Will Smirko jump the shark?
Will it be the 100,000th U.S. death from corona virus, their 44 million unemployed, the jackbooted response to the BLM protests following George Floyd’s murder or a plummeting Dow Jones that historians will mark as the tipping point for the orange globule who infests 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
After a continuous, four year stream of outrages from the sickbag residue of Dr Evil mixed with Sideshow Bob and sprinkled with Papa Doc Duvalier that is Donald J. Trumplethinskin it has become apparent that the depths of his depravity are bottomless, that no immorality is beyond his embrace; none of which has deterred his enablers, sycophants and collaborators.
With an appalling track record of corruption and incompetence is it possible to point to any one circumstance as the beginning of the end for him, his demon spawn and their crime syndicate?
Perhaps it is his reported cowering in trembling, pee-stained fear in the panic room at the White House, that icon of American presidential power and prestige, that is the most appropriate symbolic moment.
But the tipping point could be the immediate aftermath of that humiliation when he had peaceful citizens tear-gassed and clubbed to stage-manage a cowardly photo-op where he looked as natural as a orangutan on a unicycle when with witless silence and vacant expression he held aloft an upside-down bible, the contents of which are as unread by him as they are by the metaphorical orangutan.
Image from usatoday.com
In comparison, how good is Australia? A prime minister does not have the powers of a U.S. president, nor do we suffer such an imbecilic, syphilitic madman at the helm. We had an idiot in charge two Prime Ministers ago after which farcical fuckwittery was removed from the Tory’s list of essential skills for high office.
Our man is not insane. Smirko Morrison’s messaging is not Trump-like, off-the-cuff, incoherent ramblings. His forté is market-tested, focus-grouped propaganda and glib slogans that camouflage rather than amplify the mendacity and grift that is at the core of the us-&-them RWNJ mindset – “unfunded empathy”, “a fair go for those who have a go”, “separation of church and state was set up to protect the church from the state, not the other way around.” Smirko doesn’t do nuance – he does the dog-whistle.
Smirko does not sexually assault women, he doesn’t party with high profile paedophiles, he doesn’t brag about his own wealth, he doesn’t sport a ridiculous, yellow merkin on his head, he doesn’t suggest sticking a lava lamp up your arse as a virus cure. Trump has had multiple wife-changing experiences, Smirko has stuck by his first. Morrison’s not Trump-like. But he is Trump-lite.
Morrison’s standards may be higher than Trump’s but then Trump does set a very, very low bar. Smirko’s eye-fluttering, fan-girl crush on Trump means not just that his staff need to towel-dry his chair after a phone call from the tangerine ballsack but also that his morals are quite flexible, and that in line with his prosperity gospelling principles, wealth is the measure for his mangina-frothing admiration.
Unlike Trump, Smirko attacks the media by stealth not by megaphone – raiding journalists, defunding the ABC and using his tame propaganda outlets 2GB, Sky News (sic) and, primarily, the Murdoch muckers where many millions of our dollars are shovelled to bolster the withered billionaire’s empire of sleaze and disinformation, no questions asked.
As with the Republicans, the L/NP modus operandi is the game of mates and as with the Republicans it has become shamelessly blatant. They duck and weave and smirk and giggle at their cleverness in dodging accountability.
Sports rorts, regional swimming pools, the Regional Growth Fund, Building Better Regions Fund, government advertising on the tax-payers’ dime, Climate Solutions Fund, Urban Congestion Fund, Drought Communities Program, Regional Jobs and Investment Package – an eye watering $8 billion in nods and winks to Tory and marginal electorates in an asymmetric war against those electorates that do not meet the qualification criteria of contributing to the Tories’ hold on power.
(See Michael Pascoe goes back over the maths on government grant rorts – The New Daily).
But it doesn’t stop there – the Tories are nothing if not shockingly avaricious. Shadenfraud is the arousal a Tory politician experiences from gaming the system. Barking Barmy Joyce’s legover-of-the-moment must’ve been apprehensive after Barmy’s $80 million buy-back of dehydrated water from Angus “Fingers” Taylor’s old outfit Eastern Australia Agriculture! What became known dryly (!) as Watergate is but one dodge in Fingers’ portfolio of #gates whereby a coincidentally high number of Taylor familial enterprises benefited from unknowing taxpayers’ contributions – “Speaking of rorts,” Kaye Lee, The AIMN.
Hand-in-hand with the Tories’ graft comes a paranoid fear of scrutiny. The prospect of a federal integrity commission puckers the sphincters of the pillaging Tory hordes. And so supplementing the standard dissembling and obfuscation comes the stacking of boards with cronies, the disenfranchising of the public service, the politicising of the AFP and the quashing of dissent.
When Trump’s time comes he will not go quietly. The notion of him getting four more years seems more outlandish with each outrage. Surely the underlying strengths of American democracy will see this abhorrent aberration dragged by the ankles, drooling and gibbering, from under his bed.
In contrast, Smirko’s demise will be more pedestrian. There is not likely to be a jump-the-shark moment for him as there was with the Mad Monk’s plan to knight Prince Philip. Morrison is simply reverting to type – a mean and tricky, belligerent marketer of ragged neo-liberal ideology. His recent brief reprieve will come to an end, the shine will fade from this buffed beige jobbie and he’ll be told by a disillusioned electorate to “get off my lawn.” I can’t wait.
This article was originally published on The Grumpy Geezer.
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12 comments
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Baby Jewels -
Michael Taylor -
Jack Cade -
wam -
Kathryn -
Jack Cade -
RomeoCharlie29 -
Jack Cade -
Phil Pryor -
Grumpy Geezer -
Kronomex -
Elaine Richardson
Return to home pageI’m hoping for more than just a Trump loss at the election. I’m hoping also for an indication that Australians too, are sick of leaders who rule for themselves, treat us with disdain and as cash cows, use cruelty with regard to refugees, trash our environment and waste our money like it’s their plaything. Leaders who continually lie to the people, make and break promises, create more and more legislation that removes our rights as free citizens. Bring it on!
