20 Comments
Aug 13, 2021Liked by John Birmingham

Catastro-fucking-muntedly-incompetent…brand new phrase for our mine site workshop!

Love ya work, true wordsmith

Expand full comment

Guy Rundle had a good bit in Crikey today, that you can get a sense of when I quoth it's title and sub-head in full: "COVID-19 and the normalisation of abject and unmitigated failure

This government's failure of leadership during the pandemic is the result of the Coalition's indifference to its citizens' lives and health."

I like Grey's Law here: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." But it's hard not to suspect the presence of actual malice too.

There's also the limitless smaller failings. Why out-source the covid vaccine rollout to one of the big consulting firms, that have never done that sort of thing before, when there's a whole actual public health infrastructure already on the ground that could have done it? Why spend another 600Mil on a gas power station that the experts say is unnecessary, in a place that doesn't have a gas supply? Why indeed...

Expand full comment

My greatest fear is he doesn’t give a fuck about 99% of the shit he pulls because it’s all a gaslit smokescreen from some truly evil fundy prosperity Pentecostal life-hating rapture-embracing shitfuckery 1% that will cause multigenerational damage at the very least and Armageddon at worst. But I spose I’m just feeling pessimistic.

Expand full comment

You have summed up this govt's strategy for most things and the help that the Murdoch media provides- in such a way that I can't imagine a better more accurate run of words

"He doesn’t care that you know. He just has to convince a certain number of tradies that Albo will force them to give up their utes for battery powered poofter cars and he’ll be right."

Expand full comment

"only to wake in fright years later, afeared that the endless twitching of his knob in the dark is a convulsive recoil away from the serrated kitchen knife of payback."

Sir, this is one of the finest pieces of prose that I've ever read.

When you die, we shall ensure that a small monument is built for you. ;)

Expand full comment

It’s hard to imagine looking back on the days of Little Johnny or the Mad Monk and thinking “look at all that competence and transparency” but here we the fuck are

Expand full comment

. aaand “battery powered poofter cars” wins the Internet this week. Apart from being viscerally funny it’s true. Pork barrel the tradies, win the votes.

Expand full comment

This government makes me feel physically ill, and the surrounding miasma of propagandist fog that our Murdock media only sickens me further.

Expand full comment

Given how reality's a tad too enervating (and so absurdly overwhelmingly surreal), I can simply concur with how kinda brill this week's column is.. and with zilch brain fog in evidence, too.

You're in damn fine form, allora grazie! (Back to weird torpor here, bit like fave Billie Holiday song)

Expand full comment

Nailed it, as usual, JB

Expand full comment

Brain Fog? We better buckle up for when the fog lifts. As the ship goes down I hope you're there play us out JB.

Expand full comment

As I've said many times in the past, Howard is a liar, and Abbott is a bullshitter.

I think you're right about SQoMo - he's somewhere in between.

Expand full comment

Being guided by god means you don't need any bread and circuses or shiny baubbles and trinkets, although Tony with a cockscomb could substitute for a clown that could distract the serfs and kulaks enough to bang through some quasi legal legislation in the dead of night. I drove past the Horizon Church in Sutherland the other day and I saw a lightening rod on the roof, I thought to myself what do they need that for when they have Scotty as a member.

Comedians have a team who write jokes for the next performance. The prime ministers office have a team of News Corp staff who write a list of lies for the next week. The list covers a whole gamet of scenarios along with a list of current ministers who he can deflect any dangerous questions towards, of course the relevant minister will have instructed his staff not to answer the phone for the rest of the day or until the next news cycle comes along.

As we move into the era where lying is the new truth and fact is actually fiction because dystopia becomes normality we all look towards a saviour who can lead us to a sunlit shangrila, but when the miasma clears it's actually a commuter car park next to Engadine Macca's.

Some research should be done to see if the more pios a prime minister is the bigger the lie he can pull off, a pie chart or a graph could plot the trajectory verses the gullability of the average tabloid reader and the time between the next lie and the page three girl.

It has recently been discovered that Morry from marketing has got the idea for his disingenuous deceit from his long time bestie who is the big Kahuna of the Cronulla branch of QAnon, his right hand man is a Mr Craig Kelly the mendacious local member, his door is open any time. If he's not there you can find him on the Alan Jones propaganda hour where Craig is Jonsey's hand puppet.

They have a swag of facts and figures, charts and graphs and some of the finest perfidiously fallacious undisputable gospel of certitude but only available on Sky News.

I wonder if any of you statisticians out there in the interworld could compile the number of lies that Scotty has told in the last four years compared to the grand master of duplicitousness, the ole Trumpster himself. Most reputable fact checkers put the number at 30,573, give or take a fib or two, over 4 years, if you could break that down to a lie every hour, day, week, month and year we could make a graph or pie chart for a power point presentation to show at the Young Liberals branch meetings as a training video.

I always thought that Pauline Hanson was a figment of my imagination, but she's a real person ! What is wrong with the world if someone like that can exist ?

Expand full comment

I lost my job this week. First smirk I've had since Tuesday. Thanks.

Expand full comment

Now for your considered opinion about Gladys Berejiklian, please. The Master's Apprentice, so to speak. :)

Expand full comment