… but then again maybe that’s a good thing!

Were the senior editors at the Herald Sun volunteer firefighters, is there much doubt whatsoever that they’d turn up to the first big bushfire blaze of the season with their water tanks filled with petrol?

Or if they liked ocean swimming, that you can be pretty sure they’d love nothing more than to smear their full-body black swimsuits in mullet gut, adjust their fake seal whiskers and seal ears and tighten the straps on their clip-on seal flippers before heading way out beyond Port Phillip Bay, preferably to somewhere in open water that’s a well known spot where great whites cruise past?

Both these examples suggest the Herald Sun has this tragic obsession with doing as much damage to others and/or themselves as they go about the most bizarre of non-business plans.

Doubt this? At top is their social media plug this week for a series the paper is running as they proudly – yes, proudly, go figure – boast about the 77 times they’ve tried to undermine Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and his government’s actions in dealing with COVID-19 over the past two years.

Well, the MGH suspects and hopes it’s a series. We refuse to pay for a subscription to the paper for both mental health and financial reasons but we’re taking a punt they’ll run these articles over time in the hope of doing maximum damage to Andrews and Labor in the leadup to the state poll next month. If they do, the MGH almost feels sorry for the Liberal Party should they still hold a glimmer of hope of saving some of their inner-city seats.

And there in a nutshell is the problem. Those in charge at the Herald Sun seem totally blind to the very strong possibility that their vicious, unprofessional assaults on Andrews have not made a single dent in his popularity since COVID sneezed into town. Indeed, polls suggest teflon-coated Andrews is in an even better position now than his Danslide in 2018 as more voters have swung to his cause after judging the Herald Sun’s partisan, right-wing attacks over the years as being as much an assault on themselves, Victoria in general and Melbourne in particular.

It’s now pretty clear that the greater Melbourne area late on the night of 26 November is going to resemble the killing floor on a regional Victorian abattoir after a very busy processing day.

But those in charge of the Herald Sun don’t care about – or simply can’t see – such things. They haven’t even got the good sense to at least even try to understand why inner-Melbourne that used to be the diamond jewel in the crown of the Liberal Party has turned ruby red or a tealish sapphire both state and federally. Ditto for the nation’s other capital cities.

Instead, they are going to pull out all stops to try to besmirch Andrews and Labor over the next six weeks – yes, we know; it’s hard to imagine they could step up that campaign but there you have it – and try to convince their dwindling readership that Matthew Guy is the answer to the Garden State’s problems.

They are going to completely shut out of their minds the grim reality that Guy couldn’t win a fete lucky dip even if he bought all the tickets. Guy couldn’t get a root in a brothel with his pockets full of wads of grey nurses, to continue our shark theme. He’s a lightweight and every new poorly thought-out policy that oozes like calf scours from his mouth as he desperately seeks relevance seems to crash and burn before another sun has set for the day.

Clearly, the people who produce the Herald Sun and the people who read it have widely different views on the state of the Liberal Party in Victoria and nationally at the moment. One side is determined to do its shitmost to return the grand old party to its former glory; the other side would be forgiven for increasingly thinking the party is beyond help; that it’s very hard to breathe new life into something that looks well and truly dead, buried and cremated. That there’s more hope of a hair appearing on Peter Dutton’s head or something sensible coming out of Susssan “this goes with that goes with this goes with that” Ley’s mouth than the Liberal Party has of redeeming itself any time soon.

If the Herald Sun wants to set a lot of Victoria ablaze with their risible, rightwing rubbish or become corporate shark bait by committing suicide, along with other Newscorpse mastheads around the nation, by offending the intelligence of their dying readership by serving up the most unjournalistic of rotten, flyblown tripe, the MGH is happy to sit by and enjoy the show.