Miranda Devine, Michael Duffy, and the sad and sorry but revealing story of Keli Lane ...

(Above: just the trench coat ma'am, just the trench coat).

Even for a tabloid, Tim Blair is lightweight.

He's a kind of agitprop agitator and provocateur, who lazily relies on links to do a lot of his work, and being of a right wing herd mentality persuasion, his strategies and devices look and sound eerily like the left wing bloggers he purports to despise. (agitprop, of course, being a word for ponces, is a portmanteau of agitation and propaganda).

Blair also fancies he has a sense of humour, and you can judge the strength of his comedy stylings from his response to a silly Sydney Morning Herald poll (lord knows, it must be hard to wake up each morning and think up a mindless straw poll devised to appeal to the hive, and produce clicks and show that interactivity and interaction is alive and well in the new world of the interpipes, even if the results are totally meaningless).

Here's Blair's set of alternate answers in his whimsical quiz:

Neighbours are watching. Do you cut your power use?
* Hell no
* Maybe they like watching me load my shotgun, too
* Yes. Because I really care what my neighbours think about electricity consumption
* Behold the ecological miracle of using cats as toilet paper
* Let them watch. Meanwhile, my kid is stealing their car (here)

Oh knock me down with with a feather and throw me into the blackberry bush, or perhaps the briar patch.

But there's a clue in the responses. Guffaw at the notion of stealing a car, or even better adopt the mock machismo of loading a shotgun (though to be fair to Blair, who looks pale and weedy in his photos, the idea of him and his readers wielding shotguns in suburbia is a tad far fetched. More a case of fear me and my water pistol?)

Never mind, Blair's idea of an in-depth examination of why people from Iran and Iraq might want to come to Australia is to send up a Crikey travel writer's fun time in Iran (Let's All Move to Iran), and fail to mention there might have been an actual war in Iraq. And in the process fail to mention his own shameless cheerleading over the years, which treated the Iraq war as some kind of frolic and travel junket.

So shameless, he's easily caught out:

The Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair :
John Hawkins: If and when do you see the United States hitting Iraq? How do you think it'll work out?
Tim Blair: It all depends on Iraq’s fearsome Elite Republican Guard. Why, those feisty desert warriors could hold out for minutes. Dozens of US troops will be required. Perhaps they’ll even need their weapons...Wouldn’t expect it to last long once it happens.
When asked to predict a casualty count for the invasion, Blair predicted :
"Below 50." (here, at The Orstrahyun).

Yep, there's real laughs to be had in thousands dead and millions displaced, and there's Blair praising Liu Xiaobo praising George Bush's efforts in Iraq, under the header Good Guy Gets It.

Do any of the good guys get why some people might be fleeing Iraq, along with those fleeing Iran?

It almost goes without saying that I'm happy to call Blair a fool and sometimes a knave, but a

'almost' no longer covers it. I used to be happy saying it over and over again, but now it almost goes without saying that it tends towards the tedious, vexatious and predictable, which is why the one trick pony that is Blair's blog has fallen out of the pond's reading list ...

But it does help explain why the Daily Terror poached Miranda the Devine from Fairfax to try to elevate the tone of right wing hysteria that runs through the rag, and bolster Blair's gadfly spine with a hearty dose of long-winded spleen and right wing Catholic hysteria, helped along by a generous lashing of neuroses.

But is it working? The Devine dropped a long and anguished contemplation of the Keli Lane case last night in Adopt a kinder attitude to jailed mother, which at time of writing at noon, had produced zero comments. I say it again. Zero comments! Let's hope the unstable Murdoch technology on view at the Terror at regular intervals has run off the rails again.

Instead of a kind of reflexive Catholicism, and her standard anti-abortion tirade (read Abortion debate takes on a new life of its own to get an idea of the usual tone), the Devine attempts a little complexity in her response to Keli Lane's actions.

