The One Where Miranda Hates A (ex) Liberal.

 Don't fret dear readers, the HCQ lives (though it does appear to be on life support) and we haven't forgotten you. 

Column.  

You had to feel for Marcia Langton on ABC TV's Q&A panel this week, stuck between two men so terminally pompous, out of touch and in love with the sound of their own voices you felt at times they might fall stiffly off their chairs and writhe on the ground in private ecstasy.

You have to feel for SMH readers, twice a week your dribble causes them to fall from their chairs, writhing in pain.

Malcolm Fraser and Peter Carey, fresh from the Sydney Writers' Festival, are the sorts of self-styled intellectuals who give thinking a bad name.

Miranda Devine, journalism, bad name. You see where I'm going here.

Now comes news that Fraser formally quit the Liberal Party in December because it's too conservative for him. The former prime minister quit in spirit a long time ago. He seems eaten up with the need to settle old scores and be proved right on every little point, a sad state to be in at the age of 80.

And he's probably right, unlike the current Liberal party, Fraser didn't paint refugees as an invading horde of heathens intent on destroying our way of life. Nor was he an advocate of free market policies, both of which seem to now be the core of the unfortunate group of people that make up the Coalition.

He has always gone out of his way to malign and belittle John Howard, his one-time treasurer who well and truly eclipsed him in the PM stakes. How it must have rankled that some half-deaf nerd from Canterbury Boys' High could best him

Or, he thought John Howard was a terrible PM. 

He showed himself on Monday night to be no better a friend to Tony Abbott

Perhaps because Mr Abbott is the reincarnation of John Howard?

Better yet was his confident claim that the British and American governments knew Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and the Howard government, if it didn't know, "should have".

He's obviously been reading too much Green Left Weekly, or perhaps he gets his history from the Hollywood conspiracy genre of Green Zone. Even the host, Tony Jones, didn't pursue this fruitcake line.

That truly is a fruitcake line. Is Fraser seriously suggesting that before entering a war, the then Government should have used it's intelligence sources to independently verify the reason for said war? Lock that man up, I mean it's not as if the reason turned out to be fake...

While spruiking his memoirs earlier this year, Fraser denied that he had become a leftie, insisting he had not changed but the Liberal Party had lurched to the right.

Haven't we been over this already, or is it just that all of Miranda's dribble just melds into one mind numbing lump?

The odd thing is that he would have done a lot more damage to conservatives if he'd remained in their ranks. Instead, he's turned into the crabby old Muppet Statler, harmlessly heckling the rest of the cast from his balcony seat.

That may be true Ms Devine, but at least he's doing it at the age of 80, rather than in his 40's or 50's like some people. 

New Feature: Facebook Pages That Enrage.

Usually I'd introduce a new feature with a witty paragraph full of puns, but due to my lack of Quarterly-ing over the last little while I thought I'd get straight into it.

Facebook Page that enrages me: "Save Our Scripture - Make a Stand"

The dribble that has been let fly after the introduction of ethics classes has been truly amazing, spend 10 minutes listening to any of it's detractors and you'd be forgiven for thinking that students would be sacrificing small animals to Satan himself and simultaneously whipping a fresh batch of ecstasy in the dunnies.

The moron(s) behind the SOS (Stupidity Over Smarts seems to be a better use of this anagram) seem to have one particular issue with these classes being offered, the fact that they will result in less students in what they call "SRE" classes.

Calling scripture classes "SRE" is a lie in itself, not once in the scripture classes I had in high school was I ever educated about a religion. I was constantly told how good the Christian God is, but never was there any mention of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or any other religion.

But back to the topic on hand, in there own words SOS are protesting the introduction of ethics classes because :

"The NSW Government is trialling secular ethics classes in competition with school Scripture. In some schools scripture classes have lost up to 60% of enrolments." 

Now I'm not sure about that figure of 60%, but if it's true it suggests to me that a majority of students would prefer an ethics class rather than a scripture class, so maybe SOS should be getting it's followers (I prefer zealots) to pester the 60% of kids who don't want a bar or a cross of scripture classes rather than their local MP's.

Their other point is equally as stupid, so what if these classes are in direct competition? If school kids have the ability to opt of scripture classes, than why can't they opt into an ethics class that's run at the same time? Would they prefer these classes to be run at the same time as Maths or English? Classes that might actually help students in their future.

Of course, it's not only SOS who are producing this type of pollution, plenty of others have supplied their own brand of idiocy to the argument.

For example, I just discovered this stupidity over at The Australian.

I really don't know where to start with this article, it meanders from point to point like a drunk after closing time, Ms Shanahan comes out strong with her headline "Godless ethics classes are pointless," but from then on it's just dribble. I assume the writer was either under severe deadline pressure or had recently undergone a lobotomy.

When she does try to address a point, Ms Shanahan falls back on some pretty unethical evidence (see what I did there?).

"It has already happened in Quebec, where an aridly secular relativist ethics course that introduced concepts such as the same-sex family to Year 1 children was boycotted, causing chaos in the schools of the heavily Catholic province.

The NSW course does not introduce any such concepts; in fact some more controversial ones such as terrorism and designer babies have been removed."

This is just unforgivable. What Ms Shanahan has said here is "Ethics classes are evil, in another country they were unpopular due to introducing controversial topics to children too young to appreciate them, but in Australia the classes have been designed in a different way, and said controversial topics have been removed, but remember ethics classes are evil."

Dribblers, the lot of them.