So how is your summer going? Trousers off, melting ice cream on the car seat, screaming children in the back, and your brain in neutral? Political commentators are no different from us, except for when they’re telling us they are. They need a break too. But the thing is they just can’t stop posting… and talking… and thinking… and… posting, even when they are off the clock, and have nothing really to say.

Remember in December when everyone’s favorite Santa-denier, Adam Bandt tweeted Year 12 students that it was okay to smoke a little weed, listen to The Doors, and watch the Do Lung bridge sequence in Apocalypse Now once they get their VCE results as this is the pathway to becoming a Greens ‘How To Vote’ card distributor?

Perennial four-eyed beach-nerd Adam is sick of having sand kicked in his face at Cheviot Beach as he watches the horizon for Chinese submarines and wants to be the grooviest politician in parliament, but his attempt to ‘get down with the kids’ revealed his stunning lack of ambition for Our Youff. I mean, why stop at weed when there’s much more money in Ice, or heroin, or those strange blue pills you can get at the summer music festival? Then again, economics has never been the Greens’ strong suit.

Then there’s Louise Milligan, who busily tweeted summer pics of her RATs and boasted of taking unnecessary precautionary Covid tests even as she headed off to her holiday house, just to make the point that RATS are really expensive and hard to find, quite possibly because of all the journalists hoarding them to make this exact point.

Holidays didn’t stop Malcolm Farr tweeting from his secret beach shack. Despite his admirably left-of-center Insiders couch indentation, apparently he doesn’t believe in universal health cover anymore given he posted about some apocryphal anonymous coughing idiot who turned up at a Sydney hospital demanding Ivermectin. ‘Such folk don’t deserve a public health system,’ says Malcolm, who may well want to apply his ‘if you’re an idiot, you get nothing’ philosophy with regard to our welfare safety net more broadly given people who work in the media are the most intelligent people he knows.

Not reaching for the holiday Ivermectin is swear-a-holic Tom Ballard who announced he’s pulling out of the Sydney Festival because the Israeli Embassy has provided sponsorship, just like every other nation’s diplomatic cultural program does every other day of the week. Tom may be a comedian, but doesn’t understand the irony of a self-declared gay man attacking the safest country for gay people in the often brutally homophobic Middle East. But as Tom would say, what’s so funny about that? For the record, Tom is funny – like a Hannah Gadsby Netflix special.

The Guardian’s favorite God botherer Father Rod Bower in biodegradable crucifix and Hawaiian shirt has gone all Old Testament by tweeting that the New South Wales Government’s Covid policies are ‘pure evil’. No room for compassionate Christ-like presuming the best in people there. To quote everyone’s favorite summer read, Matthew 7:5, Rod really needs to remove the beam from his own eye – or the mote whatever a mote is.

Then again, judging everyone else’s behavior is very much a summer trend. So thinks summer frocked Wendy Harmer who on learning her daughter’s friend has anti-vaxxer parents chose to tweet her 80,000 followers, ‘FFS… imagine having such selfish parents.’ Is this what those ABC documentaries about tolerance mean by not punching down?

Not to be outdone, sun screened Julia Zemiro has tweeted a ‘pledge’. (A sacred pledge? Did Father Rod witness it? Were wrists cut and blood mingled, Buffy the Vampire Slayer style?) Unfortunately, her pledge is not to stop being pretentious by making vacuous pledges, but rather to do whatever she can to have the New South Wales and federal government voted out of office. Maybe her tweets will now need VEC political authorizations like Andrew Bogut’s…?

At least none of them considered breaking the law, unlike former weather girl Sami Lukis who posted that she had to bribe her local pharmacist to sell her a RAT, so ‘FU ScoMo’. I have never heard a news presenter speak this way before – except on the ABC after the 2019 federal election result or when 7 News presenters are discussing unvaccinated Serbian tennis players. As one responder unhelpfully asked: ‘Is bribing a pharmacist a crime in New South Wales?’

Could the VEC please look into this, they seem to have a lot of free time at the moment?

But just like the made-for-twitter choreography of a Grace Tame passive-aggressive ScoMo handshake, the holiday’s can be a stressful time. Walkley Award winning war correspondent John Martinkus spoke for many of us when he tweeted from his Tasmanian man cave: ‘F**k you all…. This is just getting boring now. F**k off you deadsh*t. What is your problem?’