Well I've waited several hours now for the Green/Left/ALP/intelligentsia hivemind of Australian media to do its mandatory hatchet job and character assassination of Tony Abbott for his part in today's glorious People's Revolt, but to no avail.

Crabbe, Oakes, Grattan, Keane et al must be sipping chardonnay and preaching Groupthink to the beardists at #ACTwonkdrinks instead of fulfilling their obligation to push today's government talking point.

So here I am.

Seriously.

There were somewhere between 1,500 (according to the AFP) and 3,000 (according to the organisers) and forty-eight billion (according to Andrew Bolt) protesters at today's No Carbon Tax Rally outside Parliament House.

It's fair to say that I disagree with them on just about everything from Climate Change to democracy and all points in between, including spelling, grammar, wearing tracksuits anywhere other than the couch or the gym, and that if David Archibald is a reputable scientist I'm a big fan of Glee.

It's also fair to say that several of the placards they were waving around were offensive and stupid, but I've been to anti-war rallies and had to look at badly-drawn John Howards fellating badly-drawn Dubya's, and winced through enough street theatre to know that the lunar Right do not hold the copyright on being foul-mouthed, unthinking, bigoted fools.

Whether you're protesting the Murray Valley Basin Plan, nuclear power, the Iraq War(s) or a housing development in your street, you will see offensive nutjobs pushing their own brand of hatred and anger. Be they the International Socialists or the Citizen's Electoral Council, rent-a-crowd will appear and give the real, well-meaning protesters a bad name.

What you won't often see, however, is a senior politician address the crowd with the placard-nasties as a backdrop. Senior politicians attract reporters and reporters have cameras and the cameras take photos and senior politicians know this. Even Bob Brown knew not to stand up at a Sorry Day or anti-war rally in front of a banner that read "Janette has one, Little Johnny is one".

Tony Abbott or his minders or his press secretary or the kid who does the photocopying, someone, someone must have thought to themselves "we better not have Tony be photographed in front of a banner that calls the PM a Bitch or something, that would probably be bad". It appears not.

There are two ways of looking at the photo (courtesy of @justinbarbour ). One, Abbott really doesn't care that he is now associated with vile personal abuse of the Prime Minister and linking Climate Change action to a UN World Government and genocide, which means he's alienated at least the small "l" liberals and is content to drag his party to a position where Scott Morrison and Cory Bernardi will be branded Wets.

Two, he and his advisers are just too thick to consider that this may be a bad look. Which should, in a sane world, alienate everyone who thinks that our alternative Prime Minister should have a modicum of common sense.

Just a few hours earlier, Malcolm Turnbull posed for a photo that he was probably thinking would make him look less than Prime Ministerial. It's a fair bet that he's kicking back in Double Bay right now, giggling into his Chateau D'yquem.

Good for him.

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