamentalist Catholic (oh wait ...). 

This is what she offers as wit to the readership of the lizard Oz:

I am reminded of a remark by a clever African woman I met at the World Congress of Families in Sydney last week: "You can't change gravity!" Precisely.

Yes, because gravity and human sexuality are precisely related.

Shanahan then morphs into a rant about abortion which fixates on Tasmania, and yes fixates is about the only way to describe the rant, which somehow ends up including free speech and then returns to the original theme with this:

Is there a solution? There are two. Either abolish legal marriage, which has declining status and no meaning for the religious and, in the words of Andrew Sullivan, has been "debased" by heterosexuals; or bring on a plebiscite. After all, we had one in 1974 on the national anthem.

Perfect hysteria, with only two solutions allowed. Who'd have thunk Shanahan was a dialectical materialist? And isn't that drumroll, abolish legal marriage ... which has no meaning for the religious sound wonderful.

Indeed. Make it so. Let everyone live in sin then, the pond says, or perhaps in a de facto relationship, or perhaps ... oh for the sake of the long absent lord, why does anyone spend any time at all in the company of an idiot babbling about gravity.

And wouldn't you know it,  then the readership enticed by the rotating digital splash at the top of the page is confronted by Christopher Pearson. 

Which naturally sets the pond wondering yet again. It's easy enough to understand where Shanahan is coming from. It's a form of fear and loathing, and simple enough. But where does Pearson routinely get his self-loathing from?

Pearson has also been startled and spooked by former chairman Rudd, as you can read in Kevin Rudd's day turn denies facts on same-sex families (behind the paywall, but do you really need to care?)

Now as soon as you see a word like "facts" in a Pearson header, you know we'll be talking about lies, distortions, equivocations, and verbal abuse of the concept of facts.

Sure enough, Pearson references one Mark Regnerus for his "facts", and then delivers this breath-taking line:

While the data he obtained could hardly be considered entirely objective ...

Oh we're suddenly a long way from Tipperary and facts me boyos and girlos.

Naturally it only took a few minutes to look up Regnerus and get a bit more perspective than that on offer in Pearson's piece - perhaps most engaging was the one headed Journal's Internal Audit Finds Flawed Gay Parenting Study To be 'Bullshit'.

Well that explains a few things, because it seems Pearson is drawn to bullshit like a blowfly is drawn to a cowpat up Tamworth way.

Now here's the self-loathing bit. It seems children hanging around gays are in dire peril:

More alarmingly, they are no less than 10 times more likely to have been touched sexually by a parent or other care-giver, although this may be in part explained in terms of the abusive behaviour of a parent which precipitated separation or divorce. 
 They are also nearly four times as likely to have been "physically forced" to have sex against their will. They smoke more and use marijuana more often, and more often plead guilty to non-minor offences.

Now let's forget that Pearson is mis-representing and mis-using this data, and instead let's leap to an obvious paranoid Pearson conclusion.

It's time for him to give up home schooling children. The dangers are simply too great ...

And finally the pond was delighted to discover yesterday, thanks to a reader, a delightful addition to the pond stable, one Nicolle Flint, who is full of sound and fury, deep anger, frothing and foaming, and now it seems intended to be a regular part of the Fairfax world.

A splendid offering designed to entice people to sign up ...

Nicolle shows all the signs of being an excellent head of ABC programming:

The ABC may argue its rural programming such as Landline or the Country Hour provide impartiality and diversity of opinion. When Landline is broadcast in prime TV slots and Country Hour on city radio stations, perhaps this will be the case. (ABC loses its balance over animal welfare)

Oh indeed. So the pond waking up to Country Breakfast on RN on a Saturday morning fixes everything ... by golly, we don't even have to suffer through that wretched bloody Macca on a Sunday ...

And truly - and this should go without saying but we'll tell Chris Mitchell anyway - her epic piece celebrating Nick Cater is worthy of the reptiles at the lizard Oz, as you can read in Breaking the sheep's back with political correctness.

Now you might wonder at the level of loathing required for a Ph.D student to spend an entire column berating the intelligentsia and tertiary education and a bunyip alumni, but the pond finds it fascinating and compelling, in much the same way no doubt as watching Yukio Mishima orchestrate a rather bungled ritual seppuku ...

So there you have it, a rich diverse choice of pure Bolter and Shanahan loathing, or generous examples of self-loathing in the Pearson and Flint style.

Let there be dancing in the streets ... oh wait, is that a bit gay? Should we save it up for next year's Mardi Gras?

Oh okay, let there be sombre fear and loathing, broken up only by foam-flecked indignation, frenzied anger, and musings about gravity ...

(Below: speaking of geese, after a dose of the lizard oz, is it any wonder the pond sometimes feels like those anit-suffargett postcards from the early 20th century? And if you can stomach the one below, you'll find a bunch of equally appalling ones here, and then lordy lordy you might be inclined to read what women shouldn't do when riding a bicycle here. The new millennium rule for women? Don't read the reptiles at the lizard Oz).

Away with the piggies ...

Now it's true that the pond has a warped, weird sense of humour and almost anything can set it off, but surely even the most surly and grumpy soul can have a laugh at the cheerful pig currently greeting punters being asked to register at news + (or if you will news √≠∅∑∏±).

The supplier of ham and bacon isn't even an anthropomorphic piggie in the style of Babe but a salivating, grasping type, as if designed to illustrate the grasping piggie nature of Murdoch la la land.

Now the pond got tangled with the piggie for a noble purpose - Ray Hadley had penned a piece, Extremists must never reach here, which of course would have allowed a joke about Hadley somehow having reached here, and extremism along with him. Boom tish, or tish boom, if you will.

Was it only a few days ago that Mike Carlton was calling Hadley's program a temple of hatred?

And berating the ABC's Australian Story for selective editing of his remarks about Hadley, and his behaviour in the workplace and towards his colleagues? And the show defending itself by proposing that it had shown just what a mean bastard Hadley really was, with deep-seated issues about anger?


"Ray Hadley's anger issues were the prism through which the program was tackled and indeed were mentioned multiple times from the introduction onwards .... We included more than one example of actual audio tape of Ray Hadley losing his temper. We included acknowledgements from Ray Hadley himself and his employers and his family regarding his 'scary' disposition and intolerant nature. His wife also spoke candidly about Ray Hadley losing his temper at home and the personal consequences for their relationship," she said.  (Mike Carlton lashes Australian Story for 'selective edits')

Naturally Hadley - apparently known for his 'scary disposition and intolerant nature' lashed back, describing Carlton as the most hateful and vengeful broadcaster I've ever encountered. (Mike Carlton lashes out against Australian Story on Twitter).

Sort of a hater hates the hate headline ...

