Paul Kelly, and another round of drinks for the faux conservatives please ...

(Above: oh yes, it's like a jungle sometimes. These days you can just google map it by looking up the corner of Bailey and 38 Enmore road in Sydney).

By golly, you can rely on Paul Kelly routinely to destroy a political career, and he seems right on target again as he blathers on in his usual humbug way in The Australian in PM offers no hope to social Left:

Ms Gillard, in fact, is not the social progressive many Labor backers and politicians have wrongly assumed. On the contrary, she has deep roots as a cultural conservative and traditionalist.

Yes, yes, it's another case of saying the bleeding obvious, now let's get on with the details:

This is obvious across a range of issues - her belief in personal responsibility, rejection of the option of state-sanctioned killing, support for biblical and cultural dimensions of the Western canon and the belief that social heritage should keep marriage to an institution between a man and a woman.

Indeed, on such issues she seems aligned with John Howard.

Ms Gillard is John Howard in drag! What a killer idea. Surely it must mean the end of Gillard?

Yet Kelly seems to find it an invigorating source of optimism:

The broader point is that the Greens social agenda will run into Ms Gillard's resistance as a political conservative on such issues. Her views will become prominent because, as she says, they are tied to her past and identity. This will become a serious problem for the Greens and Labor's progressive wing.

Uh huh. On the other hand, as the NSW vote next Saturday is likely to show, along with the destruction of the NSW Labor party, progressive and conservative, there'll be a surge in the vote for the Greens. That will be a serious problem for Gillard and the Labor party ... who knows they might even lose a couple of seats to the latte sippers and chardonnay swillers ...

As always it depends on which end of the telescope you use. Kelly's end is the narrow blathering end of the conservative, not far removed from the customary myopia of all conservatives who think it wise to hold back the tide. In this, they display a profound affinity with conservative Muslims.

Not that I regularly wander through the outer depths of Islamic folly, but you simply have to drop in on a site like Islam Online to get a whiff, a sniff of the standard conservative religious mendacity:

Gay marriage is totally prohibited in Islam as well as in all the divine religions. Gay marriage is an atrocious and obscene act which belongs to unsound nature. Islam teaches that believers should neither do the obscene acts nor in any way indulge in their propagation. Allah says, "Those who love (to see) obscenity published broadcast among the Believers will have a grievous Penalty in this life and in the Hereafter: Allah knows, and you know not." (An-Nur: 19)

Yep, and it's replete with the usual justifying references to gobbledegook.

I feel that Allah will never let such an act go without punishment. We have an example of the people of Lut who were deeply involved in such immoral acts and were destroyed by Allah.

I, personally, feel that this is one of the deadly germs that are injected in the vein of modern civilization, which the westerners feel proud of. Human rights should not be extended to include human destruction or threats to our life on this planet. We hope that the legislators who enacted such a law will think twice about it and consider its consequences on our human race and to try to repeal this law and put things right. (here, only in cache form)

So back to the triumphal Kelly establishing that he and Gillard are at one with conservative Islamic thinkers worried by the people of Lut:

On same-sex marriage, Ms Gillard said: "I find myself on the conservative side because of the way our society is and how we got here. There are some important things from our past that need to continue to be part of our present and part of our future."

Dear absent lord, was it only in February that Daniel Finkelstein - Finkelstein of all people - briefly escaped The Times' paywall, and turned up in The Australian with Gay marriage is good conservatism?

Against this is the important fact - that to deny gay people the right to marry in the full sense is to deny people the dignity and respect they deserve. And who better than a Conservative can understand the desire of an individual for dignity, respect and social status?

What, finally, of the religious objection? I am not very good at praying. My wife complains I fidget in synagogue. The children complain I fidget. But for all my failings in the devotion department, I do have one conviction about prayer of which I feel confident. It would be very disappointing for the Jews to have prayed for thousands of years and learned nothing. Sometimes you have to sit there for hours. Surely some thoughts must have struck us in all that time.

For me, that thought is a steady, strong belief in the fundamental equality before the law and under God of my fellow humans and a determination to love what is different about them as well as the things I share. I do not expect, or demand, that all others share it, but I am as sure as I can be that this belongs in my religion. I would want Conservatives to champion my free expression of this religious belief.

Hmm, it turns out that Ms Gillard and Mr Kelly are what are sometimes known as faux conservatives, peddling bias, superstition, ignorance and prejudice, usually of a religious kind. Sometimes Muslim, but given where this society came from and how we got here, more usually simple-minded unforgiving Christian ...

Amongst the irredeemable and ill-informed sits Kelly.

Somehow he thinks it remarkable that Gillard is an atheist who likes the Bible:

She said: "I think it's important for people to understand their Bible stories, not because I'm an advocate of religion - clearly, I'm not - but once again, what comes from the Bible has formed such an important part of our culture.

"It's impossible to understand Western literature without having that key of understanding the Bible stories and how Western literature builds on them and reflects them and deconstructs them and brings them back together." The Prime Minister was happy to accept the brand of "traditionalist". She puts this into a personal narrative too often ignored in assessments of Ms Gillard's outlook.

