Who the fuck wrote this goddam dreadful headline (above)?

And if by some chance they are still a member of what used to be the AJA, can the cunt be booted out immediately for gross dereliction of their professional duty.

These were the immediate thoughts of the bitter, retired old hacks who compile The Bug’s Media Glass House the moment they spied that heading in Friday’s edition of The Sydney Morning Herald.

One old codger in The Bug’s review pod got so angry he grabbed his pint glass of rum and coke and smashed it against a wall, narrowly missing the lovely colour picture of Laura Tingle, one of the few journalists working in Australia still worthy of the MGH’s respect.

“A martyr is someone who suffers persecution and death for advocating, renouncing, or refusing to renounce or advocate, a religious belief or other cause as demanded by an external party,” one MGH reviewer shouted, big-noting himself after taking a quick peak sideways at his terminal and the Wikipedia meaning of the word on screen there.

To highlight his disgust, he dropped his daks, shat on the carpeted floor next to his desk, tore out the relevant two-page spread from the SMH and promptly wiped his arse with it.

Naturally enough, the MGH compilers are, to a man and a woman, decent and reasonable people so they eventually calmed down and tried to find some form of explanation for why anyone with two braincells to rub together would consider the now smelly George Pell to be a martyr.

“This sub was probably a former choirboy who had the Catholic faith well and truly drilled into him from a very early age,” one of our women MGH staffers offered by way of excuse.

“Yeah, from the other fucking end!’” came one quick retort from a male colleague.

While the MGH panel quickly came to the conclusion that smelly George Pell was never, ever, actually murdered by anyone, could it be in some way argued that he was killed by the enormous weight of hatred, scorn and derision sent his way because of his strongly held beliefs?

And by that they meant that this prince of the church, the finest man Tony Abbott has ever met, the greatest Australian Catholic ever, proudly refused to surrender his unflappable, God-given and strongly held beliefs that he needed to protect kiddy-fiddlers and that his overriding duty was to protect the name and the finances of the Catholic Church rather than protecting innocent young lives and to ensure they received fair compensation for the sickening, un-Christian things done to them and the enormous damage done to them both physically and mentally, not that smelly George Pell was particularly interested in such things. Phew, try and read that again in one go!

And the reviewer who had broken his glass and was now over by the kitchenette looking for a replacement said: “Besides, I’ve got no doubt at all that when push came to shove, so to speak, George Pell himself was up to his nuts in some choirboy’s or altar boy’s guts from time to time, especially seeing he was a fairly handsome-looking young rooster when he strutted – paraded? – around naked in front of the lads in swimming pool changerooms or who loved played hide-the-sausage in school-camp lakes and streams.

“Or happily copped a gobful from schoolboys too numerous to mention in musty storerooms of convent schools dotted around the countryside,” added another. “He would have seen that as God’s swill!”

“There’s no doubt in my mind that old Georgie Boy had a keen eye for young’uns who had bottoms like ripe, plump, peaches, covered with a tantalising layer of pre-pubescent fuzz,” offered another, perhaps just a little bit too convincingly and with eyes that were rather worryingly glistening over.

“That jury in Melbourne unanimously thought so.”

Pondered another MGH staffer: “And maybe we wouldn’t have had all those rightwing nutters and God-botherers turning up at smelly George Pell’s funeral if those cunts on the High Court had kept their fucking black-letter-law beaks out of things and shown some respect to the Australian jury system instead of proving once again that the rich and the powerful always fucking well look after their own.

“Fuck me roan. A full bench with stratospheric IQs but the combined commonsense of a canetoad squashed on the Bruce Highway outside Townsville cooked up the notion that a complainant’s totally believable testimony had to be put aside because nothing could have happened at the back of that Melbourne cathedral because other church elders would have fucking-well noticed it! Unless they fucking well knew not to look, that is!”

“Hear, hear!” shouted those in the pod.

“Technicality, my fucking arse!” was one phrase that floated among the din.

“Now, who’s up for a refill,” added another, tipping a newly untwisted Bundy rum bottle in the general direction of his colleagues.

Don Gordon-Brown