How’s this for a character assessment of The Australian columnist and Sky News presenter Chris Kenny:

“Kenny is a staunchly neo-conservative, anti-progress, anti-worker defender of the status quo. He is an unrelenting apologist for the Liberal Party. He was one of Alexander Downer’s senior advisers at the time of the Iraq War. He’s been known to argue for stubborn, sightless inaction on climate change. He spits at anyone concerned with such trivialities as gender equality, environmental issues or labour rights from his Twitter account on a daily basis. Recently, he characterised criticism of the lack of women in Tony Abbott’s Cabinet as a continuation of the Left’s ‘gender wars’. He is a regular and fervent participant in The Australian’s numerous ongoing bully campaigns against those who question its editorial practices and ideological biases. The profoundly irresponsible, dishonest, hate-filled anti-multiculturalist Andrew Bolt has recently referred to Kenny on his blog as ‘a friend’.

“And it’s a jokey picture of a bestial embrace that I should be afraid of discovering online?”

And that’s from his son Liam, who didn’t have nice things to say about dear old dad in a piece on the pop-culture website Junkee. Editor Steph Harmon assured Crikey this morning it’s really Kenny blood.

“One of our writers is a friend of Liam Kenny, who asked how to get in touch with us; he sent the piece through overnight,” she explained. “I checked the reference with our writer, and called Liam to double check.”

Kenny attacked the ABC’s Chaser troupe for a comedy skit that featured him fornicating with a dog (admittedly, so did the ABC’s Media Watch).

Liam reckons dad should have sucked it up:

“Let’s see the ABC give back every cent of what it cost them to use Photoshop for thirty seconds. Maybe I’ll spend the spare change on a bus to go see the Great Barrier Reef before it, like the Chaser’s dog, is completely fucked in the arse.”

Yikes. This was Kenny Senior’s response via Twitter today:

 

We’d love to be a fly on the wall of the next Kenny family dinner …