Look, just piss off, OK? Every time you add another comment I get a bloody stink-bomb in my email in-tray. And I’m really not interested in chatting. You think I’m pompous and boring and drivelly. Good-o. No probs. That’s just fine. You’re probably right, too. Well done.

Now off the f**k, mate. Better things, both, etc. He said cheerfully.

*Just Another F**king Anonymous Dipstick In Cyberspace.

And what I’m saying, (although admittedly quite nasty), is right.

And look, ‘John2066’: anonymous commenters on the internet sniping at my writing style are not high on my list of insomnia causes. Find the nuts to put a real name to your witticisms about cancer and maybe then I’ll consider your tip on concision.

Though why anyone would ever waste time laboring to write short in an unpaid forum with unlimited space has always mystified me. Personally I think it’s wankish affectation. This isn’t The New Yorker. It’s an electronic dunny wall. Certainly judging by your pearls of sit-down wisdom, John2066.

Seriously now - not being nasty - do you really think anyone really wades through your long-winded boring posts?

JG, be grateful if you could see your way to deleting the first lot: from the opening ‘So anyhoo…’ all the way to par 6, line 4, where you see the comment finish with ‘if need be. And we’, then loop back to begin again: ‘So anyhoo, here’s how…’ and so on. From that second ‘So anyhoo’ on to the end, to stay. (The hyperlink hot text of the second ‘here’s how’ is a handy visual clue to honing in on the actual join.)

Mate, you’re a generous editor and I’m much obliged. This is a long bit of muck, and I mucked it up. But I think this kind of close-read ‘deconstruction’ - *spews, but fondly* - is still worth doing from time to time, in real time, and not entirely inappropriate for this thread, given the nature of Guy’s article - reviewing the reffo issue reviewer, as it were - and the fact that Bernard’s parallel thread (on the issue itself) is where the pacier, less introspective conversational action is going gangbusters. Truly appreciate your tolerance, and if you can manage to tidy me up to boot, I’ll promise to shoosh for a good long bit.

Best regards, JG. That Crikey is going like a house on fire doesn’t need me to tell you. Congrats. Jack Robertson.

Nah. Me neither.

They discover to their great cost in places like Malaysia or Indonesia where we try and deflect them into our rat hole prisons that they can surely apply for refugee status, but they do not get protection.

The meeja in this country is as pathetic as ever Robbo, not a brain to bless themselves with the dear old soaks.

Alternatively, maybe as overdue penance, by all means simply ditch the bloody lot if preferred. In defence, my intentions were pure - even if my execution was farcical.

PAUL KELLY, POLITICAL ANALYST: The problem Kevin Rudd has got Barrie - sure, maybe if you spake it such in passing, O Oracle, maybe if you annoint it just so - is that the policy is not working. - O, but whereth be Thy benchmark, O Oracle? ‘Gainst what Yonder Mythic Measure doest Thee plumb thy annointing mark, this cursed ‘failure’ of which you portend? How parseth Thee the multiple causal factors in boaty movements, and all that, like, nuanced jazz? - We’ve still got - we, we, who is this ‘we’ to be? - the 78 Sri Lankans on the Oceanic Viking off Indonesia. That’s his difficulty. - Ah, so ‘we’ is ‘he’ (and ‘one’ is ‘me’, and I’m stuck in a Beatles melody…- And the effect of the media blitz that he engaged in this week was to highlight his own difficulty, short of any solution. - mu-mu-mu-mu-mime-not-talking-I’m not-talking not me, not me, not me, not me, I’m not here, I’m not implicated in this blitz or its purported effect, not me, not me-mu-mu-mu, read my next book in 2020, it’ll be even bigger and fatter and more Impeccably Balanced&Impartial than Patriots - So if public opinion is shifting on the issue of asylum seekers - me, you all cry, a Shifter-in-chief, moi? Who are youse callin’ a Murdochian tool, fellah? - I don’t see how the Prime Minister’s efforts this week helped at all. O Oracle, you simpering, well-meaning Dixieland tootler, you; get with the goddamned Information Age and its wildly intra-tumbling be-bop spirals and sustained feedback loops, willya? - Meanwhile they’ve - righto, so it’s ‘they’ now - got Australian officials trying to persuade the Sri Lankans to get off the boat. There were reports this week of a generous offer being made to them. - buckets of ‘em, mate, from oodles of us (at least half now, shorely; check out Bernard Keane’s mighty sonnet just next door, for starters; what the hell, give those generous ‘uns a friendly spruik for a change even, whydon’tcha? ‘Balance’, dude, and all that…- But the signs - O Oracle, unmystify us those signs - at this stage seem to be that the Sri Lankans are determined to hold the line. They calculate that they can crack Kevin Rudd, persuade him to back down and bring the boat to Christmas Island. - And…WHAMMO!!…‘crack’, ‘back down’…there’s your story right there, Gallery youngsters, have at it; don’t you call yourself an ‘Enlightenment progressive’, Mr Paul Kelly, not even a socially conservative one, in the great and decent traditions of muscular Christianity, or Kant, or Burke, or even bloody Voltaire. Watery weasel word choices, weak Ruddian all-things-phrasing, passive voice instincts…until those lazy, killer, mass media imperative shorthands, likely unknowing, totally debate-framing. Thus does trickle-down ‘public opinion’ ebb and sway, mate. Thus, does it ooze down.

