FauxMo has now returned from his one man band tour to Washington. Invited by the orange PT Barnum ("there's a sucker born every minute") our be-spectacled, chubby PM No Friends was vaporous at the prospect of playing dress-ups with the richest kid in school. It's rumoured that he even shat his pants with excitement.
Morrison flatters himself that he's a master marketer, a puller-off (now, now) of miracles, so it will be interesting to see to what extent he'll borrow from his new, orange BFF's grab bag of grift and graft and sleight of hand trickery.
Morrison was too star-struck to realise that Trumplethinskin had jizzed all over his back simply to admire his own reflection ... the Narcissist In Chief has no interest in Morrison other than as a compliant rent boy and stooge, someone with whom to taunt China, an urger to back-up the cowardly schoolyard bully's bluster on Iran. Morrison was the ideal dupe for Trump's flagrant schmooze, willingly jeopardising our relationship with our biggest trading partner and risking entanglement in another counter-productive Middle Eastern conflict in exchange for a photo op and a tickle behind the ear.
Despite his smug self-belief FauxMo is a lightweight; a vacuous phony, a fatuous, hollow vessel who seeks validation from prosperity gospelling hucksters. How did he imagine that his knee-bending to a malignant narcissist and sex predator would play out at home? Did he imagine that blowing The Donald would add some gravitas to his faked image? Why did he think that being cheered by a rabid rabble of slope-headed MAGAs at a cardboard box factory would be a good look?
Macca Dakka
And who in their right mind would schedule in for the 2019 FauxMo Bend-over Tour a photo-op of Skidmark in front of a MacDonald's drive-through sign at a Chicago innovation hub?
The Engadine Maccas dak-shatting saga is a source of wide bemusement and there can be little doubt that the Americans' intel on Skiddy includes his infamous brown-out at the southern suburbs junkfood emporium, so somewhere some anonymous jokester in the White House logistics team is having a bit of a laugh at our incontinent PM's expense. How the actual fuck did this not raise a red flag with the self-styled master marketer?
It's also noteworthy that the PM of the Liberal Party (the destroyers of a functional NBN and saboteurs of clean energy initiatives, the dig-it-up-and-ship-it-out Luddites) thinks that a junk food drive through menu represents notable innovation. FMD!)
FauxMo's take-aways
Did Shatty think he'd look good in comparison to the gaga MAGA? Was there an element of playing up to Oz's own happy clapping Armageddon-rich gravy-trainers, a reliable cohort of fraudsters whose talent for bilking the gormless, the dull-eyed, the callow and the just plain greedy is a template for our prime faecal-spreader's behaviour?
Does the huge pool of religious Trumper whackos in the US offer a potential source of additonal funding for the god-botherer infested Lying Nasty Party? Morrison's draft guest list for the shindig was said to have included a close mentor, wealth accumulation consultant and CEO of Mammonites For Jesus Inc. Why would that be? Lifting the profile of a god-for-profit shonk in the huge market that is the land of the easily duped is my guess.
But what are the take-aways from the tour for FauxMo? Trump's chutzpah with his constant and blatant lying must've impressed our Liar From The Shire who, while perfectly at ease with his own pork pies, has seen first hand that opportunity exists to ramp it up a few notches.
FauxMo's "Canberra bubble" and "gossip" is a tad more nuanced than Trump's "fake news" but I have bet a round of beers that FauxMo will test the waters by letting that term slip from his smirky lips real soonish.
What's he up to?
The Liberal Party's dirty tricks have included the wedge and dog-whistle since the dark days of John The Lying Rodent Howard as has the ideology of divide and conquor. Australia's more enlightened compulsory turn-up-to-vote system means that our pollies do not need to encourage their ragged fringes to vote with some shameless appeals to bigotry ... but yet that is the trajectory that the Libs are on. They'll go the full Hanson should the nightmare of a Trump 2020 victory materialise.
Fear, uncertainty and doubt (the FUD factor) is another Tory tradition - it served FauxMo well in 2019 with a fall-over-the-line win. Will that close call motivate a further slide to the RWNJ practices of victimisation and ostracism of easy targets? Of course it will. The only issue is whether they will find inspiration in Trump's megaphone tactics;
Trump's MAGAs are FauxMo's "quiet Australians" - querulous, easily frightened and hence easily manipulated. Slogans not policies; not vision, not action but a dulled, gulled "silent majority" - it works here (taxes) just as well as it does in the Land Of The Introspection-Free (guns).
With FUD comes authoritariansim. A fearful public is a compliant public and both the LNP and the GOP are ardent practitioners albeit in different ways. Here the Tories raid unions, journalists and the ABC whereas that could not happen in the U.S. But authoritarianism presents FauxMo with an image problem.
Our shape shifting pants shitter contrived an image for himself of a typical suburban goofy dad - gobbin' pies and kneckin' beers at the footie and mounting machinery at factories and farms. It fooled enough of the dupes and the stupid to get him over the line so does he keep up the charade and dispense with his moth-balled shouty hardman persona, the tough talking jailer, the demoniser of dusky hordes?
He's got a Howardesque rat cunning - he signed off on the shivving of Malcolm Turnbull but made sure he had no fingerprints on the weapon nor blood stains on his shirt but how will he now further manipulate his image? 'Bloated, dysfunctional, orange narcissist' won't make the short list I'm sure and Spud-Dutton has copyrighted the fascist dictator persona.
I'm thinking a paternalistic cross between Pig Iron Bob Menzies and Joh Bjelke-Petersen wrapped in some good ol' Trumpian razza-matazz is a theme that would appeal to him. If it doesn't come off and Spud goes in for the kill he can always get a job at Engadine Maccas as a bucket boy.
A closer look at Scott Morrison’s CV - Crikey
Engadine Macca's rumour - KIIS