Ah well that was all long ago, days and days, which count for an eternity in shock jock hate, fear and loathing land, and sadly the greedy piggie has stood in the way of learning about Ray Hadley's latest list of things to fear and loathe and hate.

Which is, when you think about it, probably a good thing. Thanks Spider pig, is there nothing you can't do?

What's that you say? Give News Ltd an email address? Is there some root canal dental surgery available instead?

Moving right along, and shuffling over to The Drum, the pond was intrigued to see that the joint boasts the usual infestation of private school supporters and IPA Bergians and gay marriage haters.

Kevin Donnelly set the tone by asking this question at the head of the page:

Naturally the pond read through All students are equal, why fund them differently?, expecting, hoping against hope itself, to find a vigorous denunciation of current funding philosophies which see lavish amounts of taxpayer money handed over to schools dedicated to fundamentalist Christianity, fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Scientology, fundamentalist young earth creationism, fundamentalist abuse of gays and women, and a half dozen other fundamentalisms which propose that all students aren't equal, and that instead some are the captives of raving ratbags, including cults associated with the likes of Hillsong, the ACL, Catch the Fire ministries, and the Exclusive Brethren (ah the good old days of John Howard and the fundies, recorded in Believers a world apart).

Sadly and of course - you knew it already, didn't you - there's not a word from Mr Donnelly about such pettifogging issues, because he's as usual defending faith-based education, and quoting UNESCO and leaving out all the tricky bits while leaving in the bit about the right of minorities to be as fundamentalist as they like ...

As usual, the piece ends with blather about the need to introduce vouchers and offer choice to parents - that great American bit of crap rhetoric which proposes education is rather like having a greater range of doughnuts - and not a mention of the way government funding currently supports religious ratbaggery on the taxpayers' dime. Well here's a choice. Go do it on your own dime ...

Okay, what, who, else have we got pounding away at The Drum? Supposedly part of "their ABC" which is allegedly an arid desert for conservatives?

Well there's Chris Berg, blathering away yet again about censorship, but it isn't really about censorship, it's about the evils of bureaucracy and government, and so entirely suits the IPA line (When does mission creep become censorship?) Yes, government is evil, evil, evil, it denies us choice, and chocolate doughnuts up against plain ones with too much cinnamon ...

Then there's Peter Reith, who now infests the joint like a swarm of Sydney cockroaches (lordy, do they swarm), getting agitated about the referendum, wherein the mighty Reith - let loose the hounds Smithers - thinks John Howard's treatment of the referendum regarding the republic provided a model worth repeating (Referendum deserves more than silence).

Let's tiptoe past in silence, but if we do likely as not we might stumble on Michael Cook having a go at former chairman Rudd in Ditch the switch: why Rudd is wrong on gay marriage.

Eek, it's more gay marriage bashing at "their ABC", but really does Cook know how to shoot himself in the foot or what?

Christians oppose redefining marriage because it is an important social justice issue, but so do atheists. To take one example, Brendan O'Neill, the atheist libertarian Marxist editor of Spiked, a quirky and influential UK on-line magazine, recently spoke at (at, not in) the House of Lords against same-sex marriage.

Bugger the pond dead, as we used to say in Tamworth, though perhaps the phrase should be thought of as evoking an ecstatic rather than a six foot under state, Brendan O'Neill trotted out as an example of atheist libertarian Marxism (and never mind the delusion that Marxism and libertarian can fit together in the one sentence).

Now many others have marvelled at the way O'Neill has spent many hours and words defending the Catholic church out of sheer innate and thoroughly predictable perversity (check out the links in What not to say - The anti-anti-Pope campaign of Brendan O'Neill).

Indeed the pond has got a few bucks riding on the notion that O'Neill on his deathbed will do an Oscar Wilde.

Never mind, it's a measure of Cook's naivety and innocence that he would lead with O'Neill as some kind of trump card, when all it did was provoke the obvious response that O'Neill was a narcissist who would argue and take any kind of perverse position provided it raised his profile and provoked consternation and disagreement. That's what always happens when you have a sheep in wolf's clothing ...

Anyhow, Cook produces howler after delightful howler:

Christians may find solace and motivation in their Scriptures, just as secularists do by reading Darwin or Dawkins.

Find solace in reading Darwin? Well you might hope to find a little science, but solace? As for reading Dawkins for solace, or even motivation, what planet does Cook live on? Perhaps on a planet where people wear cilices for solace ...

Then comes this:

... the only valid arguments in the public square on same-sex marriage or any other issue are those which are based squarely upon reason

Which doesn't seem to explain how Cook himself could deliver up this astonishing bit of fear-mongering as a reasonable, rational argument:

One of Mr Rudd's finest moments as PM was his apology to indigenous Australian for the stolen generations. The result of same-sex marriage will be the creation of generations of genetic orphans. Does he really want this?

Generations of genetic orphans?! Roll that one around on your tongue and sample the weirdly paranoid irrational flavour ...

Redefining marriage should be opposed because it does a colossal injustice to vulnerable children. It makes it legal to deprive kids of the right to know their natural mother and father and to be raised by them.

Yep, irrational hysteria dressed up as reason, and now the pond awaits an explanation from Cook why his interventionist god does such a colossal injustice to some vulnerable children by making them orphans ...

Never mind, we get an idea of Cook's age and mindset by his closing reference to Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, and the heroic Thomas More standing up against Henry VIII scoring a divorce ...

Thomas More lost his friends (and his head) but he kept intact his reputation as a Christian thinker.

Um, so the argument is all about (secular) reason, and yet we end with More keeping his reputation intact as a Christian thinker?

Never mind, these days Xians love to get divorced, just like Henry VIII ... and to hell with whatever justice that delivers to vulnerable children ...

The pond blames it all on Kevin Donnelly. All that fundamentalist clouded religious thinking, funded by the taxpayer and yet purporting to be the voice of reason ...

All the same, this little excursion provides an exemplary warning to that little piggie at News Ltd.

You see, after all your relentless complaining about bias at the ABC, sites like The Drum are now full of conservatives whining and moaning about one thing or another ... so there's no need to give the greedy little piggie an email address, and sign up for a dose of "teh hatez", no need at all ...

Come on News Ltd, first kill, maim, censor and delete the bloggers ...

(Above: quality journalism and for free).

Now the pond rarely gives advice for free, but here's some free advice for News Ltd as it embarks on the brave new world of persuading people to pay for tabloid junk.

Close the blogs or shut them off from the world.

It's the only way forward.

You see, you might get a warning inviting you to sign up and fork over the cash to read an opinion piece by the likes of Miranda the Devine, but right now there's an easy, cheap alternative.

Yes, you can get distilled essence of crazy, and disinformation and misuse and abuse of data, for free, by heading off to the Devine's blog.

