Tim Blair, tourism, right wing comedy, state Labor, Australia, Mr. Murdoch and Tax Rorts

Tim Blair is like the class clown - he'd like to be funny, but he's such a gormless, ineffectual nerd, he doesn't really understand comedy. In a way he just wants to be loved, but in a right wing, neocon kind of way, so that instead of doing real satire, in a Swiftian way, he just ends up doing sarcasm in a snide way. It's not so much a sensa huma as a senseless humor.

This week he thought so much of his amusing article on state Labor MP's that he put it in the form of a pdf so we could get the whole visual extravaganza.

It's all about the joys of domestic tourism in the state of NSW, dressed down in such a way that there's a lot of cheap and easy shots at hapless politicians in a failed government. A real satirist would have distributed his barbs a little more evenly - why not start with a tour of Tony Abbott's grand north shore estate, preferably while wearing lashings of scapular.

Blair could have course have done a wondrous piece on the way his employer - News Ltd, through its subsidiary Twentieth Century Fox - looted the Australian taxpayer of A$40 million to make a golden turkey brazenly called Australia, ensuring that the brand name Australia became associated with an overblown, grandiose piece of snooze inducing melodrama. He could have explored how the Australian government was beguiled into this via mechanisms and subterfuges not available to other film producers at the time. 

He could have even mentioned the A$40 million the re-branded Tourism Australia (so we can forget the hapless bureaus that went before) dropped on an associated campaign which for sheer ineptness and incompetence was only matched by its previous 'where the bloody hell are ya' campaign.

Blair could have done a most amusing chart exploring how the News Ltd. hacks managed this piece of government stupidity as a way of shoring up their misgivings about their own product, misgivings that they were right about in the key US market. But that's Rupert for you, making out like a bandit while his minions and cohorts take shots at state Labor politicians. That's like taking potshots at wingless ducks in barrel. Come on Mr. Blair, let's see what you have to say about William Randolph Hearst the second and his rosebud. Surely there's room for some golden comedy to match the labored wit.

Yep, Tim Blair is as good a place to start as any in our quest for right wing loon of the week.