Brendan O'Neill spikes Q and A mediocrities; enrages Twitter lefties

Saw Brendan O'Neill of Spiked on Q and A last night. He just slaughtered the leftie panellists! The look on Tanya Plibersek's face whenever he was speaking, particularly early on, was just priceless.

Plibersek makes my skin crawl walk. She really is the most vacuous, sanctimonious hypocrite in Labor. Considering how chockas that joint is with 'em, that's saying something. At her most smug she makes even Gillard herself look principled and substantial.

Of course Plibersek, Christine Nixon and even Stephen Mayne (who bizarrely endorsed the Government's creepily totalitarian line on the meeja) wheeled out the usual febrile anti-Murdoch cant. And O'Neill just sliced it to ribbons. They were clearly upset, and started supporting each other for comfort.

You often see this with lefties. Being the primitive, cowardly collectivists they are, they feel deeply threatened by just one person with his own mind. They then resort to nasty smears and insinuations that are always emotive.

A case in point was when Plibersek complained that O'Neill was verballing her, an act of verballing in itself. The transcript is not yet up and I don't have time to watch it all again, but there's a bit near the end where she says something along the lines of "you're saying it's okay to hack into phones", when he'd actually just made an explicit point of deploring the practice.

Not surprisingly lefties were all asquitter on Twitter. Too thick, slow and malicious to actually refute what he said with anything like a counter-argument, they just got nasty as they always do, often about his appearance. This little gem was retweeted by Leslie Cannold, one of our leading "intellectuals".

Of course there were several Nazi-themed smears. Mike Stuchbery lamely compared him to Oswald Mosely. Nothing O'Neill said was remotely fascist. On the contrary, he consistently endorsed more democracy, openness and freedom. The fact that his reasonable arguments made leftie tweeps squeal like stuck pigs and fire off such delusional analogies reveals the scary extent of their own sinister groupthink.

Murdoch shaving cream attack conspiracy theory takes off!

In the wee hours, after watching the Murdoch testimony on the teev, I was listening to BBC World Service on the wireless. During the postmortem, they interviewed some independent blogger with a keen interest in the subject. I didn't catch his name unfortunately but he was clearly a Murdoch-hater from way back. Among other things he suggested that "he wouldn't be surprised" if the shaving cream attack on Rupert was staged to gain sympathy for the elderly mogul. To this the interviewer almost indignantly retorted: "Oh, surely not!"

Good to know that while the organization is obviously reveling in the troubles the Dark Lord Murdoch is experiencing, they still retain some common sense.

Meanwhile, across the internet this "I wouldn't be surprised if the foam attack was staged to gain sympathy" line is gaining popularity. Frankly, I'm not surprised.

Monckton may not be a lord but Gillard is certainly no prime minister

Interesting that so much of the meeja coverage of Christopher Monckton's debate today with Richard Denniss focuses on the question of whether he is a dinkum member of the House of Lords. Even the climate change denying, phone hacking, News Ltd hate media is taking this angle.

But this is yet more playing the man, not the ball. For anyone who saw the debate, the story should be how thoroughly he trounced Denniss and made fools of the climate change "bed wetters" in the National Press Club audience. 

If journos must focus on the official titles of prominent players in this carbon tax stoush, why not ask whether Julia Gillard deserves to be called "Prime Minister"? She was twice selected, never elected, after all. If Monckton is twisting the truth a tad, then the sin is nothing compared to the ginormous porkie that got Joolya into the Lodge.

Even if you think she does deserve the title it's looking increasingly like she won't be hanging onto it for very much longer. And if she does get the chop (along with her stupid carbon tax) in coming weeks there's no doubt that many in Labor will be just as relieved as most of the country. The woman is a complete embarrassment on so many levels and they should just get rid of her now!

Hell, they didn't waste any time offing Kevin Rudd, and that was when he was still ahead in the polls. They did it mainly because they hated his guts. Now most of the nation feels that level of hatred towards Gillard, yet they continue to support her! Eh?

What a strange, sad state that party is in ...

