And thank you to the intrepid Russki Brown, uberblogster, for drawing my attention to a quaint little piece about the raving right’s demonology of the centre-left.

As regular readers of my Gaynz.Com religion and politics column are aware, the far right of the New Zealand political spectrum is in bad shape these days. The League of Rights is dead, the male backlash weirdos are too depressed to dress up in superhero outfits, Barbara Faithful’s cut and paste diatribes about the seventies and eighties left have been strangely silent of late, and only ZAP is prowling around the twilight zone of the political landscape.

I’d like to think that this is because we’ve outgrown conspiracy theories as a nation, and that significant proportions of us don’t regard progressive social changes as ‘orchestrated’ by sinister factions of conga-dancing (deep breath) giant Maori nationalist lesbian DPB claimant deconstructionist supporters of climate change devils chasing innocent wingnuts down darkened corridors. However, I reckoned without fringe ‘libertarians.’

Just like marxism was back in the seventies and eighties, libertarians are plagued by dogmatic paragraph, jot and tiddle dances around the works of Ayn Rand, and interminable faction fights over holy writ, tactics and strategy. This may explain an investigation of such discourse by one Victoria University political science student, Lewis Stoddart, with the delightful title Clark Vader and the Helengrad Labour Lesbians.

Warning: Beware of flashbacks of dancing cossacks from old Muldoon era Nat propagamda while reading the entry below.

I realise that the above statement sounds suspiciously like an article from Ian Wishart’s tragic tabloid gutter glossy, Investigrunt. Well, it was perpetrated by two former inmates of Radio Pathetic’s (Augean) stables, Messrs. John Banks and Lindsay Perigo.

Sadly, Linz is the diatribist in chief, condemning other media professionals and management as wannabe Stalinists, “Islamofascism” supporters, proponents of “televised racism”, and a “communist tabloid”.  He also seems to be spectacularly inconsistent, balancing moments of rare compassion with distastefully misogynist ruminations on lesbians, left-wing witches,  the left, treachery, collaboration, and parasitism.

Hey, I can do rhetoric too. Social conservative ideological purist. Raving right. Spinning Johnny. Little Zealand. A “Christian’s Right to Spank.”  While it’s fun, it’s not sober political analysis. However, sadly, in Linz’s case, it does symbolise the extent to which a once-insightful media commentator was driven when the ideologues took over his mind and turned it into a sectarian cliche generator.

Recommended:

Russell Brown: “A Taxonomy of Poo”: Public Addressnet: http://www.publicaddress.net/5157#post5157