Why just yesterday she was ranting on about the ABC in Their ABC, using impressive data proving that the ABC was full of greenies.

Now the wretched academic who did the survey admitted that the raw data - the actual numbers who responded in the ABC - were risible, down in the thirties as opposed to a guesstimate that there might be around a thousand journos in the ABC, as you can hear here in Are Coalition-supporting editors skewing the news?. He acknowledged that the data should be treated with caution, and that it had already been rampantly abused by people who should know better.

Which sort of lets the Devine off the hook, because she never knows better. She never knows sense or intelligent analysis, just shallow, shrill hysteria.

So you see, at the moment you can still get your distilled essence of distorting News Ltd crazy for free outside the paywall. With appropriate comments below the fold:

"Friends of the ABC" = socialist forum = communist party.

And that's just one, where the spelling is reasonable and never mind the caps. Essence of undiluted crazy, and all for free.

Repeat the experiment as many times as you like. Log into Piers "Akker Dakker" doing yet another tedious rant, Ideological rot is why ALP is losing touch, and it's free. Oh sure it's also dated late April because Akker Dakker loves his bludging and his breaks - no need to work on an assembly line if you're Akker Dakker - but he'll be back, and in blog form he'll be free.

Want your daily dose of Tim Bleaghism? You know, the usual wall to wall flurry of foam-flecked Islamophobia, climate denialsim, and ABC phobia? Not to worry, start here, and it's all free.

Feel like roaming the vast intertubes, but somehow, ineluctably find yourself drawn to the HUN?

Well you can't read the Bolter doing an opinion piece without paying to get behind the paywall, but you can blog with the Bolter here, and get your usual dose - better for mental health than multi-vitamins - of ABC phobia, paranoia, climate denalism, and ratbag right wing indignation. Why you too can be amused by the Bolter's attempt at humour, pretending he's an aging, fat white married journalist suffering the slings and arrows of prejudice, a veritable black, he's so suffused with suffering. And it's all free ... (just as you can souvenir free sick bags, handy if you happen to read the Bolter).

Now the pond knows why the rags do it and not just because it provides a wall to wall frenzy of distilled essence of crazy. It's because it drives traffic, and traffic is revenue, and the absent lord knows, the rags need digital revenue.

But it means the paywall isn't sticky enough. News is plentiful, easily available from any number of sources - including, oh the suffering, oh the indignation, the ABC - and it's only ratbag opinion pieces and sports stories that might persuade punters to tickle the till.

So the blogs have to go. Sorry, but they need to be spiked, stabbed in the heart, or hidden deep behind the bamboo curtain.

Now the pond has already provided this sort of advice for free before - long ago proposing that The Punch was a totally useless exercise in blogging, a distraction from the core business, and a mouthpiece for derelict refugees from both sides of politics, if perhaps notable for revealing the distilled essence of Sophie Mirabella craziness.

In due time - though long after the pond proposed, way too long - The Punch was shut down, terminated, and the logo and a few opinion writers who did the hard yards taken into the fold. Where their opinion pieces form part of the lure to get behind the vaguely porous paywall by splashing the cash ...

At a stroke, News Ltd can do the world a favour - terminating wretched blogs full of spite and spleen - while giving its paywall a go. But how long will it take them to work it out?

Then the rags can get down to the honest business of providing nonsensical banners saying EXCLUSIVE, like this story:

Now if you're prepared to go to the effort of googling the story, you discover that it wasn't an exclusive at all:

"The war on terror was fought in the wrong place," he told The Australian during a meeting with invited media, pointing to terrorist training camps and sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Invited media? Does that sound like a press conference, with only the lizard Oz bothering to ask Karzai a question about the effectiveness of the Australian presence in Oruzgan province?

The rest of the piece is a desperate cobbling together of Stephen Smith saying something in March, a Tufts University study released in August, and general chit chat by Karzai, which concludes sounding like a press release for and by the man:

There would be no retreat back into an "obscurantist mindset", no reversal on the constitution, on women's rights or education advances.

Uh huh. Of course you can find the bulk of the story here in The New York Times, without the wretched local angle horn-shoed into the header.

And  the real story going the rounds right this minute isn't about the Australians packing up and heading home, leaving behind a mess, but the nature of the Karzai mess and in particular the mess in relation to the treatment of women, as you can read in Anger as Afghan MPs halt women's bill debate. Or in Afghan's women's rights in peril, as news that the jailing of women and girls for "moral crimes" has risen by 50% in the last year and a half ...

And there's the rub. It's a sorry business when you exclusively miss the point and exclusively quote Karzai exclusively putting a gloss on matters.

You need to do better than google if you want to label a story an "exclusive" and charge money for the pleasure ...

Meanwhile jolly Joe Hockey - please do not propose the pond should buy a used economy from this man - has set the cat amongst the pigeon by getting outraged and going gunning for Treasury, as you an read in a story about his valiant defence of Howard government tax cuts.

And naturally this immediately produced a fluttering and a cooing amongst the pigeons at the lizard Oz.

No need to provide links - google is your friend, at least in this matter - but whenever anyone asks the pond why it insists that the commentariat at the lizard Oz swirl in the sky and fart in unison, it's days like these that provide the evidence ...

Enough already, so let's end on a lighter note by once again celebrating David Pope, with more Pope available here:

James Allan, a poor judge of Aunty's poor judge of bias ...

(Above: more Steve Bell here)

Apparently English premier David Cameron - he has no claim on Scotland or the Celts - has emailed a personal note to members saying he would never work with anyone who 'sneered' at activists.

Oh those wicked sneering metropolitan elites.

It occurred to the pond that there could be a whole swag of Bell cartoons on similar themes.

Like climate science believers, the greatest threat to swiveleyesation since gay marriage. Like metropolitan elites, the greatest threat to swiveleyesation since climate science. And boat people, the greatest threat to swiveleysation since metropolitan elites.

And so on and so forth, with players of the game able to make up endless variations, with an ample supply of examples rife in Murdoch la la land.

But what do we understand as the grandest heights of swiveleyesation down under? Why surely it has to the right to piss money against the wall on poker machines and Tom Waterhouse while downing plenty of piss in a western suburbs club of your choice, a Taj Mahal of grog and gambling.

Oh dear that sounded suspiciously like a sneer - cross off the pond Mr. Cameron - and let's see who else we can sneer at.

Come on down James Allan, sneering away, another lizard in the pack of reptiles at the lizard Oz who routinely sneer at the ABC, this time under the header Aunty a poor judge of bias (inside the paywall, so you don't have to care)

Now here's a simple enough question. When was the last time you ever read a detailed, lengthy tract complaining, moaning and whingeing about the bias inherent in Murdoch la la land ... and not published in a blog or a boutique publication, but actually published in The Australian?

