Cartoon courtesy of Alan Moir.
If asked to nominate a politician with a penchant for titty bars I suspect most people could name the distended Member for Manila and ping-pong ball fieldsman Gorgeous George Christensen. Gorgeous G, a devout Christian, is somewhat sensitive about the curiosity aroused by his frequent perver points accumulated at iffy Filipino dives where the sticky carpets are not solely a consequence of spilled beer. Press reports of his 28 trips and almost 300 days spent hanging out in the Philippines were vile smears according to our travelling vagophile. To be fair there should be some sympathy reserved for a bloke who can't see his own genitals without the use of a mirror on a selfie stick - there's the deprivation factor to consider. And we should stop fat shaming Jiggle-O George. He already has enough on his plate.
Then there's Kevin Rudd, the heedless man in topless bar and another conspicuously pious Christian who famously detoured into a Manhattan "gentlemens' club" that traded in overpriced booze and the display of ladies' pink bits. Apparently Kev was taken by surprise when confronted by a pert pair of areolae and a freshly-shaved flange and legged it for the exit. (After surviving FBI raids and ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani's crusade against smut, Scores nightclub is now closed. foxnews.com.)
Kev, a practicing, purse-lipped Miss Prissy was duly mortified after the local Murdoch mulch fortuitously published the story when, as Opposition leader the bible-toting Rudd was favoured to win the 2007 election. What Kev and News failed to anticipate was his popularity increasing as a consequence. What Kev also seemingly failed to realise at the time was that the bloke who'd steered him into the strip joint was not his pal.
Col Allan was Murdoch's New York Post's editor, the longest-serving editor at News Corp and a "Dubbo boy with a fondness for beer, women" and peeing into the office sink. Rudd was then Opposition foreign affairs spokesman. Whatever bonhomie that may have existed between the two at the time was not to last.
The scrotum squeezed through a shirt collar that is Rupert Murdoch lauded Allan as “one of the most outstanding editors of his generation”. Murdoch also stated, without irony or the hint of a piss-take that "Col has sought...to hold the powerful accountable, to assail corruption and to have a positive impact in New York and beyond." Integrity, truth and decency earning Rupert's respect? Apparently it's revenue that does it. “I’ll get fired not because Rupert doesn’t like the stories I put in the paper. I’ll get fired because we don’t sell newspapers” Allan told Lloyd Grove in a 2007 New York magazine profile.
Allen is the Murdoch myrmidon responsible for the crude front page splashes and blatant propaganda in News Corp's Daily Guano denigrating Rudd and the Labor government. You have to question the standards of sleazy New York nudie bars when this is the type of trough snorkeller they allow onto the premises.
Murdoch is the price we pay for a free press. The dullards, bigots, RWNJs, offence seekers, non-registrants on the IQ bell curve, the perpetually confused, car crash spectators, the venal and the lazy have a right to have their opinions formed for them. The Murdoch manure machine's usefulness is otherwise limited to teaching dogs to read or for prepatory hygene in proctologists' waiting rooms. Unless of course you're an otherwise unemployable hack or a Tory politician.
The bile and merde produced by the monkey's typing pool of Murdoch wazzocks, pizzle ninjas, racists, planks and coprophiliacs could be mostly ignored if it wasn't for its ubiquity and dominance and the Murdochracy's hands-down-each-others'-trousers relationship with an outrageously corrupt, punitive L/NP kakocracy.
This is taking liberties with the concept of a free press. It is not holding power to account - it's a protection racket for gangsters and their cronies.
Criminals don't like scrutiny. SchMo's tactics for avoiding a federal integrity commission include everything short of calling in a bomb threat - it's a guilty plea by default. After exposing Sports Rorts the national audit office had its budget cut at a time when unprecedented government largesse is being distributed. SchMo's national cabinet is run in secret with fossil fuel mates being granted open slather to salt the earth and poison the atmosphere regardless of dodgy return on investment or a rooted planet. Tertiary education is being dumbed down and kept out of financial reach of enquiring minds. Various #gates bubble away. Promised millions in disaster relief goes undistributed while a bloated, smirking practitioner of POETS day cooks curries and assembles flat-pack cubbies and chook pens for the cameras.
