COMPOSED: AN ALENE COMPOSTA TIMELINE

These assaults on our PM are nothing but sexism and woman-hatred. The outpouring of Tea Party-style hate could easily lead to violence, sooner or later. If our PM introduces the licensing of commentators and a peer-review panel of media professionals (Laura Tingle, Phillip Adams, Virginia Trioli, Mike Carlton, Hartcher, for example) to determine what constitutes "fair" free speech and to stamp out the noxious, inappropriate variety, I would support her 100%.

The real reason the Liberals are using "moose" and chuckling about it is because it is a flat-out sexist obscenity commonly used to describe female genitalia. It gets worse, much worse.

The ABC pulled a blogger from its The Drum Unleashed website after she named the Liberal Party state director, Mark Neeham, as supposedly making a below-the-belt attack on Kristina Keneally. The blogger, Alene Composta, an admitted agoraphobic who said she used the internet to make the world a better place …

turns out it was a fake. apparently. we were had. it seemed plausible. i was wrong. i pulled it.

Diary touched base with Green this week, at a time when he still believed that Composta (rhymes with imposter) could be real. When told that she was certainly a parody of a Lefty blogger, he said the piece had been taken “in good faith”. All contact with Composta was done via email and “when you are [publishing"> pieces from the public sphere, there is an act of faith involved”. Green says he will investigate whether Composta was in fact a hoax, and if so, would consider writing a note to readers about it.

One area where Sarah and Bob and Julia can go further, however, is the threat posed by carbonated drinks. Every time we open a bottle of soft drink, drink a beer or pop the cork on champagne, we release another jolt of invisible CO2 poison into the ecosphere. In addition to the proposed measures, this threat needs to be addressed in a responsible and appropriate way.

It seems to be that if we can link the Liberals to this crotch talk then there is still a chance we can nudge the election toward Labor, or at least do something to limit what looks like it will be catastrophic damage inflicted by voters … The important thing is that we do everything we can, use every tool we know, to help Kristina out of the jam some silly moves and a lot of Murdoch venom has put her in.

According to The Drum's editor, Jonathan Green, the piece was quickly taken down because it had "appeared inadvertently in a pre-legalled form. "On advice... we thought it safer to take it down".

I have to say, as someone who's been working off and on for the ABC for 30 years, and for the BBC for a dozen years before that, if an unknown blogger had offered me a piece like that for publication on an ABC website in an election period, I'd have run a mile … I asked Jonathan Green whether it hadn't occurred to him that Alene Composta might be a hoaxer. He responded: "To be honest no. The style of material on her blog was not all that unusual in the online space. Her name certainly seems ridiculous in hindsight, but that's hindsight, not the urgency of a busy working day."

My humiliation is complete.

Anyone not blinkered by, say, ideological fervour might first have done the most basic check on the author of all this weirdness. Indeed, Composta urged Green in another email to "feel free to examine my other writings". If he'd done so, he would have started with her blog, a cornucopia of the most psychedelic Leftist hate. Imagine a cross between Catherine Deveny and Marieke Hardy.

For what it's worth i agree it wasn't my finest moment. Obviously. But nor was it some leftist rush of blood. Ridiculous. Cock up is all.