It's hard to maintain a grip on reality at the best of times, but during an election campaign it's impossible. On a daily basis politicians utter inanities and stupidities at stupendous speed. How are we to assess these foolish if not sociopathic utterances? The important thing is to record each one and lock it on to that politician's world wide resume. But when they come as fast and furious as they have in the last week (or month or year), the tendency is to just give up. However, as Jack Black once said, "Are we not men?". Indeed, and extremely intrepid. Praise the Good Lloyd, it's almost over.

For sheer sociopathic idiocy, it's a toss up this week between Tony Abbott and Mark Vaile. Vaile, who yesterday blew his status as one of Howard's least credible stooges is at it again. Vaile in last-ditch pork barrel states:

The Deputy Prime Minister, Mark Vaile, has announced two unapproved grants worth $900,000 for his own electorate since the election campaign started, under a funding program that has funnelled millions of dollars into rural Coalition seats. On the same day he came under fire for overseeing the Regional Partnerships Program, which has made dozens of grants to Coalition seats against departmental advice, Mr Vaile pledged $500,000 for a surf lifesaving club at Bonny Hills in his northern NSW seat of Lyne.

Read all about it and wonder how a politician can be so gormless.

For me, though, the award goes to Tony Abbott. The video that showed the sweating drop-kick accepting that WorkChoices had shafted workers was breathtaking in its unconscious revelations, but we all know that. What sends Abbott to the head of the Class of Misanthropic Chuckleheads was his lung-emptying solution for workers unhappy with their jobs. With the compassion, understanding and comprehension typical of Medieval royalty, and typical of every last Howard Government MP (save possibly for Petro Georgio), Abbott suggested that unhappy workers should simply get a different job. Hey, presto! No worries, Tony, especially in these really swell conditions we all get to work in, thanks to WorkChoices which you just said, er… wasn't so hot for workers.

Here's a letter to The Age, which sums it up perfectly:

Tony Abbott's fatuous assertion that any worker who is unhappy with his or her conditions should just go and get another job, demonstrates, if proof were needed, just how far out of touch the Coalition mandarins have become with the situation of working men and women of Australia.

Students on precarious part-time, low-skilled jobs in service industries, virtual slaves in the food-service industries and many women juggling, as Mr Abbott has never had to do, the responsibilities of housekeeping, child-minding and income-generation know only too well that walking out of a job, however ill-paid and unpleasant, is dangerous.

It is more likely to lead to dropping out of study, winding up on the dole and/or failing to pay the rent, the mortgage or utility bills than to waltzing into another job. -- Juliet Flesch.

"Out of touch" hardly begins to describe this government. All you have to do is take a quick look (please don't linger) at Alexander "Little Lord" Downer's puffy, privileged face to quick-smart understand how depraved and far removed these born-to-rule-forever dandies are from their subjects. Out of touch? The very idea of being in touch makes them cringe with repulsion and contempt. Don't be ridiculous, they would say, the wretched of the earth only concern us during those election campaigns required by that irritating institution called democracy. And, to be sure, the occasional bribes we fling to keep them from rioting. For the rest, if something trickles down from the largesse we guarantee for our own, then we're certainly not against it.

Of course that just describes those in the Coalition belonging to the Illiberal Party. The Nationals are nothing more than like-minded but lesser beings used to fill out the numbers. You can bet that Downer's sneers at the hoi polloi are no different than his sneers at Vaile and co.

Get out your baseball bats.