Australians will be familiar with a journalist named Andrew Bolt, who seems to have a “thing” about whether people of mixed Aboriginal Caucasian descent can truly claim to be aboriginals, or whether they just “discover” their aboriginality to get career advancement and grants that should be given to “real” aboriginals. He was taken to the Federal Court a couple of years ago for racial vilification, and lost.

Australia suffers a shortage of truly crazy politicians, compared to the US. But the US has 15 times more people than us.  Australians, by various measures, are only half as religious as Americans, and we don’t have young-earth creationists here.  No one much cares about a politician’s religious beliefs. The former PM, Julia Gillard, was an atheist, and most Australians couldn’t even be bothered to shrug their shoulders and say, “so what.” So I guess that puts us behind the eight ball. This is not surprising.

So could Andrew Bolt ever become Australia’s Sarah Palin?  No.

Firstly, Sarah Palin once said that Putin might invade Crimea. This puts her on the same level as a genuine prophet of God, or people who say enough crazy things that one of them eventually turns out to be right, or people who pay other people to retrospectively create news clips and blog entries to prove they predicted things. (I don’t think she – or he -are in the last category, but I mention it for completeness.)

To my knowledge, Bolt has never predicted the invasion of one country by another. Also most of his early work appeared in print journals, and (unlike the internet) they are hard to retrospectively falsify. George Orwell got that bit wrong in ‘1984’.

Second, he doesn’t know how to field dress a moose, because we don’t have moose in Australia. This ability was touted by conservative commentators as a great point in favor of Palin being a real down-to-earth person when she was nominated for VP in 2008. No one talks about field dressing a kangaroo.

Third, Bolt has never been a state Governor and quit half way through his term of office. In fact I don’t think he’s been elected to anything. There have been some journalists who have run for public office (Maxine McKew, but she lost after one term.) But let’s be realistic. No political party wants a loose cannon in the Forecastle of the ship. They’d rather have him on the outside spaying it around than on the inside spraying it around.

Fourth, Bolt speaks in grammatically complete sentences. He’s need some serious dental anesthetics and some amphetamines at the same time to sound like Sarah.

So although some readers of the Herald Sun might wish otherwise, it’s never going to happen.

There’s more chance of Cardinal George Pell entering into a gay marriage and wanting to adopt kids than there is of Andrew Bolt being our next Deputy PM. Sorry. I just can’t see it But what about you? Do you think having someone like Bolt in public office would brighten up the landscape? Remember, HE wont have his finger anywhere near any launch codes. What do you reckon?