Finally, to bed it in and tie it down and, like, totally wash his personal wordsmithing hands, we get the ‘Peter Harvey, Canberra’ summation&sign-off, complete with sterile, distancing, abstracting but thoroughly-loaded intro-clause (pure John Howard): - In a situation of course where asylum seekers don’t have the right to self select their country of residence… - followed by a pre-emptive, vaguely-flagpoled threat disguised as pompous, mock-chin-stroking ‘a wise-man-would-do-thus’ Lofty Punditry (pure Rupert bloomin’ Murdoch) - if Rudd backs down, then he’ll need a genuine media blitz to explain that decision and how it equates with tough border protection.

It’s not his fault. Shakespeare couldn’t f**king get it all in a ‘balanced’ way in those 45 seconds of live TV, either. It’s not Kelly’s fault that we have all knowingly colluded in the reduction of the way we talk about difficult matters in the Town Square…to this pointless, but incalculably damaging (for us all) exercise in electron wastage. It’s not Kelly’s fault…but it’s surely his obligation - he has one of the few chairs on the podium at all, and his is as lofty as they come - to do something about it. To make public discourse more concrete and specific again. To lead the way through this fog.

I happen to think - have long thought, yes, it’s a dull, boorish and oft-aired obsession, across a decade online now - that even as a reporter, the only real way to do that - to fill throwaway words with weighty meaning again - is to shackle your fleshy personage - your views, your stance, as a human, a voter, a citizen, as an amateur literate person - anchoringly to the carefully crafted words you produce and release into the public realm, as a professional one - whatever your role, whatever your views may be. Democratic transparency, journalistic precision, genuine impartial disinterest, real civic inclusion, true public debate generally on this and all equally-thorny and complex matters - not to mention human decency and especially dignity (the Kantian, Christian dignity of human specificity) , wherever you stand - would have been served 10,000,000 times better, had Kelly started that snippet this morning with ‘Just so listeners know, I happen to think we should…’ followed by a twenty-words-or-less hard verb soundbite of where he stood ‘as one of the rest of us’, even if - just like a lot of the rest of us, maybe - it was a simple ‘I’m f**ked for ideas, too, mate’.

Hey, if nothing else, he’d get a taste of what ‘the rest of us’ have to put up with nowadays - if we’re lucky, a five second TV window to explain in words of less than three syllables how to make the bloody world perfect, right now, all the time. As counter-intuitive as this notion may feel to our senior, entrenched Boomer media leaders - the Kelly’s, the Oakeses, the Grattans, the O’Briens - this now IMHO the only viable way forward, if journalism is to have any real contextualising, much less watchdogging, future as a democratic fourth estate.