When was the last time you read anyone in The Australian denouncing the inherent bias of its editor Chris Mitchell?

Or the kool aid drinking culture? The sparrows all whirling and farting in unison, their opinions relentlessly the same?

Now we're not talking about criticisms you might find in the wild, as in Chris Mitchell v Robert Manne: The Australian editor to sue, we're not talking of sniping from the sidelines, as in Payback: The Bullying Tactics of the Murdoch Press.

No, we're talking a relentless, incessant, monotonous, repetitious set of columns culled from all over the place and featured at least weekly in The Australian, raving and ranting and complaining about the bias in the rag.

It's a dream of course, beyond the valley of delusion, but it comes in handy when it comes to contemplating the ranting about bias presented by James Allan, who proposes that he is a professor of law at the University of Queensland.

Let's see how it might have worked out in practice.

First Allan:

Does it really matter if every host of the ABC's Media Watch since its inception has left-of-centre sympathies? 

And now what he might have added:

And does it really matter if every member of the commentariat Murdoch pack, since Chairman Rupert instructed his rags to go feral right wing, has ratbag raving rightwing climate denying sympathies?

Allan:

Or if all the ABC political programs, not least Insiders, show an unmistakable tilt towards having more left-of-centre participants than right-of-centre ones, sometimes by a factor of 3:1?

And since he seems to have forgotten his self-proclaimed notion of balance:

Or, since we strive for balance and fairness, if all the reptiles at the lizard Oz and feral rags, not least the Daily Terror, show an unmistakable tilt towards having more right of centre and right of Gengis Khan participants than remotely sensible ones, sometimes by a factor of 99.99:1?

You could go on playing this game all day, because the rest of Allan's tirade is singularly unbalanced and remarkably one-sided, while supposedly pleading for the ABC to display a lack of bias.

The out clause?

Remember, this is not a private broadcaster that relies on advertisers and in a market economy decides for itself what views it wishes to appeal to. This is a publicly funded broadcaster with a statutory obligation to be even-handed. It spends billions of taxpayer dollars in a way that millions of Australians think is biased (when it comes to current affairs).

But hang on, the lizard Oz doesn't rely on advertisers in a market economy to make a profit.

The Australian doesn't make a profit, or at least that's a best guess about its financial situation, because its books have about as much transparency as the IPA disclosing details of its patrons and its sources of funding:

It's very hard to find out whether, or how much The Australian loses every year. Everyone seems to think it loses a great deal. But I talked to experts about the finances of newspapers, and they didn't know the exact profitability or in fact loss-making of The Australian because many of its finances are tied up with the other News Limited papers. The printing presses are shared, distribution is shared, and so on. So the finances are opaque. But on the other hand, everyone thinks it loses a lot of money, and I think most people see that it continues mainly because Rupert Murdoch sees it with pride, as the vehicle he can use to influence the trajectory of Australian life. So whether anyone has the will to keep it going with so much loss after Murdoch passes or loses his grip we don't know. I think it might be a fifty-fifty bet as to whether it would be able to continue. It presumably could be bought by someone else who might try and make a go of it, but whether it could ever be even vaguely profitable is unclear I think. (here)

Indeed. However you cut it, the rag is the personal plaything of a man who uses political influence to maintain his position in the marketplace.

Why no profit? Or at best a very marginal one? Well, this is a rag which routinely alienates a substantial part of what might otherwise become its subscriber base, so that it can keep drinking the kool aid and pursuing its assorted agendas, which incidentally inter alia involves the wittering and twittering of James Allan about the ABC,  with - it has to be noted - Allan just one in a very long line of conga dancers ...

You see, you can't just let the rag off the hook with a wave of the hand and a mutter about advertising and the market economy and let them publish whatever views they like in order to make a profit. Not when in reality the rag is published in order to present a biased dog whistling view of the world subsidised by other parts of Murdoch la la land, such that even a humble viewer of The Simpsons once upon a time might have been helping out ...

But okay, how to deal with the complete fatuity and stupidity of Allan. Here we go. First he leads with the notion that what we need is even-handed impartiality, and not just impartiality, but the appearance of impartiality:

... imagine that the Wallabies had yearly Tests against the All Blacks but that nine years out of 10 the referee was from New Zealand. Of course, the referee has an obligation to be even-handed. But because of those debatable little calls (which in rugby union can encompass just about everything), we want not just someone assuring us of his impartiality, we want the appearance of impartiality (which is why the referee in real life will come from some third country).

Uh huh. So what does Allan propose for the ABC?

And that's where Scott and the ABC let us down so badly. When it comes to appearances the track record at the ABC looks appalling. 
Personally, I think there is real bias at the ABC. But let's say I'm wrong. Why not at least improve the awful appearances and pick, say, at least one conservative host of Media Watch (ever) or make sure that exactly half of those who appear on Insiders have a lineage on each side of politics?

Yes, for the one program dealing with all forms and all aspects of the media, he proposes appointing a referee from one, biased side of politics ... a conservative host.

Which is why Allan and the lizard Oz let us down so badly. When it comes to appearances his track record - favouring conservatives - would look appalling. You see, you don't correct bias by appointing a biased host to a show which above all cries out for balance and the appearance of impartiality.

The whole point of Media Watch is that it assail transgressions in all forms of the media, not rule on them from either a liberal or a conservative point of view.

After waffling and warbling about the need for a referee to hail from Wales (oops, that's Gillard country, let's say South Africa), he's suddenly proposing that the referee be the Bolter or that prattling Polonius bore, Gerard Henderson.

To what avail?

Now at other times the pond would simply call Allan a blithering idiot, just another nattering member of  swiveleyesation, and walk on by, but it has to be noted that for a professor of law, it's seriously troubling that he fails logic 101.

But that's the trouble when you refract everything through the wrong end of the telescope and apply ideology to everything:

There's an easy way to show how pathetically unpersuasive are the ABC's arguments. Imagine every appointment to the top ABC news shows is given only to a right-of-centre person with Coalition links (as so many present ones have Labor links). 
How long do you think it would be before there would be howls of protest from the other side of politics?

Actually it's pathetically easy to show how pathetically unpersuasive and how typically lizard Oz Allan's arguments are.

Way back when, the Howard government decided it would transform the ABC, and appointed Jonathan Shier to do the hatchet job. Shier fucked the ABC comprehensively and made such a hash of it that he only lasted in the job for a year and nine months.

Because in the end you can't run a broadcaster as an ideological machine ... just as you can't run an ideological rag like The Australian and expect to make a profit.

