Warning! Sausages under construction!

It was the aggressively moustached German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, I think, who said that politics was like sausage making. Best not to look too closely at what went into it.

I could check that factoid with el Goog, but I feel like living on the edge. So I’m just gonna throw it out there and perform this deft conversational pivot. There’s a bit more goes into the Boob than me just slamming down four or five angry breakfast gins on Friday and punching out new and exciting profanities for you. There’s some sausage making.

See what I did there, Otto?

Through the week I clip a pile of stories that might, but more likely won’t, turn into your weekly shit post.

Last week, for instance, Energy Minister Angus Taylor caught my eye for a cringeworthy interview with Fran Kelly during which the government’s dimmest bulb tried to shine a little light on their whole ‘tech not taxes’ blueprint for dealing with energy and climate change.

Taylor kept dry heaving the same stupid phrase over and over again. Something about backing more than one horse. I think he sees horses as a big part of our future energy grid. With Angus, it’s possibly because he owns a stud farm somewhere.

Anyway, I could feel myself getting dumberer and dumberer while I listened to him, and before sentience departed for good, I thought, ‘This seems Boobworthy’.

Especially since Taylor is straight up the sketchiest motherfucker in Cabinet.

To borrow some old Australian folk wisdom, this bloke looks so fucking crooked he couldn’t lie straight in bed. But, in the end, I figured his turn would come later. Probably in a longer essay about energy futures. And, er, horses.

Today, Monday, I have no fucking idea what I’ll be sending you on Friday.

But I do this work though the week, and I thought why not let you see some of that too?

So from now on, I’ll post a little something most days. Nothing with the awesome power of a fully operational Sideboob.

But something.

After today I’m not gonna email these bonus pieces, because we’ve all got enough crap choking our inboxes. But if you’re looking for a few minute’s diversion, drop into the ASB Substack right here and have a read, leave a comment, touch yourself, whatever, I don’t judge.

It’d be nice, over time, to build a sort of clubhouse where people can chat about these things without having to cop the unrelenting shitfuckery of the big social networking sites.

So today’s bit?

This super-frothy beat up from Sky News After Dark.

Fuck knows how the US Secretary of State ended up wasting his breath with Sky’s magical talking toilet brush, Rowan Dean, but perhaps Pompeo’s staffers were too busy shit-canning that Inspector General who’d been investigating him for abusing State Department resources to stage Republican Party fundraisers.

Again, Whatevs.

Pompeo slid down and around a rhetorical S-bend, pondering a Victorian Government handshake with Beijing on China’s Belt and Road initiative and a sudden weekend feeding frenzy in Mordor over the Pompeo’s warning that the US could simply 'disconnect from Australia’ was picked up by the poor old ABC who ran with it as a major international relations bit.

Narrator’s voice. “It wasn’t a major international relations bit. Pompeo didn’t even say that thing.”

The Memo in question is a bunch of feel-good statements, none of them about anything real. It’s less of a binding contractual document than your Netflix subscription, and even says so itself. Right above the sig files.

Pompeo was careful to say that he knew nothing about the Vic’s MOU with China, but not careful enough to avoid talking with Sky’s animated lavatory muppet in first place.

What did he think was going to happen?

The threat to simply ‘disconnect from Australia’ was, as so many Murdoch stories are, a small, solid lump of bullshit, wrapped in a thin and crunchy outer shell of even more bullshit.

What Pompeo actually said was that if necessary the US would simply disconnect any military and secure communications networks from any networks which it judged to be compromised. (And even that was an essentially meaningless statement, because the entire internet is thoroughly compromised by hostile state and non state actors, and no way is President Tweety unplugging himself any time soon).

But some fucking grifter somewhere in News Corp saw a chance to give Danial Andrews a smack upside the head and so they took it, leading to a preemptive buckle from the US ambassador who quickly ‘clarified’ that no, America would not be disconnecting from Australia.

Anyway, working through all that was my Monday commitment to the Boob. I doubt this story will last until Friday, so I’m just going to post it here now. And I’ll do a few more through the week. They’ll all be freebies.

And you can feel free to comment below.