Baby J, I’m looking forward to Biden’s promise: if Trump doesn’t vacate the White House (in the hopeful event of his election loss), then the military will physically remove him.
Oh my, the excitement of the prospect keeps me awake at night.
Apart from the fact that neither candidate is worth voting for, the presidential election in November could be the lighting of a fuse that could untie the United States. If Trump loses, he will cry ‘foul’ and exhort the gun-wielding sister-shaggers to rise and take back the country. If, as is seriously suggested, Trump refuses to vacate the WH, who is going to drag him out? The police? All of the law enforcing agencies in the USA are probably Trumpists, hard core. If the Military moves in to drag him out, who will then stop martial law being declared?
World trade should dump the $US as the reserve currency anyway, but another year of US civil commotion would probably make it inevitable.
I’m watching Power v Crows. My heart sank when I saw that we had alopecic umpires – they always favour the team in the clown costumes.
Oh grumpy what hope your words have given me. Biden is hardly worthy but could roll trump because he doesn’t have the loonies hanging around his neck. .
Happily,. as an americophobe , trump nay have so damaged anerica that by next january theremay be no return.
me too jack all good so far. loved the quipn about taking the seats when the crows leave???
I believe any compassionate person with an IQ >10 is desperate to see the totally corrupt, mean-spirited manipulative marketeer, MorriScam, get kicked to the kerb at the next election. Sadly, as long as the weak, ineffective Albanese is at the helm of the Labor Party, it is doubtful that the ALP will win the next election! Albanese appears to be complicit in his silence; he is rarely seen (or heard) challenging, criticising or condemning any of the increasing acts of appalling, self-serving corruption and nepotism committed by the reckless, smug and undemocratic Morrison regime. Albanese has stayed “mum” throughout Morrison’s scandalous Sports Rorts and the ONLY members of the ALP I have seen loudly condemning the worst government in our history are the erudite, intelligent Kristine Kenneally, Tony Burke or Bill Shorten. For God’s sake, if Albanese hasn’t got the intestinal fortitude to stand up and loudly criticise Morrison, Dutton and the rest of the self-promoting sociopaths in the LNP, then he should stand down or, Labor should get rid of him and get another leader who will! Even long-standing Labor voters I know, do not like Albanese and tell me they are going to be voting Greens at the next election.
Wam
Yep! True, too!
The rest of the season is bound to be a disappointment…even if we won every game, it couldn’t feel any better than this!
Ok, footy out of the way first. Blues, down by a point and Eddie Betts is back. Sad/Great. Like all of you I am counting Trump out but worry about what happens if he refuses to go. Does Biden march into the White House with the army at his back? They must, after all, support the elected Commander in Chief. I think Biden is just the obverse side of a Trump coin, another Wall Street flunkey but given his incipient Dementia am counting on whoever is VP ascending to the role as the first woman President, ushering in some wholesale change in the US starting with serious gun control. Call me Pollyanna? As for Scummo, his tin ear regarding so many things recently surely must mean he’s on the skids.
I have always voted Labor, since and including 1972. I could not see what was wrong with Shorten or what was right with Albo. He is colourless and lacks fire or passion, and I could nominate 3 or 4 current ALP members who would be more attractive electorally. I don’t think the next ALP prime minister is even in the parliament.
The second most important government member is Frydenberg, and yet Jay Weatherill destroyed him on camera when he rubbished him about the fabricated ‘SA power failures due to ALP governance.’ The corporates got rid of Jay by a ‘boundary revision’ conducted by a member of the ‘family Vanstone’, converting 4 marginals to safe Liberal seats.
So a departed state premier showed how ducking useless the commonwealth government is by showing one of its leading lights as a clueless lightweight.
There is no hope for Australia when the federal opposition has a Biden-light as its leader. In fact there IS no ALP, which apart from a couple of front benchers and two fine female senators, is just another bunch of uninspiring time servers.
The Pathetic Moron gets noticed for absences, shitheadedness, other people’s efforts, rigged, bent, blunt wrongheadedness, while the LP and Greens cannot get noticed with passive leaders and leftover policies. When modern political operators get left alone to wallow cheerfully in their own sties of muddy, mucky, mischief, we all suffer. The conservatives know how hard it is to remove or even oppose an entrenched military or civil service, so they have made governing very like military and civil service tightly controlled, no opposing institutions, easily done with an overbearing all powerful media maggot morgue defying misfit like the big Yankee wankee. Policies of overbearing exploitation, abuse, control, suppression, domineering are “normal” in the abnormality of conservative supremacist posing.
Michael,
Too right. Perfect scenario is that he goes down big time in the election, refuses to leave and is dragged out by the military in full public view and the legal cases against him can proceed to court.
The MAGAs will go nuts – so hopefully no violence.
And if, and when, the LNP finally feels the breeze from the descending voter executioners axe on their collective neck they will develop a massive party wide case of selective amnesia and will carry on as if nothing has happened. Then the mighty, and tired worn out refrain of, “It’s all…” will ring out incessantly.
“The MAGAs will go nuts – so hopefully no violence.”
If you mean the knuckle dragging armed to the teeth redneck right wing conspiracy overloaded MAGA’s, then I believe violence and blood is almost guaranteed. I just hope I’m wrong but…
In the middle of all the muck and mayhem we’re dealing with, I couldn’t but help a chuckle or two whilst reading Grumpy Geezer’s piece. If I didn’t laugh I’d burst into tears (and that’s not a pretty sight either…lol) Keep up the good work AIMN; where would we be without youz….