Allan spends an enormous amount of energy featuring a couple of programs - Media Watch is 15 minutes on a Monday night, The Insiders is an hour in the dead zone on Sunday at 9 am.

Why? Only the long absent lord knows, because a much bigger issue for the ABC is the way the BBC has done the dirty on it and cosied up to Foxtel and the Murdoch empire ...

But wait, it gets worse, because it turns out that judges aren't impartial, they are ideologically driven. Yep, the next time you head off to court, understand that you're in the hands of a judge driven not by a desire for impartiality and balance and justice, but driven instead by a hotbed of political ratbaggery:

...all of us bring to the table certain core beliefs that influence how we see and decide the borderline cases. Probably not the clear-cut ones. But the debatable ones, such as which political news to emphasise and discuss, which stories to focus on and which aspects of polls to lead with. 
So the way the ABC selects its top hosts and participants for its big-ticket current affairs shows, choosing them overwhelmingly from one side of the political spectrum, means that we end up with less balance than if they were picked the way top judges are, with both sides of politics getting about even input.

Which is of course a nonsense, since by definition if you're a lawyer, or a judge, you are inherently conservative, already in a game played by winners who might affect to take certain stances but who are supposed to be above all even-handed, impartial and apolitical ...

And these days the ABC, which is in reality a relatively conservative institution, is routinely demonised as a haven of socialism, full of commie pinko perverts, but only if you look at from the perspective of the clan of kool aid drinkers at the lizard Oz, who strangely never seem to listen to Alan Jones and the rest of the shock jocks, or rail at the infinite stupidity of commercial television and their unwatchable alleged current affairs shows ...

Which is why Allan manages to sound both smug and other-worldly:

Unless you think journalists are inherently more even-handed, impartial and apolitical than judges. But who aside from Scott could say that with a straight face? (Hint: If you can you should move to Los Angeles and look for acting work.)

Yes indeed. Who could ever imagine the lizard Oz as the home for even-handed, impartial and apolitical journalists ...

Actually, here's a hint for James Allan. Why not move to Los Angeles and look for acting work. Well you can't go looking in Canada, because truly there's not a duller film industry in the world ...

Why not take an interest in scientology?  Because you simply don't have the first clue about how to run a broadcaster, but clearly you have every notion of how to be a biased exponent of the law and show an enormous capacity to swallow the kool aid that flows from the water coolers at the lizard Oz ...

Meanwhile, the pond continues to be exposed to ABC ratbaggery of a real and tangible kind.

How many more times will the pond have to endure Scott Stephens turning up and discussing the world with Waleed Aly, as he did yesterday, blathering on about Kevin Rudd and gay marriage?

Here's a deal Prof Allan.

You can go on listening to Alan Jones and reading Murdoch rags, and the pond will go on demanding that the ABC should at last get around to displaying some of the liberal bias it's routinely accused of possessing.

How about we  start with RN Drive, as hapless people are gadding about in cars, expecting a decent display of left-leaning liberal thought?

And instead they cop Scott Stephens ... and even worse he's demonising former chairman Rudd on the most obscure theological grounds imaginable, and carrying on about how wonderful Mehdi Hasan is for scribbling As a Muslim, I struggle with the idea of homosexuality - but I oppose homophobia.

It turns out that Hasan has repented. His idea of humility? Why he's absolutely opposed to homophobia, provided of course that poofters stay well clear of .mosques, because after all, they're just not Islamic...

You really don't have much of a clue Prof Allan, do you? Do you know anything of the suffering of ABC listeners and viewers in search of genuine left-liberal-secular bias? No, you clearly don't ...

.

Welcome to the home of the original patented swivel-eyed loons, no substitutes or inferior goods accepted ...

(Above: clippings from the great swivel-eyed loon scandal of 2013)


Now don't take it from the pond, take it from the lips of Poodle Pyne.

It turns out that Bazza O'Farrell is a dupe, a gull, a loser, a drop kick, a mug punter. You see, he's been conned (O'Farrell 'conned' on Gonski deal: Pyne).

In other words, he's been bilked, sold a pup, had a fast one pulled on him. He's been diddled, defrauded, bamboozled, hoodwinked, dudded and done like a dinner. He's been taken for a ride, had the dirty done on him. He's been gipped, hornswoggled, swindled, hustled, stung, short-changed, tricked and cheated. He's been skinned and stiffed and misled and deceived. He's all-day sucker, or if you put it another way, he  couldn't pick a lemon by sucking on it.

Why you could sell him a VFT to Sydney's second airport in Canberra in a trice. Hang on, how about selling him a monorail ...

Oh yes, the pond loves it when the Liberals eat their own, but fancy Poodle Pyne imagining he could do more than yap and race around in addled, empty-headed circles. Down poodle, down ...

Of course the logic dictates a couple of awkward conclusions. Big Bazza is such a dunderhead, he shouldn't be the premier of NSW. Or that feisty silver-quick red-headed fox is as sharp as a tack when it comes to selling the harbour bridge (with the Opera House tossed in as a bonus) to the mullet-head that she should be the PM ...

Well that was the entertainment yesterday, though we shouldn't overlook Quelle horreur! Passion for French may lose its rasion d'etre. The poor old French ... now all we need is a member of the Murdoch pack of lizard hacks to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that the French language is in decline because of gay marriage.

Speaking of gay marriage, the pond has also been drawn to the great controversy in the UK involving mad swivel-eyed loons.

Now the pond is always drawn to idle chatter about loons, and "swivel-eyed" is an apt addition to the lexicon.

You can read about the fuss, with links, at The Guardian in David Cameron, the 'loons' and gay marriage - what the national papers say.

It's all over the place, as if the English didn't already have enough evidence that they and their print media were barking mad.

Now it turns out that "swivel-eyed" might or might not have been said by one Lord Feldman, and certainly not by David Cameron, but it is quite clear that the insult is the work of deviant, devious members of the metropolitan elite.

It has brought out all sorts of proud loons, including Tim Bale, professor of politics at London's Queen Mary university, in Swivel-eyed loons or seeing clearly?:

...what is really happening? Is it that the so-called “loons” – and one wonders how long it will be before the label becomes a badge of honour rather than a gratuitous insult – are more numerous than they once were? Is it because they have become even “loonier”? Or is it because slagging off one’s superiors has become perfectly acceptable, where once it would have been unconscionable – or at least terribly bad form? 
The first thing to point out is that the Tory grassroots are rather more variegated than the stereotypes suggest. Many of the poor bloody infantry certainly share the stereotypical view that Mr Cameron should give the country a chance to get out of the EU, find ways to prevent the imminent arrival of more Romanians and Bulgarians, and forget all this nonsense about overseas aid, wind farms and gay marriage.

Yes, and don't forget about the way gay marriage has ruined the French language.