Indeed. Who could understand the deeper implications of Cecil de Mille and wanton, lustful dancing girls, let alone - without referencing the King James version - the thoughtful way Agatha Christie dressed up some of her titles by ripping off either Shakespeare or the Bible? In a Glass Darkly and Evil under the Sun so to speak ...

Now there's a wonderful canon. Go for it Yul:

It seems to have escaped Mr Kelly's attention that atheists and agnostics generally tend to have a better knowledge of the bible and religious matters than believers in pie in the sky by and by:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions. (Pew U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey)

Sure that only applies to xenophobic Americans and it puts atheists in the company of Mormons, but hey any port in a storm.

It's when Kelly continues his paean of praise to Gillard's intrinsic conservatism that things get silly:

Explaining her family background in a pro-union, pro-Labor, conservative household, Ms Gillard said: "We believed in politeness and thrift and fortitude and doing duty and discipline. These are things that were part of my upbringing. They're part of who I am today."

Yep, according to these brushstrokes, if you're pro union, pro Labor, pro Liberal, pro National Party or pro big business, or pro small business, pro thrift and pro politeness, you're like as not part of a conservative household. And there I was thinking that the Greens were a polite thrifty conspiracy to cut back on conspicuous consumption and capitalism.

Naturally Kelly gets wildly excited by Gillard's rejection of euthanasia, which is a particular bete noir of his, and perhaps helps explain the way The Australian these past few months has kept on harping on about Greens' conspiracies and the ACT government and the end of western civilisation aw we know it.

On euthanasia, Ms Gillard was sympathetic to those people who "may want that choice". But she rejected the argument. She had "never been able to satisfy myself" that the policy of the pro-euthanasia advocates contained "sufficient safeguards".

Her concern is that euthanasia laws "open the door to exploitation and perhaps callousness towards people in the end stage of life."

No need for euthanasia then. Just watch the callous NSW Labor party in action as they deal with people in the end stage of life ...

Which brings us back to Kelly's conclusion:

This will become a serious problem for the Greens and Labor's progressive wing.

Or will it become a serious problem for Gillard as she blithely thinks she can sail through unscathed espousing allegedly conservative values, and acting like an uber John Howard - when it's quite possible to be a Finkelstein, a conservative, and a Murdoch man, and hold contrary views?

It reminds me of a Facebook routine that went viral:

Let me get this straight...Charlie Sheen can make a "porn family", Kelsey Grammer can end a 15 year marriage over the phone, Larry King can be on divorce #9, Britney Spears had a 55 hour marriage, Jesse James and Tiger Woods, while married, were having sex with EVERYONE. Yet, the idea of same-sex marriage is going to destroy the institution of marriage? Really?

To which we might add the bizarre notion that somehow a woman living in sin with a hairdresser in the leafy suburb of Deakin is seen as supporting bible reading, conservative Islam and Christianity, and the institution of marriage as a religious construct. Really?

Sad to say, Kelly is sounding older and older these days - one wag dubbed his style as owing a lot to Spock, but that's a serious abuse of the charms of Mr Spock - and incapable of understanding his old world is rapidly changing.

Never mind, it's a very clever double play by Kelly, ensuring that Gillard is seen as a dullard up there with Mr. Kelly himself and the redoubtable John Howard. It's a serious problem for Gillard and no doubt it will get worse ...

Meanwhile, it's worth noting Mark Day's splendid offering Rupert Murdoch's Middle East call to freedom, which explains how the noble chairman sees communications as a way of liberating the populace, and more particularly the Chinese.

A cynic might re-title the piece Rupert Murdoch's sordid venture into the middle east in search of a way to rip off Al Jazeera's business model, or Liberating the sheep is important and beneficial providing they pay a modest stipend to News Corp for their freedom, but then that sort of cynic might also find the time to mention the way brave Chairman Rupert's bid to bring democracy to China futtered and sputtered (Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation to sell down China TV stakes), and to wonder whether phone tapping is quite the same as the liberation of information. (News of the World phone hacking affair).

No doubt the Libyan rebels will be greatly relieved that Chairman Rupert is embarking on a venture designed to bring freedom from regulation and intimidation to the middle east, in the company of a couple of other squillionaires (with UAE and Saudi Arabian partners), and we look forward to the impending liberation of not just Iran but Saudi Arabian women.

I guess it'll happen in much the same way as gay people everywhere routinely celebrate The Australian for the way it stands up for their rights.

Day forlornly hopes that he could see the impact of last week's speech by the Chairman in a couple of decades from now, and never mind what's actually happening at the moment in the middle east without benefit of chairman Rupert.

Let's hope it doesn't end up like British celebrities taking legal action or the sordid tales springing from the chairman's Chinese adventures (Murdoch's China dream shattered). Or worse still Fox News, still peddling Glenn Beck and surely one of the worst blights in the media world anywhere, making the old commie Pravda seem like a benign source of truth and light ...

Still, you have to admire Day's diligent, relentless burnishing of Chairman Rupert's image. The buffing and the polishing and the shining and the smoothing must get quite taxing and exhausting at times, especially as he's just risen from his sick bed to get back to the job at hand ...

(Below: oh dear, the company that the real Julia Gillard keeps these days).