Of course it wouldn't be a Devine piece without some kind of rampant prejudice, and so the difficulties of adoption are hauled before her kangaroo court to take the blame for women preferring to abort, than have and adopt so they can be farmed out to good Anglican and Catholic homes, and brought up to see the truth and the light ... and never mind that Lane had managed to have two babies adopted out but had also shown a preference for abortion ... since Lane had already aborted two babies (the first in her final year of high school)

And of course there's not a word about the benefits of contraception, since we all know that that's a sin, and never mind the strange nature of her relationship with her boyfriend, and since we all know - thanks to the infallible teachings of Pope Nougat the Fifth (to borrow a Colbertism) - that abortion is murder, it seems that the authorities have finally managed to make a third murder case stick.

But for all that the Devine is driven by a medieval kind of thought process, worthy of a tabloid, she does at least manage to express sympathy for Lane.

Don't expect anything by way of a complex response from Blair about anything, when idle chatter and links to a "good guys v. bad guys" view of the world is all the go.

Meanwhile, Fairfax is moving into what would once have been the turf of the tabloid - on the intertubes the concept of broadsheet ceases to exist - thanks to Michael Duffy joining the Sun-Herald and the SMH with his blog, Crime and Punishment.

Duffy was the original inspiration for these pages, in his life as a SMH columnist dedicated to sundry causes, usually of a right wing kind, in an uneasy stew of libertarian views and irrational fellow travelling with other members of the commentariat.

After a couple of minor outings, Duffy has now hit his stride with his 'true crime' four part recounting of the trial and conviction of Kelli Lane, which concluded yesterday with Steadfastly silent on Tegan's fate until the bitter end.

Duffy shows the requisite taste for adjectives in such writing - he starts off part one, How Keli Lane's secret life was exposed, by calling Lane a golden girl, a child of sun and sand and water, a cheerful girl with a lovely smile, and by the end he's scribbling furiously how her familiar childlike serenity has given way to what looked like petulance, wistfulness, even flashes of anger.

Well Duffy does start by referencing Neighbours, so fair's fair, and if you read the four parts, it's clear that what fascinates him are the insights into Sydney's current upper middle class North shore social and family structures, as offered up by Lane, her Manly-resident family and her rugby playing boyfriend.

To read 'true crime' requires a tendency to voyeurism, and a love of titillation, but truth to tell, Duffy handles these requirements with way more panache than the Devine, and with a good deal more balance, as you'll discover if you read Duffy's version of Lane's desire for an abortion, and when that was denied, the adopting out of her third baby.

There's no need to go into all the details here. Like any decent news channel, we just present the facts, and you decide ...

But it's about this point that an innocent reader - well the pond is always innocent, until someone or something is proven guilty - comes to realise that reading the Devine is only useful as a way of understanding the extraordinary, hysterical, irrational rear end of the telescope way the Devine views the world, and as a corollary, the way as a commentariat columnist she twists the facts to suit her ideological agenda.

Who'd have thunk it, after all the hard times the pond and the original Michael Duffy files has given to Duffy and his scribbles, but now we have to tip the hat and give a favourable wag of the finger to Mr. Duffy in the matter of Keli Lane.

Duffy has shown this tendency before - his promo site provides a link to a number of past 'true crime' stories, here, and like a lot of other writers it suits him more than an ideological soapbox, or attempts to stray outside genres and write the "great novel".

Sydney has plenty of crime stories to tell, and here's hoping Duffy tells more, and forgets the world of ideology, in favour of the world of soap opera adjectives and Sergeant Joe Friday saying "Just the facts, ma'am", even if it's a fact that Joe Friday never actually said "Just the facts, ma'am" (argue about that here in the wiki).

I knew there was a reason I'd stopped visiting the Terror - there's only so much tabloidism to be digested before the stomach cramps and the desire to rush to the bathroom takes hold - and now that tabloidism is firmly entrenched at the Herald, given decent space and a thin veneer of broadsheet respectability and objectivity, long may it reign ...

And that's the last we'll speak of Keli Lane, though at least her sad life has served a purpose by exposing the sublime irrationality of Miranda the Devine ...

As Agatha Christie once said:

Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.

Yep commentariat scribbling is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your politics, your adjectives, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your scribbles ...

Why, I wonder, is the the pond is always letting the commentariat off with a warning, a small fine, and a hope they'll do some community service in reparation for their evil deeds ...

(Below: and the grim look his publisher presents of the crime-orientated Duffy is just, well it's just so suitable for the new Duffy).