For our Jovial Joe to defend the cuts at the CSIRO is beyond the pale. He should get flogged. His houses should get flooded by the Clarence or burnt down in a savage bush fire. I've had enough of these self-serving bloated self-important idiotic moronic ignorant buffoons. Gees, I need new words to describe my anger!

When Ross Douthat of the NYT tells you: "It’s too soon to say Europeans are actually from Mars once again. But the Continent’s Venusian idyll has taken blow after blow: the euro crisis, the aggressions of Vladimir Putin..." you should know, my dear reader that you are entering the cloaca of an unfathomable cesspool of sneaky educated deliberate disinformation stupidity.
As soon as someone mentions the "aggressions of Vladimir Putin" you know you're in for a treat of polished turditional writings. Mind you it should not take long to know where this crap is coming from. Douthat is a CONservative Catholic baby who is less than half my age (though age is not a criteria for being stupid or not) and has learned his craft by stacking small yellow cubes on top of the blue ones, in the kindergarten of Harvard University. It looks like diplomas from that revered institution went very cheap in the latter half of the 20th century.
One of Douthat's first effort after saying da-da" after nappies was to write a book on how the GOP could resurrect itself, in 2008. No need to mention we just had George W Bush as a dreadful wrecker of the GOP universe — and ours at the same time. George got away with it, just... Bush should be rotting in prison but this is another story.
Douthat's book in question is called "Grand New Party", giving historical parallels on how the GOP could become great again. Here we are now with Trump leading a race of idiots in 2016. Exactly.
I don't think any of the people in the GOP read Douthat's book, unless this was the grandness of what Douthat alluded to in order "to attract the working class" to the GOP, for an epiphanical annihilationic Armageddon of the Democrats.  Trump is doing a great job at consolidating his lead over the other idiots — by attracting the deluded and the uneducated and the morons and the bigots and the rabids and the evangelicals and the loonies...
What Douthat does not mention in his poor papering, is the way the US Empire really works. The Roman Empire worked on a simple technique which was "divide and conquer". The modern US works on the "divide, create corruption with cash incentives, confuse, threaten, cajole, undercut, uppercut, rough up in a dark alley — and if all does not work — invade, install new despots, render broke or instil massive debts to make them bend the knees and become dependant, but do NOT conquer — this last step would be illegal, in these days and ages of respect for nation's "sovereignty" like in Iraq.
This is why when the "aggressions of Vladimir Putin are mentioned, one should be cautious. There was only real aggression without a single aggressive act: Putin took Crimea back. All other "aggressions" attributed to Putin are simply untrue, as compared to the militarisation of Europe with American troops...
Yes Europe is uneasy with all this... But it has one course of action which is to do what the General de Gaulle did in 1964. Tell the yanks to get fucked. Douthat was not alive then and he would not understand all the subtleties of the General when he tried to successfully make friends with the Germans, while the Yanks have been trying to break this alliance ever since...