Ah well, at least they've got over their issues with gay whales and now it's just the wind farms, helpng people out, and extending equality to all...

But soft, hush, speaking of swivel-eyed loons who look askance at metropolitan elites, something wicked this way comes ...

Oh never mind, it's just Tuesday and that means it's Gerard "Prattling Polonius" Henderson day, and his noble duty is to pour oil on the troubled matter of big Bazza and Tony Abbott in Abbott, O'Farrell have equal claim to Menzies' legacy:

Ah yes, it's back to that unfortunate matter of the conned Bazza.

What a Solomon Hendo is, how wise and just. He's almost up there with Abraham giving Isaac a good burning, such is his loyalty to all that's right and just in the world. 

It turns out that in Liberal la la land, all is equal, first amongst equals so to speak, and everyone has equal claims and it's fair dibs me hearties, almost socialist you might say, such is the even-stevens egalitarian world of the swivel-eyed loons down under ...

Now of course Prattling Polonius is the only guardian of the sacred flame of Ming the Merciless left in the entire country. Only he knows the deepest truths, only he can speak with the power of an oracle ferreting through chicken entrails, so of course he has to join Poodle Pyne in reprimanding that dumb klutz big Bazza for speaking out of turn:

The issue flared up last Sunday. Interviewed on Sky News' Australian Agenda program, O'Farrell was asked whether he or Abbott was closer to Howard. 
O'Farrell responded: ''I'm a Menzies man, Tony's a Howard man.'' Yet, as Abbott makes clear in his book Battlelines, he too is an admirer of the Liberal Party founder. 

Yes Bazza, once again you've got it wrong, you've been conned by your faulty understanding of history.

Thank the long absent lord we have our present-day Polonius to adjudicate on the dispute, and yes, as any fair claim reader could predict, what follows is a long and exceptionally tedious sermon on the days of Ming, as only a prattling Polonius can manage.

You know, lo and behold, for there came upon the land a man blessed by god to lead the Israelites and the UAP, and to ban the filthy pinko perverted Commies and never you mind about democracy and plunge Australia into the mire of Vietnam, because you know, the dominos, the dominos, theyz fallin, and the White Australia policy was bipartisan, fair dinkum it was, so that makes it alright, because you know the Asians is coming, the Asians is coming, and Ming was a monarchist, because you know it's okay to support the Queen but assorted queens on Oxford street is entirely another matter, and it's true he didn't do much for the economy - remember 1961 - but hey who cares about the economy when your real aim in life is to become the Warden of the Cinque Ports ...

It is only fair that Menzies be judged by the standards of his time. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was bipartisan support for White Australia.

Indeed, and if we may be so bold, it's only fair that Adolf Hitler be judged by the standards of his time, because the treaty of Versailles was just so unfair, and that Weimar Republic, why it was full of decadent artists and bohemians and it was just so wrong ...

And now, if it please the court, might we be permitted to smote wildly at those who dare to offer themselves as guardians of the meaning of Ming when they don't have the first clue about anything:

In an article in the November 2008 issue of The Monthly, historian John Hirst suggested O'Farrell was unique to the modern Liberal Party in that he was a moderate disciple of Menzies. Hirst is a fine historian. However, until Howard's time, he was known to be a supporter of social democratic parties such as the ALP. It seems after his political conversion Hirst looked back on a Menzies that never really existed. 

Known to be a supporter! Of filthy vile social democratic parties such as the ALP.

Well the pond never!

Arrest that man officer, he doesn't have a clue:

It is fair to say that both Fraser and Howard, in their different ways, followed the Menzies tradition. As has O'Farrell in office. And as Abbott is likely to if he wins in September.

Uh huh. Yes, in their different ways, some took the high road, and some the low, and some the road least travelled, and yet they all ended up in the bush.

Oh wise and judicious Solomon, oh guardian of the flame of Ming.

But what does it mean to follow the path of Ming?

Now by Henderson's own account, this would seem to imply that Tony Abbott will forthwith embark on a foreign adventure, in the manner of Ming in Vietnam. Perhaps Syria, perhaps Iran, perhaps Indonesia? Oh come on, there must be somewhere we can have a foreign adventure. New Zealand or Tasmania - would it hurt to do a Gareth Evans? - if that's all we've got ...

Naturally Abbott will ignore the economy and fuck it up - remember '61 and the Ming way - and he'll certainly drum up all the ferocity hatred fear and loathing he can manage for boat people, no matter if they come from Afghanistan where Australia has already done its best to help wreck the joint (isn't Iraq and its current flurry of bombings working out well).

And what about a referendum to ban the greenies? Why surely that speaks to the heart in every member of the commentariat in the land ...

After all, they're completely responsible for the ruination of everything, and to the pond's certain knowledge are engaged in a conspiracy with the United Nations to introduce world government, perhaps run from New York, or perhaps from Moscow.

Except, except, oh dear sweet awkward delsuions, it's quite likely Tony Abbott will have to swear an oath of loyalty to that fervent ratbag greenie, King Chuck. Will it be a House of Cards all over again?

To make things better, the least Abbott can do is reintroduce conscription, so that men and women can be sent around the world to fight against the dominoes, and perhaps save us all from vile pizza ... or perhaps the carbon tax, by having a green army out on the land, helping save the planet, in the best socialist way.

Conclusion?

The swivel-eyed loons are alive and well in Australia, and the pond wouldn't have it any other way ...

(Below: more Rowson cartoons at The Guardian here)

Please note: we're not, under any circumstances, for having a fair go ...

(Above: is it possible to imagine a more nauseating, deceptive and misleading advertisement, placed out in the street, and assaulting the eyes of innocent passers-by?)


So last night the pond sat through the two hour twenty minutes generational saga The Place Beyond the Pines, featuring the Beagle (Ryan Gosling) as a wall of death motorbike rider turned bank robber who comes up against - what to call Bradley Cooper, the Squirrel? - an ambitious cop who shoots him and uses the killing to further his career as a DA.

Somehow the two sons - the Beagle's is tortured and introspective, and the Squirrel's a drug-taking brat - end up in the same school, and the question arises as to whether the Beagle's spawn will take down the Squirrel and/or his spawn ...

Now it was nice to see Ben Mendelsohn making a living as the new Warren Oates and Rose Byrne turning up to whine again - though no one has ever given the pond a good reason - so oi, oi, oi and all that, but the movie seemed to be trying to say things about what was wrong with the United States and District Attorneys, while celebrating motorbikes and wheels on the wild side, but by the end of it, the pond was ready to erupt and cross swords with anyone about anything.

So what have we got?

Well not Paul Sheehan, frothing and foaming about public servants and sex and frolics and wildcat judges in Judges' frolic folly costs us dearly.