Thanks for your tolerance, Crikey (and Guy). I know this is idiotically lengthy and tedious and banal…but this - Kelly, this morning - is exactly the…well, lengthy and tedious and banal way it works in the first place, huh. It’s not Rupes we need to call b/s on, or ‘the meeja’, and then, not strategically; it’s individual influential bylines. Story by story. Phrase by phrase. Word by word if need be. And we So anyhoo, here’s how Paul ’ Moi, influential?’ - Kelly spun it this morning. And it’s worth a bit of an old school Fisk - ah, memories, memories - to see just how hard the fellow is trying to keep himself snuggled away in that ‘disinterested’ Swiss-box. Bear in mind that this morning - just like every Sunday morning for the last half decade - every single political parliamentarian, pundit, press hack, party flak, policy advisor and otherwise mainstream-media conduit to the Great Australian Peeble would have been watching, most (though they’d never admit it) with quivering spin-pens-to-cometh metaphorically poised, a-dippin’ an’ a-duckin’ at every inflection and nuance, lest they miss The Oracle’s hints ‘ponst The Way T’will Best Play This Week (Kelly’s, italicised):

PAUL KELLY, POLITICAL ANALYST: The problem Kevin Rudd has got Barrie - sure, maybe if you spake it such in passing, O Oracle, maybe if you annoint it just so - is that the policy is not working. - O, but whereth be Thy benchmark, O Oracle? ‘Gainst what Yonder Mythic Measure doest Thee plumb thy annointing mark, this cursed ‘failure’ of which you portend? How parseth Thee the multiple causal factors in boaty movements, and all that, like, nuanced jazz? - We’ve still got - we, we, who is this ‘we’ to be? - the 78 Sri Lankans on the Oceanic Viking off Indonesia. That’s his difficulty. - Ah, so ‘we’ is ‘he’ (and ‘one’ is ‘me’, and I’m stuck in a Beatles melody…- And the effect of the media blitz that he engaged in this week was to highlight his own difficulty, short of any solution. - mu-mu-mu-mu-mime-not-talking-I’m not-talking not me, not me, not me, not me, I’m not here, I’m not implicated in this blitz or its purported effect, not me, not me-mu-mu-mu, read my next book in 2020, it’ll be even bigger and fatter and more Impeccably Balanced&Impartial than Patriots - So if public opinion is shifting on the issue of asylum seekers - me, you all cry, a Shifter-in-chief, moi? Who are youse callin’ a Murdochian tool, fellah? - I don’t see how the Prime Minister’s efforts this week helped at all. O Oracle, you simpering, well-meaning Dixieland tootler, you; get with the goddamned Information Age and its wildly intra-tumbling be-bop spirals and sustained feedback loops, willya? - Meanwhile they’ve - righto, so it’s ‘they’ now - got Australian officials trying to persuade the Sri Lankans to get off the boat. There were reports this week of a generous offer being made to them. - buckets of ‘em, mate, from oodles of us (at least half now, shorely; check out Bernard Keane’s mighty sonnet just next door, for starters; what the hell, give those generous ‘uns a friendly spruik for a change even, whydon’tcha? ‘Balance’, dude, and all that…- But the signs - O Oracle, unmystify us those signs - at this stage seem to be that the Sri Lankans are determined to hold the line. They calculate that they can crack Kevin Rudd, persuade him to back down and bring the boat to Christmas Island. - And…WHAMMO!!…‘crack’, ‘back down’…there’s your story right there, Gallery youngsters, have at it; don’t you call yourself an ‘Enlightenment progressive’, Mr Paul Kelly, not even a socially conservative one, in the great and decent traditions of muscular Christianity, or Kant, or Burke, or even bloody Voltaire. Watery weasel word choices, weak Ruddian all-things-phrasing, passive voice instincts…until those lazy, killer, mass media imperative shorthands, likely unknowing, totally debate-framing. Thus does trickle-down ‘public opinion’ ebb and sway, mate. Thus, does it ooze down.

Finally, to bed it in and tie it down and, like, totally wash his personal wordsmithing hands, we get the ‘Peter Harvey, Canberra’ summation&sign-off, complete with sterile, distancing, abstracting but thoroughly-loaded intro-clause (pure John Howard): - In a situation of course where asylum seekers don’t have the right to self select their country of residence… - followed by a pre-emptive, vaguely-flagpoled threat disguised as pompous, mock-chin-stroking ‘a wise-man-would-do-thus’ Lofty Punditry (pure Rupert bloomin’ Murdoch) - if Rudd backs down, then he’ll need a genuine media blitz to explain that decision and how it equates with tough border protection.

