Ok, the other day someone asked me why I don’t seem to write as much satire anymore. There’s too much competition, I explained. But I promised to give it another go. However, in the past few days, I’ve been totally gobsmacked by how hard it is to outdo these brilliant exponents of irony:

“TWO things defined the Rudd and Gillard governments as the worst in our history and the two individuals as our worst ever prime ministers.

The first was the carbon tax — the ultimate destination of the broader insanity after Coppenfloppen in 2009, which gripped leaders and party, leading them to press on with, one Gillard-inspired hiccup aside, saving the world from a non-existent global warming, on our own, with the world’s highest and most pervasive tax on carbon dioxide emissions.”

Terry McCrann

Or this from the master, Andrew Blot

MYTH 4: You can divide and conquer

Which idiots in Labor thought it smart to turn Australians against each other?

Labor thought that was a great campaign technique, pitting women against men, poor against the “greedy” rich, workers against miners. How stupid.

Make someone your enemy and they’ll never vote for you. Make enough enemies and you cannot win. Labor must lose that hectoring and bullying tone. Humility and respect are the new political virtues.

And Labor should drop other hallmarks of the arrogant – like its itch to censor newspapers and restrict free speech.

More respect, please.

More bringing together of Australians. Less preaching and more persuasion.

Someone managed to convince me that these were real and that Murdoch isn’t just some comedian’s attempt to bring Mr Burns to life, he actually exists and runs a media organization. I was initially shocked, but after taking the information in, I decided that what Australia needs now is a satirist in the Jonathan Swift class. I took up my pen (well, actually my keyboard), but before I could put pen to paper, I came across this from Paul Sheehan:

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/welcome-to-the-abbottoir-20130915-2tsrm.html

It contains such satiric gems as:

The community of people that hived around the ”(Tony Abbott) Worst PM in Australian History” website is a celebration of closed minds. The general tenor of the prefabricated outrage is a contempt for the democratic process itself. As one comment put it: ”This is an illegitimate government. It is an illegal government. And it will get no co-operation from us. Everything it sends to the Senate will be sent back, or put on hold, until it resigns or is removed.”

Completely absent from all the petulance is any sense of irony about its own intolerance.”

I mean, after the past three years of idiots asserting Gillard’s illegitimacy and the comments about Rudd being the worst PM since Whitlam, no wait Gillard is the worst PM ever, now we’ve got Rudd back and he’s worse than Gillard, such an attack on the irony of the “Tony Abbott – Worst PM in History” while complaining about the Facebook page’s lack of irony is satire that I just can’t beat.

And as for his complain that GetUp! was hiding its true agenda because it “operates on behalf of big unions, the Greens and the hard-left while presenting itself as a community-based organisation.” Well, one must say that stuck it to all those conspiracy theorists who accused the IPA of hiding its true agenda just because no-one knows who funds it.

But to follow it up with: “The campaigns to destroy Jones through viral trolling both bounced off the wider community. Alan Jones’ show never ceased to dominate its timeslot and quickly returned to a full line-up of advertisers”.

Calling Alan Jones listeners the wider community – his demographic of retirees in Sydney “the wider community”?!?!?? – but GetUp and Change.org just speak for unions, those concerned for the environment, those concerned for social justice, those wanting a fair go for women and anyone who thought that saying that Gillard’s father died of shame may have crossed the line. Even The Chaser boys can’t do satire like this.

And for those of you thinking that Paul Sheehan may be serious, remember that he writes for that left-wing media organization, Fairfax, so it has to be satire.

Doesn’t it?