And not the schizophrenic rags and their reading of the runes, managing to extract entirely opposite headlines from the very same poll results. Guess which way it went. The reptiles at the lizard Oz went one way:

While the Fairfaxians came to a slightly different set of headers:

Sort of like a re-run, a re-hash of the Beagle v. the Squirrel, while over at the Daily Terror, the lads conjured up an entirely mischievous EXCLUSIVE about federal Labor rats who after a slaughter in Sydney's west are supposed to leave the sinking ship and take on big Bazza.

Naturally there's not a single named source for the story Federal Labor MPs urged to state switch if they lose at the September Federal election, and sundry politicians, including Chris Bowen, are invited to hose down the unsourced speculation, and the question arises, can the Daily Terror sustain this sort of casual, insulting, mischief-making, deceptive and misleading storytelling and bullcrap exclusives all the way to the federal election?

Does Ryan Gosling look like a Beagle?

Of course he does and of course they can ...

What a vile humbug ideological warrior rag it is ...

Meanwhile, in the usual way, the reptiles at the lizard Oz have put a story by Bjørn Lomborg, Harvesting forests to reduce fossil fuels the next big boondoggle, behind the paywall so they can charge you for it, when the very same piece was published here, Hugging a Burning Tree, some five days ago and can be accessed for it.

Yep, the next big boondoggle isn't hugging a burning tree, it's Chairman Rupe charging like a bull for what is free ...

Free is about all Lomborg is ever worth, especially this piece, which conjures up a world where environmentalists - un-named - are leading the charge to burn down the trees of the world, and heroic Lomborg is standing up for the trees. Won't someone think of the trees, he moans, without mentioning how Chairman Rupe might save a few trees by refusing ever again to publish the Daily Terror ...

Look, if the Philippine Daily Inquirer can publish Lomborg being a twit - for free - what on earth is he doing locked up in the lizard Oz, and worse, being printed on paper derived from cut down trees (and let's not swallow all this cheap talk about recycled pulp, when the lizard Oz recycles pulp Lomborg).

Actually when you google the piece, it's all over the place like a virus, and all for free ...

Meanwhile, there seems to be trouble in plant, what with Peter van Onselen daring to compare visionary Bazza 'let's have that second airport in Canberra' O'Farrell to Bob Menzies, and even worse, daring to suggest that the likes of Christopher "chant it to me in Latin" Pearson and Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen might be barking mad, or at least a little prejudiced, as you can read in Heir to the Menzies legacy, which seems not to be affected by the paywall because it carries an astonishing insight ...

This newspaper's columnist Christopher Pearson recently described O'Farrell as a "pretend conservative", lampooning him for signing up to the Gonski schools reforms. Janet Albrechtsen did likewise, going one step further by describing O'Farrell as "not a real Liberal". Yet it is hard to argue with O'Farrell doing a deal with Canberra when it involves better outcomes for his home state. As one senior Liberal insider put it, "I wonder if those columnists have even looked up the details in the Gonski package. It includes principles Liberals are supposed to support, like a devolution of authority to local schools."

Dame Slap and the Latin man off with the vicious pixies? Cheap-arsed uninformed cheerleaders for Tony Abbott's brand of feral conservatism and rampant negativity?

Who'd have thunk it ... and where has van Onselen been this last decade? Does he have any clue about the rag he writes for?

The cheerleaders are of course only doing the bidding of their master, who right at the moment is turning into a tweet eccentric, suggesting that senility is just around the corner.

Here's the tweets that made Crikey suggest that Rupe needed to take a Bex (and never mind the kidneys) and have a good lie down (the world according to Rupert):

Yes the man who bought MySpace and turned it into a wasteland has the cheek to offer advice to Facebook. 

But Crikey jumped too early, and missed the best tweets of all:

(More twittering tweets from a tottering tweeter here)

Uh huh. It turns out that Rupert is a flat taxer, and the poor man suffers from vicious taxation.

Once again the sight of a pitiful, weeping and wailing billionaire churns the pond's stomach with the unfairness of the universe ...

Yes, the fish always rots from the head:

What an ugly miserable world Murdoch la la land is, full of climate and NBN denialists, as his minions carry out his mission ...

The pond hereby apologises to the Beagle, and other beagles everywhere.

Now for those of you who came in late, perhaps you're wondering about the Beagle joke.

Credit where credit is due, we owe it all to Anthony Lane at The New Yorker reviewing Gangster Squad (behind the paywall):


Gosling, who did such demanding work in “Blue Valentine” and “Drive,” must have laughed when he got the “Gangster Squad” script and realized that his principal duty, as Sergeant Jerry Wooters, would be to deliver The Look. You know the one: imagine that your local animal shelter sends out a fund-raising leaflet, and Gosling is the beagle on the cover. It never fails.

So whenever you're tempted to take a look at a rag put out by Chairman Rupe, remember he's pretending to be a long suffering Beagle, tortured by taxation. And if you swallow that, you'll swallow anything ...

At least Ryan Gosling only makes bad movies, and a few good ones, whereas Rupert Murdoch's empire ruins lives ... and at least Gosling is cute, even if his companion isn't a beagle ..

Enough already, the pond reserves the right to call the long absent Abrahamic god the original inspiration for Hitler ...

What better way to start a Sunday meditation than to contemplate the dull desiccated thoughts of the anti-laughter, anti-comedian brigade, as represented by Vic Alhadeff's Don't call me a Nazi-Nazi: trivialising a word sends the wrong message about a genocidal regime.

Now for starters, the pond reserves the right at all times to refer to the genocidal god of the Jews as an early example of Nazi behaviour. We're not just talking Pharaoh and his men and their chariots, we're talking the whole enchilada. Show us a few panels Mr. Crumb (click to enlarge):

Mass slaughter, mass extermination, and just one lucky dude and his kin and a few selected animals make the cut!

Now the only sensible response to this capricious, o'erwheening brutality seems to be laughter but Alhadeff is in the sombre and as dull as ditchwater school of life:

I'm a Seinfeld aficionado. I've watched each episode a ridiculous number of times, yet still find the humour brilliant. 
But then there's ''The Soup Nazi'' - an episode about a surly delicatessen owner who refuses to serve customers who flout his excessive rules of decorum. It's witty and well scripted, but it commits a cardinal offence: it trivialises the meaning of what a Nazi is, and in doing so degrades the language associated with those who devised, planned and perpetrated the most grotesque genocide in history.

It goes without saying that in this moment, Alhadeff reveals himself to be anything but a Seinfeld aficionado. He doesn't have the first clue about Seinfeld or its humour, and the moment he yabbers about a "cardinal offence" he's a fit subject for Seinfeld comedy.

