“I have long held the view that The Age is the most left-wing
newspaper in Australia – in a sense, its culture is set by Michael
Leunig,” Gerard Henderson told Crikey last year.

Let me make my views on the illustrator quite clear. I consider
Leunig’s work mawkish, self-pitying, saccharine-sentimental
pseudo-Christian socialist nonsense dressed up as touching profundity.

The great humanitarian is a grumpy sod, too – as an art gallery
assistant friend of mine learned back in the eighties. Gallery
assistants are a lower form of life (see Martin Amis’s Success for a
good depiction of their lot). That didn’t stop them copping a bollocking
from Leunig when he was unhappy with the staging of an exhibition of
his costly doodles.

An amazing storm is raging in the blogosphere over his Ariel Sharon cartoon from last week:

“How’s Mr Sharon’s condition?”

“There was a small movement in his right arm.”

“So he’s fit enough to work. That’s all the movement it takes to order
a missile strike against an old Palestinian man in a wheelchair.”

Leunig has form on this issue, after the affair of the Auschwitz cartoon.

He has been forced to defend himself in The Age‘s opinion pages.

Tim Blair offers a good starting point to investigate the row. Begin with Friday’s post and follow the scandal through to the weekend update. Blair packages up a huge range of opinions.

This one will run and run.