Well finally there seems to be a consensus, at least if you leave aside the assorted outriders of the lunar right. Tony Abbott is a national embarrassment. A small minded, parochial, used-car salesman of a politician who used Australia’s moment in the global spotlight to make what Bill Shorten called a “weird and graceless” speech complaining about how Australians don’t like his budget cuts.

It’s hard to disagree with this assessment, or with the vast number of schadenfreude-laden comments that flooded Australian social media lambasting Abbott for his ill-conceived threat to shirtfront Vladimir Putin (did he really think he was going to win that pissing contest?), or comparing his schoolboy-schmuck whinging to the stirring oratory on display in Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Queensland only hours later.

But here’s the thing. Abbott might be a ludicrous right wing git, a provincial parody of what George W. Bush would have been if his greatest responsibility in life was being in charge of a local planning committee, but that is no excuse for fawning over the leader of the most violent and destructive military-industrial machine in the history of humanity.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, I wrote an article arguing against the widespread Obama-mania on the international liberal left. It didn’t go down too well. And understandably enough – for most young people then their only experience of the US empire was summed up by the bumper sticker that read “Somewhere in Texas, a village has lost its idiot”.

And even for those who were older (and should have been wiser) there was a logic to the catharsis which came with George W. being replaced by an articulate, liberal, and above all Black US president.

None of these excuses remain today. Since Obama took power, he has been an unwavering champion of the US ruling elite. Pre-election rhetoric about standing up for workers and the downtrodden were swept aside as he installed an administration that worked in lock-step with the disgraced Wall Street bankers and the military-industrial complex to restore their shattered reputation and impose the cost of the financial crisis on what the Occupy movement came to call the 99%.

Lofty promises to close the Guantanamo Bay torture prison were quietly shelved. When Edward Snowden exposed the criminal surveillance carried out by the NSA on tens of millions of US citizens, Obama backed their right to do so to the hilt. Troops were, eventually, withdrawn from Iraq, but Obama replaced the Bush strategy of invasion and occupation with the new and in some ways more inhuman tactic of drone warfare. And now, of course, he is bombing Iraq again.

At home Obama stood by while a militarised and racist police force put down protesters in Ferguson, when they rose up in outrage after yet another unarmed Black man was murdered by a white cop. The US alliance with the brutal monarchy in Saudi Arabia continues. The irony of Obama enlisting a regime that routinely beheads its citizens in the name of “Islam” in an alliance against Islamic extremism in Iraq is as hypocritical as his demands that China protect human rights at the same time that racist cops have carte blanche to murder Black men on American streets.

I was as pleased as anyone to see Abbott put in his place at the G20. But if mocking the banal mediocrity of crackpots like Abbott also means holding up as an alternative one of the most articulate and effective warriors for the global ruling elite, you can count me out.