NOTW phone hacking scandal not unlike Princess Diana's death

Bloody hell! The News of the World seems to be the only news in the world at the moment. The phone hacking scandal is devouring all before it like some kind of meeja black hole. So far it's claimed the jobs of Rebekah Brooks and two top cops, and (seemingly) the life of some poor journo. Many are saying it could result in the toppling of Murdoch himself and possibly even the destruction of his empire. Then there's the pressure on Cameron and his government. I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually makes the Houses of Parliament just crumble into the Thames ...

All seems to be getting way out of hand to me. Sure, my views are biased. I read The Australian, which is part of Murdoch's hate media, and of course anything associated with him is inherently eeevil. But while what NOTW did was truly disgraceful, it's comparatively minor in the grand scheme of things. There are far worse scandals that sections of the meeja have been complicit in -- for example the concerted attempts to demonize global warming skeptics. That's not nearly as ghoulish, but it's hugely more significant, surely.

And all this disgust from the public seems kind of hypocritical. They happily lapped up all the news that these dodgy practices uncovered for years, after all.

I can't help thinking it's all a bit like what happened to Princess Diana. The paparazzi hounded her to her death, and half the world went into collective shock and mourning. But those photographers were just "feeding the monster" too. Diana may well be alive today had the very people who were most in love with her not had such a voracious appetite for photos of her.

Not unlike the aftermath of that tragedy, the phone hacking scandal will result in a squillion pledges to clean up the tabloids. But they'll all be back to their old ways a decade or so hence. Just you wait and see.

Dennis Glover on The Bolt Report

Just watched The Bolt Report. One of Bolta's guests was the Labor speechwriter Dennis Glover. He's obviously an intelligent and articulate bloke but he kept making the classic Labor mistake: When confronted by working people's genuine frustration with the Government, Laborites never take it for what it is, but claim that it's only because the shock jokes have been winding 'em up. This is a condescending attitude that is deeply held in the party, and one of the main reasons they are in such deep, deep doo-doo. The more they express this contemptuous view of working class people, the worse their situation gets.

Really, they have to stop treating the electorate as utter nongs who can be "ginned up" by the Alan Joneses of the world and accept that Aussies can think for themselves and are bloody angry about they way they've been treated. Once Labor shows these people some respect and accepts responsibility for their own dire situation they may actually start to recover in the polls.

Murdoch-hater Stephen Mayne on ABC News Radio

I just heard Stephen Mayne being interviewed on ABC news Radio about the crisis engulfing News Corp (no link available). He was introduced as a shareholder activist and founder of Crikey. Not surprisingly, he got stuck into the embattled media baron big time!

I thought it was pretty ironic to ask his opinion, considering that Mayne's Crikey was never known as an examplar of media ethics. And that reputation continues. You would think that the interviewer might raise this issue at some stage -- you know, in the interests of the "balance" the ABC claims to uphold -- but of course he didn't.

Sure, the phone hacking scandal is a biggie, but some of the things Mayne said were laughably extreme. He said Murdoch resembled an ageing dictator like Mubarak and compared him to "Comical Ali", the Iraqi Information Minister.

He also got stuck into The Australian's push for "regime change", as if it was some kind of scary thing for democracy. But as everyone living in Oz knows only too well, the paper is merely articulating what most Australians feel. This government is probably the most dishonest and inept one we've ever had, led by the most embarrassingly vacuous numpty ever to disgrace The Lodge.

Mayne clearly hates Rupert's guts. And the interview with him was typical of the kind of meeja bias that is far more of a threat to democracy than Murdoch represents.

Kristina Keneally on what ails Labor

Kristina Keneally reveals one of the attitudes that is afflicting today's Labor in her opinion of how best to fix the party. She says that it needs a "rebranding".

Ms Keneally said the Labor Party needed to develop a new brand, claiming most people did not know what it stood for.

She thinks it's all a marketing problem! No, most people know what Labor "stands" for: monumental incompetence, dysfunction, petty internal hatreds and utter disdain for the electorate, among other things.

The problem is that Labor politicians themselves don't believe in anything much. Mostly they just see the party as a way to further their own personal ambitions -- you know, have a great income with a load of perks, get to boss people around, hobnob with celebs ... that sort of thing.

She's kind of right when she says this:

"We speak very well to the unionised workforce and we speak very well to the educated progressive class, but we don't have a brand or a method of speaking to middle Australia."

Yeah, that's because they wrote off middle Australia a long time ago. And middle Australia has finally run out of patience with them.