Stupidity Rules Part 2

So even though we haven’t quite made all the payments on the Queen’s recent visit, now we’re stumping up for the fawning and swanning and obsequiousness in overdrive, not to mention the circus of security, that is the current trip down under made by a certain Mr Obama of Washington and parts thereof.

Look, I know it’s polite when the visitors pop over to ensure they're safe and that they’ve got enough lamingtons and somewhere to crash but there are Other Considerations here. I think you know what I’m talking about. You must have seen it. It’s impossible to miss. There are blind people out there who have actually felt it assaulting them through their flat screens. I’m talking about the smugness factor. Not his. Hers. Julia’s. In every shot I’ve seen of them standing side-by-side she looks like the cat who’s got the cream. And not your bog standard supermarket-standard cream, either. I’m talking King Island Secret Stash Royal Reserve Mega Premium Double Thick Double Dollop Hand Stroked Extra Special For Your Eyes Only Sourced From The Secret Magic Cow Allowed Only To Feed Upon The Purest Greenest Grass Grown In The Ripest Pasture In All The Land-type cream.

Smug smug smuggety smug. As smug as a slug on a drug. As smug as it’s possible to be without actually dying of pure smugness. We need to ask why this is... Is La Gillard secretly watching her sagging polling fortunes start to rise? Or is it simply that the nerd from Unley High School is practically holding hands with the most powerful – and one of the cutest, from her perspective, I dare to suggest – blokes in the known universe. Having private chats with him about national security, foreign debt and how Stacey in Fourth Form never thought Julia would amount to anything.

But that's not actually the only scary part of this cavalcade of  congratulation, is it? There's also the question of the new US base, where a couple of thousand Marines are going to hang out in the Top End and drop ridiculously efficiently from helicopters – presumably with ropes or parachutes – onto anyone underneath them who isn’t quite in the loop about the training exercise going on overhead.

This is a concern because as soon as Ms G and Mr O head to Indo and start spruiking to the countries around us that there’s ‘nothing to fear’ from the new base, you know that there’s actually a helluva lot to be righteously afeared of – and I'm not talking about the Festival of Smug.