It’s not his fault. Shakespeare couldn’t f**king get it all in a ‘balanced’ way in those 150 seconds of live TV, either. It’s not Kelly’s fault that we have all knowingly colluded in the reduction of the way we talk about difficult matters in the Town Square…to this pointless, but incalculably damaging (for us all) exercise in word and electron wastage. It’s not Kelly’s fault…but it’s surely his obligation - he has one of the few chairs on the podium at all, and his is as lofty as they come - to do something about it. To help make public discourse more concrete and specific again. To help lead the way through the epistemological fog.

I happen to think - have long thought, yes, it’s a dull, boorish and oft-aired obsession, across a decade online now - that even as a detached reporter, the only real way to do that - to fill throwaway words with weighty meaning again - is to shackle your fleshy concrete world personage - your views, your stance, as a human, a voter, a citizen, as an amateur literate person - anchoringly to the carefully crafted words you produce and release into the abstract public realms, as a professional one - whatever your role, whatever your views may be. Democratic transparency, journalistic and literary precision, genuine impartial disinterest, real civic inclusion, public debate generally on this and all equally-thorny and complex matters - not to mention human decency and especially dignity (the Kantian, Christian dignity of human specificity) , wherever you stand - would have been served 10,000,000 times better, had Kelly started that snippet this morning with ‘Just so listeners know, I happen to think we should…’ followed by a twenty-words-or-less hard verb soundbite of where he stood ‘as one of the rest of us’, even if - just like a lot of the rest of us, maybe - it was a simple ‘I’m f**ked for ideas, too, mate’.

Hey, if nothing else, he’d get a taste of what ‘the rest of us’ have to put up with nowadays - if we’re lucky, a five second TV window to explain in words of less than three syllables how to make the bloody world perfect, right now, all the time. As counter-intuitive as this notion may feel to our senior, entrenched Boomer media leaders - the Kelly’s, the Oakeses, the Grattans, the O’Briens - this now IMHO the only viable way forward, if journalism is to have any real contextualising, much less watchdogging, future as a democratic fourth estate.

Thanks for your tolerance, Crikey (and Guy). I know this is lengthy and tedious and banal…but this - Kelly, this morning - is exactly the…well, lengthy and tedious and banal way shitty wordsmithery tends to work its black satanic magickes on tender human flesh in the first place, huh. It’s not Rupes we need to call b/s on, or ‘the meeja’, and then, not strategically; it’s individual influential bylines. Story by story. Phrase by phrase. Word by word if need be. (‘Crack’. ‘Back down’. Sprung, Mr Kelly, sir. With respect, there are many different ways to define other, related words - like ‘resolve’, and ‘toughness’, and ‘strength’ - than you seem to be impying…)

Anyway, we can do it now. Is the point. Of this here intertubemagizmonator. And so…well, I think we should. Until they figure it out. And factor it in. Was all.

And what on earth, you just have to wonder, is poor Mr Kelly ever going to make of Mr Howard’s flameful and narcissistic re-entry into the refugee debate? (Geez, that man must really hate the Liberal Party of Australia. And especially Malcolm Turnbull.) So will we perhaps, finally, see the Imperious Influencer grit his journalistic teeth, chomp down on some steely bullet prose, and send a liberating rush clean through the entire Gallery apparati…say, by deploying the splendiferous Mungo McCallum’s eternal gem ‘unflushable turd’? O, dearest, dear Lord of Eloquent Mainstream Prose, let it be so. Let it be just thus.

Tic toc, time to choose, Paul Kelly. Time to decide where you stand, as a man. Deep breath now - the first real time choice is always the hardest. And then where-ever it may be, absolutely everything about discharging the weighty obligations of professional reportage and analysis becomes clearer and cleaner, and the subsequent pen-fruits more useful to a wider, vigorous democratic debate. Even - especially - in these most complex, two-sided issues of practical political choosing.

Hope all’s well, and you’re not too miffed with The Kev. ‘Xpect you are, but. Cheers, mate.

Jack, mate good to see you writing something lucid about the old evil hawk himself.

Jack Robertson

Its really satisfying to see that filthy, malignant piece of murdoch cancer, The Australian, die a slow death, hopefully one as long and prolonged as the much unlamented Frank Devine, and just the sort of long painful cancer ridden death we all hope Rupert will have to finish the bastard off once and for all, as well as his grovelling pig-animal ‘journalists’.

