Friday, February 20, 2009

Michael Duffy, Kevin Rudd, Nationalizing the Banks, Ben Chifley, Tim Blair, Monkeys, Murder, Westerns and Sci Fi Mayhem


The New York Post published an online apology for its chimp Obama cartoon, as defiant, vulgar and offensive an apology as it could muster, and all that you'd expect from that buccaneer Col Allan, trained as he was at The Daily Terror in all the news that's fit to wrap fish and chips.

You can read the wretched and churlish piece of dreck under the heading That Cartoon, but a warning - scientific tests have shown that after visiting the Post, computers tend to lose fifty per cent of their ROM and RAM, and their owners some seventy per cent of their brain cells. Repeated visits can result in a complete intellectual melt down and a tendency to repeat over and over Rupert good, Rupert good.

But you can bet that Tim Bleah won't find it in his heart to say anything about this turn of events (plenty of posts since it became news, but no mention to date). 

He just cranks up more monkey jokes. Any connection between Obama, monkeys and blacks? No siree Bob, no more than a Klu Klux Klan costume has to a burqah. Bet Tim's favorite T-shirt during the campaign was the one above - just joking, only joking.

Blair is of the old-fashioned, never give an inch school:

As long as there is injustice, as long as there are lefties and greenies and global warming trendinistas, whenever a Targathian baby cries out, wherever a distress signal sounds among the stars, we'll be there. This fine ship, this fine crew. Never give up ... and never surrender. (Apologies to David Howard).

Next up from Tim? A vivid, evocative, horrified re-telling of the sordid social implications of a Queensland murder in which a man was stabbed 133 times, and had his head decapitated - for it then to be used as a puppet and a bowling ball. (You know, like Tim's obsessive compulsive interest in that Islamic beheading in New York).

What? There wasn't an Islamic involved? Feergit it, you git. Get out of here. Only Islamic murders done by Islamics foretell the decline of western civilization  and the impending rapture. These Queensland killers were ideologically sound - one of them talked about the other's soul being condemned to hell because he was weak. Nothing there for Tim, not that Tim's into selective reporting. He doesn't do reporting at all. He does skew and spin.

I'm thinking of whipping up a quick Ph.D proposal based on the thesis that right wing columnists developed their tendency to perversion as a result of watching too many westerns (or sniffing petrol when they filled up the tank for a new day driving route 66 with Edd 'Kookie' Byrnes and the crew).

So you check for an addiction to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and QED - you have a rugged individualist loon who likes to ride the range six gun in hand from the safety of their big city home. (On the other hand, left leaning loons tend to nerdishness and sci fi, allowing of course for rule-proving exceptions like Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard).

Of course it will be necessary to do a deep brain scan to see what happens when columnists get neurone stimulation, such as a picture of John Howard quickly followed by a picture of a naked woman (never mind the age or the looks or cheap jokes about Penthouse, just think any woman up against John Howard). Righties will surely get excited by Howard's eyebrows - shards of glowing purple light will explode in rapture - while nerds confronted by a woman will swiftly drift back into a reverie about the time William Shatner sucked lips with Nichelle Nichols.


(Stop it Tim, no eyebrow orgasms allowed on a Saturday).

Unfortunately deep brain scanning has often resulted in a total neurone wipe. I guess the up side is that right wing columnists will be able to resume their scribbling without any discernible alteration in their relationship to reality.

On the subject of never giving up, never surrendering, and swearing on Grabthar's hammer and by the Sons of Warvan to wreak vengeance on lefties everywhere, you have to admire the esteemed Michael Duffy, a chip off the old Blair block.

The Duffster, in a hard hitting, penetrating column, The rubbish PMs love to peddle, discovers Kevin Rudd's column in The Monthly weeks after everybody else, and via John Howard's speech at the Menzies Research Centre.

The Duffster takes a few swipes at Howard in order to look balanced and fair, and then offers Rudd's "baroque", rambling essay a fail mark in most any undergraduate course.

The Duffster is outraged at Rudd's claim that markets were pretty much unfettered when it's clear from America just how well financial regulation worked, how tight and effective it was (oh sorry the Duffster skips all that nonsense about the USA, he just wants to dwell on the much more globally significant, Howard-run Australian economy).

Through the fog, the Duffster does seem to understand Rudd was engaging in a political exercise, but thinks by talking of Hayek and Keynes, Rudd's talking to a smaller and better educated audience. You know like right wing loons. Who can tell Rudd's arguments are embarrassingly incoherent. Like, you know, like the Duffster.

It's all so late breaking and sad it's hard to go on, so we'll skip over the Duffster's celebration of our wonderful banking system, and cut to the chase.

The Duffster gives a wonderful quote from a really profound and insightful expert: Rudd's speech was perhaps the strongest attack on the ideals and purpose of private enterprise by a national leader since Ben Chifley's attempt to nationalise the banks in 1947.

And who is this expert? Why none other than loon Mark Latham, now resident at The Australian Financial Review, in much the same way as Michael Costa, that other featherduster, now graces the pages of The Australian

Talk about free enterprise. Isn't it great how, in Latham's case, you can go from a meteoric flame out on every level to becoming the 'go to' expert for any and every right wing loon in the country looking for a damning commentary on the Labor party. Personally I preferred it when he was smashing cameras and breaking a taxi driver's arm - all this theoretical stuff at such a high economic level is terribly hard to read and understand for a poor possum like me.

I mean Ben Chifley nationalising the banks! Come on Duffster come on. You are such a complete and comprehensive loon. What about since we abandoned the gold standard, surely the cause of all our misery today? (Sssh, no, no don't say it, it was George W. Bush who nationalised the banks. Or was it the banks who nationalised themselves because they fucked up so bad? Whatever, it seems more likely that George W. was channeling Ben Chifley than the Ruddster. By Grabthar's hammer say it ain't so).

Anyhoo, the Duffster thinks the future looks gloomy. No, not because of the global financial crisis. No that's easy to fix, it's because Kevin Rudd might believe what he's saying.

The insightful Duffster talks about governments like they're James Packer in the Packer family. You know Sir Frank gets the fortune together, Kerry builds it up, and James pisses the family fortune against the wall.

Actually, a better parallel for the Ruddster's folly is the the downward path of the right wing commentariet:

The first generation (William Buckley) establishes the insights and the intellectual substance with style and elan. The second generation (David Brooks et al) consolidates it in various respectable organs, which proceed to go bankrupt. And the third (the Duffster, Tim Blair, little Billy Kristol) pisses it up against the wall.

Gold standard, silver standard and now the age of lead. See. We should never have given up the gold standard.

On to the score:

For biting on the Rudd bait like a cat fish searching for weeks old food in the river mud: 11
For writing a rambling incoherent piece to demonstrate how rambling Rudd was: 11
For using the word 'piss' to show how strong and gutsy the Duffster is in writing school: 11
For taking Mark Latham, class Labor clown, as a quotable expert in anything:  11 to the trillionth
For actually showing any practical interest in solutions to the current economic crisis: 1
For trying to be fair and balanced about John Howard while at the same time indulging in Howard and bank ancestor worship: 1
For thinking it's all about Australia: 0
For being the last right wing commentator to rubbish Rudd's essay in The Monthly, on the basis that the first shall be last, and the last first: 2

A mixed score, and how happy I am to know that very few people seem to know or care about the ranting Duffster and his arcane Mark Latham quoting ways. After all, he's just a harmless public broadcaster and columnist for a failing, disreputable newspaper. Now Tim Blair ... time to get Zorg on the case there.

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