The list is long, ignored or spun by the Goebbels and Riefenstahls of News Corp.
Prominant amongst Murdoch's bilious minions we have the queen of confected outrage, Alan Jones, safely isolated in his Southern Highlands luxury estate from whence he broadcasts for Sky News and writes columns for News Corp, telling us now there is no pandemic despite earler stating that “We are living in the world of coronavirus and the most repeated statement we hear is, we must listen to the experts”. When you're an opinionated blow-hard consistency is entirely dispensible and hypocrisy a tool of trade.
Miranda Devine (aka Marge - I can't believe she's not better) piled on Quaden Bayles, the Indigenous kid with achondroplasia dwarfism who was being bullied at school, claiming it was a scam to make money. What sort of broken individual does that? Apparently it's OK with the Rupester, as she's now spewing her poison for his New York Post. If hacking a dead kid's voicemail is OK then...meh!
The Cruella DeVile of politics, Peta Credlin, found herself at a loose end after steering feral friar Abbott's government into the blackhole of public opprobrium. Apparently self-immolation sits well on a CV when submitted to News Corp, so long as you've aquired the requisite RWFW credentials where Pete scores an A+, offsetting the F she received at a road-side breath test. Pete's now desperately trying to raise her miserable ratings on Sky News by grandstanding at Dan Andrews' Covid press conferences where, much to her chagrin, she simply comes across as a tragic, look-at-me shrew.
Melbourne's village idiot Andrew Bolt has the coherence of a drunk on a bus shaken awake by a pot hole. When Ivan Milat died Bolt's position on the list of Australia's worst people went up one place and in any battle of ideas he's holding the beers.
Murdoch himself was deemed not a fit person to run an international company following the UK's Leveson enquiry. The stench goes all the way to the top and sets a standard for the bag carriers and apple polishers such as Rita Panahi, Rowan Dean, Chris Kenny and their fellow bloviating detritus who work for the wizened old bastard.
Murdoch apologists suggest that his political influence is over-stated. It's surely coincidence that three western democracies being pillaged by governments-by-brown-paper-bag are Murdoch's markets.
King Conkers, the apricot nut in hi-viz makeup of orange spackle topped by mangy, yellowed road kill can retain office only because of the Fox News cheersquad of blonde Barbies who've discovered that pneumatic boobs and good teeth can get them a better paying gig than blowing quarterbacks under the bleachers ever could.
The UK has a wardrobe malfunction as Prime Minister - who let the boob out? A bloke who sees a challenge in outdoing Trump in the I'm so incompetent I'll kill thousands of my constituents stakes. Murdoch boosted Boris's Brexit because, in his own words, 10 Downing St does as he tells them while Brussels tells him to fuck off.
SchMo and Co will ignore Kevin Rudd's petition for a Royal Commission into Australian media diversity even though it has 368,000+ signatures.
Big Big George & the Reverend Kev both found out that Rupert will throw anybody under the bus. In George's case it was for titillation, in Rudd's it was mendacity and self-interest - Abbott could be trusted to obey orders and blow up the NBN to protect FoxTel's revenues. Morrison will be aware that Murdoch can turn, so pending a heart attack or Jerry speeding up the inheritance by sitting on his face a tad too long, there will be no Royal Commission.
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Also published on the AIM Network.
Supplement - Fun with anagrams
Bridget McKenzie - begrimed neck zit
Peter Spud Dutton - doped nut sputter
Scomo Morrison - SOS micro-moron
Michael McCormack - Cecil Cram-Hammock, chemical crack mom, Micmac - clam choker.
Josh Friedenberg - John Beefgirders, John R. Edge-Fibres, Jib Dogfreshner, Jobs Fingeredher
News Corp editor Col Allan retires - The Guardian
Kick this mob out’: The Murdoch media and the Australian Labor Government (2007 to 2013) - Global Media Journal