Take that, Paul Keating! Wham! Bam! Thud! Kapow!

The Sydney Morning Herald on Friday rained blow after telling blow on the hapless old ex-PM chappy after he had the temerity to use his National Press Club speech on Wednesday to give a right unroyal bollocking to the mainstream mediocre in general and the two clowns who authored the SMH’s laughable Red Alert series last week in particular.

SMH editor-in-sook Bevan “it was a strike!” Shields weighed in, saying Keating went way too far and was truly cruelly awful to the two Red Alert scribes Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott.

See the Friday splash featured in the collage at top? Will Keating ever be game to show his face in public ever again after James Massola and the aforementioned Knott gleefully reported on Anthony Albanese and several senior ministers getting stuck into Keating for his sad, outdated and unwanted views. Yes, that James Massola! James “Morrison would be re-elected if just 51 per cent of Australian voters could meet Jenny!” Massola. His stuff’s always worth reading.

We’ll put aside Keating’s very plausible arguments on Wednesday over the sheer folly of the AUKUS deal and concentrate on his excoriation of our nation’s mainstream mediocre. He called the Red Alert series disgraceful warmongering journalism and it’s hard to find fault with his assessment. He flensed some of the media folk who tried gotcha questions on him but his attack on Hartcher and Knott curled the toes of true Keating aficionados.

In their series, Hartcher and Knott found five experts who argued that within three years Australia faced the real prospect of war with China including attacks on our mainland.

Can the MGH be upfront here? We didn’t read too much of that series. Like Keating, we thought it was a heap of shit. So we’re not sure what these experts were arguing we should do over the next three years to remedy this apparent total unreadiness for war with the PRC.

Make our Collins-class clunkers less noisy? Scrap the NDIS and health and education spending and spend up big on military hardware? Cancel the costly Voice referendum? Scrap all infrastructure projects? Buy guns! Guns! Guns! Reintroduce conscription but not just for 20 year-olds. No age limit and you’re in if you can walk without the aid of a stick?

The MGH notes the thrust of two of the SMH articles: one silly old bugger’s opinion, supported by a few other has-been ex-pollie lefties, has or will split Labor. Like the Red Alert series, it’s all nonsense really.

But you have to wonder if the right-wing Shields insisted on this “Labor split” line of attack, in the equally silly hope that it might improve the LNP’s chances in the state poll today week. It sounds like Machiavellian nonsense, maybe, but was there some hope there that “A party divided doesn’t deserve to be in power” notion might hopefully seep by osmosis into the state sphere and fool some voters into backing their mate Dom?

Absurd, we know, but as Newscorpse Lite – sorry, the Nine Entertainment Co. and its Herald mastheads – moves steadily to the right and becomes more and more an LNP public relations outfit, such thoughts are hard to dismiss.

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Okay, the Media Glass House is more used to hurtling bricks than showering the MSM with bouquets but credit where credit’s due, right?

We didn’t think it would happen but today’s weekend SMH has given NSW state opposition leader Chris Minns the front of the review section and inside, a two-and-a-half-page spread with plenty of photos, exactly the same amount of space devoted last Saturday to Dominic Perrottet.

It’s such a reasonable, decent, balanced, professional thing to do, journalistically, that we suspect Bevan Shields had nothing to do with it. We’ll stick with our view that we wouldn’t trust Shields with the weekly fruit and veggie market reports.