The Loon Pond - Miranda Devine and Defending The Undefendable  

"The Loon Pond" has a look at the increasingly unhinged SMH conservative columnist Miranda Devine and her foaming attack on ex-Liberal party leader / member Malcolm Fraser for deviating from the increasingly extreme party line - Miranda Devine, and the assassination of Malcolm Fraser as typed by the inmates of the asylum of the SMH under the direction of the Marquis de Sade.

And so the trashing of Malcolm Fraser begins all over again.

Just after Janet Albrechtsen bemoaned the bee hive mind of the left, why here comes Miranda the Devine strutting along, determined to show just how much of a collective beehive mind the conservative commentariat contains.

If you join the modern Liberal party, it seems you'd better not be Piggy, or if you are, you should prepare for a 'kill the beast' party in best Lord of the Flies fashion.

In A convert to the preaching will have no power to change, the Devine is determined to prove that she's the bitch from hell, and she can shove the slipper into an old man with reckless abandon. Cop this for an opener, as she lumps Fraser in with Peter Carey:

You had to feel for Marcia Langton on ABC TV's Q&A panel this week, stuck between two men so terminally pompous, out of touch and in love with the sound of their own voices you felt at times they might fall stiffly off their chairs and writhe on the ground in private ecstasy.

Malcolm Fraser and Peter Carey, fresh from the Sydney Writers' Festival, are the sorts of self-styled intellectuals who give thinking a bad name.

Actually - and perhaps for the first time - I felt some kind of sympathy for Fraser and Carey, being given a dust up by a woman who gives thinking a bad name, and whom you couldn't - not without disgracing the concept - honour with the title self-styled intellectual.

Perhaps self-styled loon, or ratbag, or unstylish feral ranting and raving member of the personal abuse commentariat.

The next time you read some member of the commentariat blathering on about playing the man rather than the ball, or people dwelling on personalities rather than policies, remember it's fair game, and you can shove it up them Miranda style, preferably loaded with a goodly abundance of class hatred and spiteful bitterness.

You see, Fraser kept his quitting of the Liberal party very quiet, didn't use it to sell his book, and feared front page haymakers having a field day, and for good reason.

Cop this bit of payback and group think:

He (Fraser) has always gone out of his way to malign and belittle John Howard, his one-time treasurer who well and truly eclipsed him in the PM stakes. How it must have rankled that some half-deaf nerd from Canterbury Boys' High could best him, the tall imperious scion of the Victorian squattocracy who speaks as if he has a mouthful of cotton wool.

Sheesh, and they reckon the comrades are the ones to knife their own in the back. Take that literary icepick to the back of the neck Malcolm.

Miranda followed up with a tirade against distinguished american journalist Helen Thomas, who made the fatal faux pas of discussing whether or not it was right to create the state of Israel on land belonging to the Palestinians (our refusal to debate this guaranteeing that there will never be peace in the middle east - even once the oil runs out and we no longer feel the need to occupy Iraq, demonise the Iranians etc etc) - Acid tongue sinks the scribe who swam with anti-Israel sentiment.

They say the older you get, the less you care about what people think. The physical reason for elderly insouciance may be frontal lobe degeneration resulting in a loss of inhibition and social judgment.

But that's no excuse for the vile anti-Semitic outburst by Helen Thomas, America's "dean" of the White House press corps, who said Jews should "get the hell out" of Israel and "go home" to Poland or Germany.

Facing a barrage of well-deserved criticism, Thomas resigned on Monday from her job as a columnist with the Hearst News Service, just a couple of months before her 90th birthday. The doyenne of presidential press conferences going back to John F. Kennedy's days thus ended her 70-year career in disgrace.

Fellow SMH columnist (albeit one still in possession of his faculties) Mike Carlton made the mistake of criticising the Israeli attack on the flotilla trying to break the blockade of Gaza, and got a serve of his own - Funny, they remember their epithets but not their manners.

It is a ferocious beast, the Jewish lobby. Write just one sentence even mildly critical of Israel and it lunges from its lair, fangs bared. ''I rejoice every time a f---ing Palestinian dies, f--- them!!!! Israel should flatten Gaza with a nuclear strike and be done with it,'' said one of hundreds of Jewish emailers this week. ''How dare you insult Israel you over priviledged [sic] racist white moron, f--- you and your stupid article. I wish I could smash your dumb face in.''

The stupid article was last week's column, which suggested that Israel's attack on the Gaza flotilla was lethal idiocy and that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an unprincipled thug addicted to the use of military force.

Few of the emails were as brisk as that one. Many, though, were nakedly racist, such as this from a man named Schwarz. ''Do Jews do drive-by shootings every other day like in Sydney's south-west? Do Jews or Arabs make up a large proportion of the Australian jail population? Do Jews gang rape young girls in Sydney?'' he mused.

Others like to threaten. A travel agent from Double Bay drafted an apoplectic denunciation and circulated it to his friends. ''The more of us write with a copy [sic] to The Sydney Morning Herald, the more chance we may have that the Herald will change its one-eyed view of the situation and give us a more balanced reporting and maybe even sack Mike Carlton,'' he said hopefully. One of his chaverim mistakenly forwarded it to me.

It's standard operating procedure for the lobby to hurl accusations of anti-Semitism with that peculiar Israeli blend of paranoia and belligerence. ''That you are happy to indulge in hate-mongering makes you quite the sadist,'' wrote a man from Melbourne. ''Your article gives you away as an anti-Semite and as much as you may hide behind the guise of a pro-Palestinian humanitarian, your Holocaust revisionism in comparing the conflict of the modern era to the systematic extermination of the Jews shows your true colours.''

That is just plain dumb. My Jewish friends would confirm that I am not a sadistic, anti-Semitic, hate-mongering Holocaust denier. But I did enjoy the sneers about my manifold failings as a journalist. ''You are a cheap hack making money out of lies,'' was typical. ''Journalists are generally recruited if they have an IQ larger that their shoe size,'' was another. Yuk yuk, guffaw.

None of this is accidental. The Israel lobby, worldwide, is orchestrated in Jerusalem by a department in the Prime Minister's office with the rather Orwellian name of the Ministry for Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs. Less than 24 hours after the attack on the Mavi Marmara, the ministry hit the internet with ''important talking points'' for Jews around the world, the first of which was - surprisingly - that ''the Palestinian people are not under blockade''.

''Write letters to your local newspapers, comment on blogs and news websites, call in to radio programs and post links to social networking sites to help spread the real version of events,'' urged the deliciously named Mr Ronen Plot, the Ministry Director-General.

The Economist thinks the Israeli tactics are a disaster and need rethinking - Israel's siege mentality: The government’s macho attitude is actually making Israel weaker. I wonder if the neoconservative lunatic fringe will call them anti-semites (it might make for an interesting debate between and the other major grouping on the lunar right, the genuinely anti-semitic paleocon types who view the Economist as the house organ of the Rothschild empire).

Guy Rundle at Crikey reckons the government with a real problem is the Egyptian one - as the blockade wouldn't work if they weren't cooperating - Greater Israel, Greater Schmisrael — the Zionist entity is mad as a bag of cats.

To support Israel, must be like supporting Collingwood in a final these days, watching through the fingers of the hand. “Oh f-ck …don’t do that. What are you thinking?”

Yet, whatever the horrors of the IDF raid on the Gaza flotilla, it has certainly brought a brutal government, indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians, to account.