The theatre of manipulating political/public opinion in action:

Joe Hockey has suddenly had a revelation.

After years of toady lickspittling to Trump - enough to make the average Australian's throat close over - Hockey has had a religious conversion.

Trump it seems, is bad. https://twitter.com/FinancialReview/status/1347461492577349632

Not only is Trump bad, but according to Brother Joe Hockey, he is very bad.

In a religious conversion not seen since the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, Joe Hockey, the golfing partner of Trump, the crawling hanger-on of Trump - has seen the light.

Hallelujah Joe.

Perhaps it's because Joe Hockey has been too busy taking selfies, or gurgling down the champers while we Lifting-Leaning taxpayers footed the bill for him, but Hockey somehow doesn't appear to have noticed the violent, dog whistling rhetoric Trump has used for many years.

At times it seems as if Joe Hockey's entire reason for being in the US at our expense was for him to run the unofficial fan club for Donald Trump's Australian Ambassadors Wanting To Open A Consultancy In Washington

Hockey's unquestioning championing of Trump has been nauseating.

Which brings us to the theatrics of political journalism in this country.

Are we to believe the AFR journo in question here sat down on Friday afternoon and wondered to himself:

Gee, I wonder if Joe Hockey has had an epiphany about Donald Trump today? What's Joe Hockey think?

Or did Joe Hockey, in a moment of clever image control, decide he needed to distance himself from the madness & perhaps rehabilitate his image now he's running a private US consultancy, so he called a journo at the AFR who spent 5 years in Washington when Hockey was there too?

Because instead of saying:

GOOD GOD MAN! How can you possibly sit there with a straight face claiming you're appalled by all this violence & mayhem when you've spent half a decade enabling this mango maniac?

The article pisses 1 little sentence into the wind & let's Hockey pass

And so a man who spent $70K of our money on babysitters & booze gets a free pass from what passes for political journalism in Australia the public's faith in our political media is diminished further.

Poor Joe Hockey is now "appalled".

And that my friends, is the art of spin.