Now others have mourned Israel becoming a humorless homeland (may be paywall limited, and you may have to google) and announced that the greatest threat to the country is a loss of the precious natural resource of a sense of humour (of course if it's in Haaretz, humourless right-wingers will come out in droves).

You see, Seinfeld's soup Nazi doesn't commit a cardinal offence. Nor for that matter does Mel Brooks in The Producers when he offered his show's signature tune to the world, Springtime for Hitler and Germany:

Springtime for Hitler and Germany 
Deutschland is happy and gay! 
We're marching to a faster pace 
Look out, here comes the master race! S
pringtime for Hitler and Germany 
Rhineland's a fine land once more! 
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Watch out, Europe We're going on tour! 
Springtime for Hitler and Germany...

And there's a good reason that Larry David puts his Survivor episode in his top five Curb Your Enthusiasm shows. That's the season four episode where Larry's father brings a Holocaust survivor to a meal, and he gets into an argument with a Survivor of the TV series as to who is the better survivor.

Sure it skates on the edge, but all good comedy skates on the edge. There's a point to it:

Bragging about his hardships on the show Survivor, the fit young man explains that he didn't even get snacks some days. The Holocaust survivor can take no more and begins a debate, which escalates into each of them screaming at the other "no, I'm a survivor!" The two Jewish worlds have collided: one connected to the vanilla fun of American pop culture and the other rooted in the sordid past of European atrocity. Larry fails to fit in comfortably with either image of Jewishness, and as he looks out over his kitchen table, the audience feels his incapability to fit in with any particular image of Judaism—Larry always will find a way to end up uncomfortable and hilarious. (Wait, Larry David is Jewish?)

Now Alhadeff goes on digging ever deeper a humourless hole, getting agitated about grammar Nazis and spelling Nazis and diet Nazis and in the search for a free kick, Glenn Beck referencing Goebbels and Rush Limbaugh doing the femi-nazi routine, and PETA doing a holocaust on your plate with its campaign relating to six billion slaughtered chickens ...

And then he comes up with the killer blow:

This is neither about censorship nor about curtailing the right to humour. 

But actually it is about censorship and curtailing the right to humour, or else he wouldn't conflate Beck and Limbaugh and PETA with soup-kitchen Nazi jokes. You see Seinfeld's funny, Beck is lame. Just as the Daily Terror comparing Conroy to tyrants is lame, just as the pond is routinely lame, just as the Bolter is always lame and with it a profound absence of humour, just as any thought emerging from the Pellists and the angry Sydney Anglicans is beyond the valley of the lame.

This is easier to see when you get beyond the exceptionalist stance.

Comedians shouldn't make jokes about Mao and Stalin - two men who did more for the killing fields than Hitler ever managed?

Kurt Vonnegut shouldn't have mined the fire-bombing of Dresden for the black humour embedded in Slaughterhouse-Five?

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.

Of course other writers have been down this path - Phillip Roth wrote a story for the New Yorker in 1958 called Defender of the Faith:

I met with opposition right off,” Roth recalls. “… The New Yorker began to get letters, dozens and dozens of letters, canceling subscriptions, by Jews, and I began to get angry phone calls from various Jewish organizations. Would you write these stories if you were in Nazi Germany? And I was suddenly being assailed as an anti-Semite. This thing that I detested all my life. And a self-hating Jew. I didn’t even know what it meant. It never dawned on me when I was writing that story that this was going to cause a conflagration. But that’s what happened when I began to write. (here)


Yes, the humourless and the righteous have always walked amongst us, always vigilant, always censoring, always undermining and clucking, and always with the best of intentions:

It is a concern about how we use language and the impact of that. Everything begins with words. That includes racist violence and genocide. When words are used irresponsibly, they lose their meaning, their power and any historical import they might carry. 

The irresponsible use of words! Which implies the responsible use of words, and a life of eternal dullness. Piss off James Joyce, you're so irresponsible ...

But can anyone be more irresponsible than Alhadeff, who is quick to play the victim card:

In the context of trite Nazi references they become cheapened, the experience is diluted and the words are offensive and hurtful, particularly to those who suffered.

And then equally quick to deploy teetering logic:

Misuse of ''Nazi'' borders on blasphemy, yet it invariably falls safely within the ambit of free speech. 

Borders on blasphemy?

Uh huh. But the pond routinely indulges in blasphemy, and certainly rails against the Catholic Encyclopaedia's notion of blasphemy, and is immensely pleased that the Commonwealth of Australia doesn't recognise blasphemy as an offence and no one seems to have used the notion since the Victorian government had a go at a socialist journalist in 1919 (here).

Which is just as well if you're going to call the Abrahamic god the original Hitler (oh go away Godwin's Law, you've been abolished, thanks to Chairman Rupe) ...

So why does Alhadeff think blasphemy is a useful concept? The pond should care?

Enough already, where do we get to?

No one owns the word, yet it connotes the most catastrophic regime of modern times. So it becomes a balance between rights and responsibilities, and a matter of awareness. We need to ensure that a 14-year-old is able to tell the difference between a Nazi and a harmless radio presenter. 

Indeed. But that isn't the business of comedians nor comedy. Let the 14 year old do history, and learn a lot about the curious ways of the world, and especially the censorious ways of the religious.

Let's not reduce humour and comedy to what's safe for a 14 year old.

Let them learn that life in a prison camp in the second world world war wasn't quite as imagined in Hogan's Heroes, and that relationships between the Indians and the white folk weren't quite as portrayed in F Troop. Let them discover and contemplate the meaning of the missing verse of Rolf Harris's Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport and his invitation to Bruce to let certain folk loose (for some reason the wiki seems to think it was Lou) ...

And so on and so forth, endlessly, since the world is full of cliches and stereotypes, and so the history lessons need to last a lifetime, and one of them might involve a discussion of what Charlie Chaplin was attempting in The Great Dictator.

And let the fourteen year old learn the golden rule of comedy. If you're black, you can do black jokes and use the word nigger; if you're white, you're up for a shellacking. Leave it to Chris Rock and Richard Pryor and Cedric the entertainer and the other greats ... (argue about the top ten here).

And if you're a man, and you do sexist misogynist jokes, you might end up castrated, and nothing wrong with that. And if you're a Jew and you want to do Jewish jokes, go right ahead, but it helps if you have the timing and canny sense of how far to go that Larry David and Seinfeld show ...

And some really good jokes about Vic Alhadeff wanting to reduce the adult world to what should be in the minds of fourteen year olds will be your first port of call for a successful comedy career.

And now how else to end, though not with the original, which is only a click away on YouTube, but the broader stylings (blessed by Mel Brooks' making a brief appearance) which might well raise questions about political correctness and the gay sensibility as the default for Broadway shows. So it goes.