Impartiality in journalism dies very easily, it seems. As Victoria comments above, its decedence is observable even at the ABC (though even that “even” betrays an expectation no longer presumptively warrantable). Leigh Sales is one of the worst offenders; her chumminess is infuriating. Tony Jones’ efforts on “Q&A” to pursue expert political commentary while deferring to a democratic pseudo-populism is disqualifyingly middle-brow and for the most part inconsequential. And as for culture, Jennifer Byrne’s “First Tuesday Bookclub” is a portent, or perhaps more alarmingly a confirmation, of the Oprahfication of literary criticism. Its cosy inclusiveness demands the substitution for real literary discussion of the merely subjective exchange of impressionistic vanities: I like, I like, I like, I think, I think, I think … chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.

Contrast the epistemological concreteness of the ‘culture war’ protagonists’ cheerful partisanship with the hopelessly wafty, shifting thin air of Kelly and the ‘mainstream’ press, tail-chasing the chimera of ‘balance’ to the absurd point where to be a ‘responsible’ journo these days you need, apparently, to get an eloquent quote from the Devil to the effect that there’s a strong view among some sections of the Australian Peeble that black is, in fact, white, blah blah… on every contentious ‘political ishoo’ of the moment- like, there’s another kind, is there? - no matter what. Manifest in individuals like Kelly, what you end up with a entire career that can be summed up in a single phrase: sustained professional equivocation. I think it’s a matter of mundance writerly insecurity as much as anything else, frankly: the sheer careerist terror, on the part of the lifelong jobbing opinion-giver (in a desperately insecure and competitive workplace), of ever being shown, by history - by life! - to have been wrong.

This isn’t - this can’t be - how any sane epistemological can work, can hold together. (Anyway, it’s a fear wholly misplaced. Janet A is wrong every other day, and last I looked her career’s going gangbusters.) Yet the workaday agencies of our daily discourse - the ‘mainstream’, ‘grown-up’, ‘serious’ media filters as defined and trickle-down-decreed by pundits like Kelly - are now built upon just such a dismal, but surely now doomed, dogma: O dear Lord of Slick Prose, grant me the eloquent power to write about the concrete world I see in such a goddamned, pissant mode that I, my saleable byline, shall never, no matter what, have to concede analytical error. Not exactly a heart-stirringly ferocious self-admonition for a young ambitous gunslinger to sticky-tape above their Canberra cubbyhole PC, huh? And what is really a tad heart-stirring just now, touchingly so (because we all of us want juice from our political writers, we want to watch them ignite on the page, like a Rundle, even, if they’ve got it in them at all), is the impulse to sympathise deeply with the plight of very well-meaning journalists trying to re-set their professional gyro’s in a riotously toppling moment; their ever more (I think) contorted attempts to simultaneously build their careers, gain contacts, break stories, do their jobs well on a day-to-day basis - just the facts, ma’am - and try to hang onto the journalistic ideals of a past, less media-saturated era…while trying like hell to ignore the epistemological elephant in the cyber-room, which is that those facts are increasingly of their own making, merely in the reporting of them.

How to grapple with this in the longer term in a ‘post-institutional authority’ era, I know not either, Tonto. But as a post-Boomer, like, completely ecked-off after four decades of samey, too-earnest drone, it’s sure fun - sort of - watching erstwhile imperious page-lofties like Paul Kelly flap about the po-mo breeze, looking just a little bit lost. No matter how fat and weighty the Stately One’s latest mighty tome…you just know it ain’t gunna be heavy enough to hold the poor bugger in place, there in that thrillingly unholding centre. My advice - as a certified Howard-hating loony and serial, very long-winded internet cuckoo-trollumist, is to arc up a blogsite like all us young ‘uns, Paul, start flapping your prosy wings like the goggle-eyed political maddie we all know is itchin’ to burst free, in there….O, and fly, my little pretty, fly, FLY!

His chafed lips are still raw. A legacy of all those years with Suharto.

While we’re on the subject of capping bores, ex-ALP Sen. Loosely keeps leaking into the loungeroom…