The Editor, John Surname, Ant Rogenous, Keri and Craig discuss:

* Faking the Olympics
* Funding the Olympics
* Broadcasting the Olympics
* Backhanding Catherine Deveny with assumptions
* TardWatch: laugh-until-you-cry-and-get-a-hernia edition

** Because Jeremy refuses to pay £6.50 to download this podcast, use only the “Play in popup” link or the “Download” link. **

 

 GrodsThink 28 (19 Aug 08) [40:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The Age columnist and prime Bolt/Blair target, Catherine Deveny, might have bipolar disorder.

Timmeh shows sympathy and calls a ceasefire.

Deveny’s columns… are a frequent target here. No more. Assuming the above account is accurate—it’s unlikely someone would joke about a bipolar diagnosis—Deveny isn’t well.

Fair play, Tim. A credit to you. Andrew Bolt then agrees with Blair (surprise, surprise), albeit a little more crudely.

An unhappy columnist who writes what seems to me a plea for help, and who confesses she is indeed in trouble, should not be kept in harness by a newspaper hoping to win extra sales from her growing despair.

However, I can’t help thinking that Bolta (and to a lesser degree, Timmeh) are suggesting that Deveny’s assumed illness is somehow responsible for those opinions that the groupthinking duo so despise. Is it not possible that Deveny can have a mental illness and still have perfectly valid opinions, unshaped by that mental illness?

This is all assuming, of course, that Deveny does have bipolar.

ELSEWHERE: Darryl Mason deconstructs teh issue more detailedly.

Catherine Deveny perfectly sums up GrodsCorp’s attitude towards the government’s populist, xenophobic and divisive citizenship test.

YOU can shove your citizenship test up your poxy date. No one has the right to decide what being Australian is. I was born here and I have no idea. But I do know what it isn’t, and what being Australian isn’t is testing people on what they know about some white pen-pusher’s idea of Australia. This is the country whose citizens pride themselves on not knowing the words to their own country’s anthem.

[…]

Who are we trying to keep out with this test? How will knowing the name of Australia’s first prime minister or the date of Federation keep out terrorists, wankers or bludgers? The citizenship test questions are irrelevant and offensive.

Read the whole article and take Deveny’s awesome alternative Aussie citizenship test.

UPDATE: Humourless Andrew Bolt reckons that Deveny’s first line is symptomatic of The Age’s inability to argue a case. Of course, it completely escapes Bolta’s attention that the line, “you can shove your citizenship test up your poxy date”, is a beautiful mixed example of the Australianism metaphors used by Deveny throughout her article as an illustration of what Deveny holds to be more “Australian” than anything in the government’s citizenship test.

By the way, did anybody else choke on their cornflakes when Bolta accused another journalist of “emotive and poisonous writing” on Insiders last week?