The phony campaign is underway. How nasty will Spud go?
Tasting notes: a terroir of earthy fear and loathing with less than subtle notes of racism, bottled in Abbottesque carping negativism and belligerence, exhibiting a faux indignation but with projection and genuine hypocrisy teasing the palate.
The bovine dullard is still trying to work out the wrapping on his Rubik's Cube. His is a personality so uninspiring that undertakers do a stock take whenever he appears on the telly. He has the integrity of wet bog roll, the sincerity of a LinkedIn birthday greeting and a gangrenous level of empathy that would embarrass a mob enforcer. Yet Handsome Pete, the wannabe tinpotato, armed with wishful thinking, is measuring the curtains at The Lodge convinced his ultimate ambition is soon to be realised.
He demonstrably craves the top job with the fervent yearning that is evident in all the malignant creeps and weirdos who sit atop the RWNJ totem pole.
What is it about the nasty, the non-descript, the deluded, the befuddled, the belligerent, the purposefully ignorant that gets them to positions of power and influence in the Tory ecosphere?
All Tories are greedy, egocentric fuckers but with Spud and co is it at a psychopathic level of dedication to self-interest? Self before party before country - "an evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes". Spud has form - putting national security at risk for personal political advantage. For him national security has always been first and foremost a partisan weapon.
"It's perplexing how Peter Dutton continues to get kudos for being the go-to politician on the national security beat, when he has so clearly not just ignored the advice of ASIO but undermined the agency's credibility." Laura Tingle
Spud is to truth what Uri Geller is to spoons. Lying is a tool of trade for most politicians but Brother Scotty and now Spud have elevated their craft to an art form - a genre, a movement even. Clunge? Pap? Ethically Baroque? <space reserved for possible additional appalling puns>
In thrall to the bloated grotesquerie occupying the White House the Tories have noted the success of the fabulisms so habitually dispensed therefrom so they've decided to embrace the post-truth Trumpian world.
“They’ve got a like mind.” Empurpled member for New England Englebert Humpastaffer comparing the Spud to the pumpkin-coloured horror.
No more standard pollie porkies and misleading statements - it's a blizzard of deceit bolstered by a compliant, often complicit corporate media that does not push back. From the teals being secret communist radicals to declaring that the Chinese Communist Party was backing Albanese and Labor in the election ("the statement so toxic that it provoked an unprecedented public warning from ASIO's chief, Mike Burgess") there is no outrageous lie that will go unindulged by der fabrikator.
A desire for the trappings of office and a mindset that treats wealth as virtue will get you through a Liberal Party job interview in the Barclay McGain room (no scissors please) at Young Lib HQ - so it's hardly unique to the lugubrious tuber. However, with Spud they are baked in attributes - his pie floater personality being in awe of the confit d'endangered species canapes and Pol Roger Reserve Brut at Justin Hemmes' Wage Theft Manor and major miner Big Vag's various sprawling mansions. Spud is wealthy beyond reasonable aspiration and true to the RW covetous style, too much is never enough, but a PM's paltry salary is not the motivator. It's the cachet, his embrace by the exploitative class with their private jets and emotional support yachts. He'll be accepted as one of them.
His naked ambition and long held acquisitiveness is a symptom of overcompensation for low self-esteem. Performative machismo is also an offset to his insecurities - Spud's shtick being the tough guy, the uber dude, the hard man. There are though, things that touch his blackened soul, that stir his loins. The clang of a cell door closing on small, brown fingers, the smell of cordite in a Gazan refugee camp, turning off the life support at old folks' homes, the lapping of waves over headstones in an abandoned Tuvaluan churchyard. "Thug" is a suitable label. Thank you Malcolm.
The pitch and the packaging - Make Australia Afraid Again¹ promising to keep the worthy safe from
the bogeyman du jour while honouring his commitment to demonising those who are guilty of subsisting while Black. He'll maintain the weaponising of cultural division and the manufacturing of outrage against the "woke" and the "inner-city elites" (the versatile pejoratives where his audience decides who that applies to in accordance with their own prejudices).
The muscular bluster from the thin-skinned, glass-jawed tubermensch will no doubt continue as on brand. But the real Spud is a tremulous poltroon hiding from scrutiny and disappearing when under pressure. He'll turn up for tummy tickles from tame media but it's Jane "Marg" Hume (I can't believe she's not better) and Whiney-the-Poo and Eyesore (Suss Ley and Bridget McKenzie) who he deploys as human shields elsewise. When needs must he's even resorted to the innumerate Angus "Squizzy" Taylor, Fidel deFigueres Man of the Year.
To date the strategy has been to hope that things got worse...that our bad news would be their good news. Plus an occasional thought bubble (as Albo said "all bubble and no thought") and a sampling of Trumpisms. They've even gone off the boil on nuclear power - a plaintive pitch from Scooter doppelganger Homely Ted O'Brien is all we've had of late.
So what would Spud accomplish if, gods save us, he falls into the job? <cue dry retching and whimpering>
A nuance-free zone, a lumpen boob of no discernable worthiness, tone-deaf with a robust stupidity that could be used as road base and with a track record of inanity, monumental fusterclucks and dodgy dealings - he'll move to hasten the shift to the hard right, milk the politics of grievance to cultivate an ascendant authoritarianism, cynically exploit antisemitism as a filtering mechanism to target the muzzies, prosecute the culture wars, persecute the powerless (particularly if of a darkish hue) and work to entrench the neoliberal agenda of shifting public money into corporate hands. The promise of Oz as a renewable energy powerhouse driving national wellbeing will be shot in the head (NBN anyone? Thank you again Malcolm).
All of this will be championed by Sky News, Stokes' minions, 2GB, 3AW - Bolt, Murray, Credlin et al
and the toadies from the Murdoch vomitorium such as the appalling Greg Sheridan. Covered in gravy stains and smelling of stale piss he puts a clothes peg on his foreskin to keep his nutsack off his slippers and the only reason he's got a chin is so that Rupert Murdoch has got somewhere to rest his balls when he is in town. That's the quality of the type that fervently champions our Baldrick. FFS!
Sending us broke and backwards, how Trumpy would Spud go?
¹ "John Howard has particularly influenced Dutton’s socially conservative culture-war focus on issues such as race and immigration. While Howard used a dog whistle, he writes, Dutton uses a foghorn." Lech Blain ala Good cop, bad cop, Inside Story.
"Escalation by escalation, embellishment by embellishment, the Liberal leader is inhabiting the zone of the political fabulist."
Katharine Murphy, The Guardian. 14/10/23.
Merivale agrees to no-admission payment of $19.25m to former employees who allege they were underpaid. news.com.au
A work of art. Chapeau Geezer. Chapeau
Sensational writing once again!! You capture this decrepit mob so well!!
👍your best yet and very timely.
A word portrait as sharp as a photograph.
Facts matter for facts sake! This is one of your best Grumpy! From Hemmes (Are you with me Geezer and readers?) to patent leather shoes in a Catholic school girl's playground, all has been exposed! The Dick Tater (With your permission Grumpy) has been exposed and the slack response is patently exposed as a limp appendage!