Saturday, November 14, 2015

Decanting the recanting and savouring the esters ...


(Above: more Wilcox here).

There is much recanting going on amongst the reptiles.

There is a whiff of republicanism turning up even amongst the Terrorists:


That's Laurie Oakes, explaining how Chuck's relationship with the country is a decidedly uneasy one, and has been since the silver-spooned prat turned up at Geelong, how knights and dames helped Turnbull to power to welcome Chuck on his fifteenth visit, how Chuck floated the idea of becoming GG, how Di drew the crowds and Chuck gloomily sulked about how he may as well just stay in the car, and how David Hill's book on the monarchy contained this anecdote:

Speaking of affection, Charles faced a particular problem on visits to Sydney in his bachelor days before marriage to Lady Diana Spencer. 
He could not stand staying with NSW Governor Sir Roden Cutler because of the difficulty in sneaking young women into Government House late at night. 
It prompted the then head to assert it was “difficult to believe that Prince Charles could ever be accepted as king”. 
The book quotes colourful entertainment promoter Harry M. Miller, whose home became a refuge for the prince, describing how Sir Roden would sit up “fully dressed in pinstriped splendour” waiting for the prince. In the end, “Charles had to order Cutler to bed”.

Now the pond has no problems with royals being randy - what an inspiration Prince Edward was - but if we want a rake for a ruler, why can't one of the local lads get the gig?

Then there was this ...


That's Susie brooding about how the crowds are down - "They are just pleased anybody comes out to see them" - and how interest in the royals has now jumped a generation ... except, of course, that Chuck is determined to inherit the crown, and the spawn can wait their turn ....

Poor Flinty is pushing it uphill and remarkably the ACM website hasn't had a posting since June this year. They've shifted over to Facebook, but you have to be logged in to peruse the follies, so naturally the pond refuses to link to such nonsense ...

Meanwhile, some of the reptiles are doing their own form of recanting of a peculiar, tediously lengthy and torpid kind, and who else to show the way than the pompous Paul Kelly (no reflection on the singer intended).

Kelly is in the reptile vanguard designed to explain to conservatives how the new wind might be good, and how perhaps Fraser was a grasping thug, who would have won an election in proper style if he hadn't been so greedy and devious (need we add so guilt-laden that in later life he swung wildly off to the left?)

Yes, in selling his book, Kelly is also selling the notion of a republic and the right to dissent to the behaviour of Fraser's cur:


However cutting through the thickets of verbiage requires a really good chain saw as Kelly wanders off into heresy land...

It turns out Malware, in this new world order, is a man for the season, and a man for all seasons. A right royal Chauncey the gardener:


Okay, there's the book selling part of the business done - it's out this week folks - or is it done?

Can we squeeze just a little more juice out of Malware to keep the tome off the remainder shelves for another week?


Well you have to go back to the start of that tediously lengthy gobbet to begin to assemble the laughs.

The Nation Review a radical newspaper? Only a tedious old man shouting at clouds could possibly imagine this is an appropriate use of the word "radical". The wiki gets it right:

Nation Review was aimed at Australia's new urban, educated middle class, providing mocking political commentary, offbeat cartoons, iconoclastic film, book, music and theatre reviews, and food, wine, and even motoring columns. The paper's satirical tone matched the style of Australian university newspapers like Honi Soit and Tharunka, from which publications many of its contributors and editors had indeed graduated.

Which is why years later you can find alumni like Leunig railing at injections, Patrick Cook off in the wilds of the right, Germaine Greer getting agitated about TG folk and Phillip Adams scribbling for the reptiles of Oz.

If that's radical, then the pond's a wild-eyed Bakunin nihilist.

But the pond shouldn't be distracted by radical dreams, because what's interesting in all this is Kelly's attempts to come to terms with Malcolmisms about things like the dismissal and the republic, and to explain how really, deep down, Malware remains aligned with the stars, and the Abbotts and the Howards, and everything's going well in the garden and with the vegetables and the fruits and the soil and the seasons ...

Of course, there's an ominous note at the end ... The conservatives lie and wait - they believe, sooner or later, Turnbull will misstep, big time. They might be right - but it didn't happen this week.

But that proves just how irrelevant Kelly is, as outdated as his carry-on about the dismissal.

Malware has already made a big misstep - the NBN is an ongoing disaster which will only reveal its infinite follies and rich betrayals over the years - and besides Kelly's line could be turned around for this man of all seasons ...

It's not just the conservatives that lie in wait ... it's also anyone who expects things to be done.

What happens if the Queen carks it and Chuck ascends the throne? Where will Malware be then? What happens if a vile campaign of fear and loathing leads to a vote against gay marriage? Where will Malware be then? What happens if tax reform mainly amounts to a GST slug? What happens if stripping weekend entitlements turns the country even more towards the employment practices of the United States? As if we didn't already have enough 7-Eleven examples ...

Slowly but surely, Turnbull is building up a log of claims, many of which he will be unable to deliver, and then Kelly explaining how conservatives got it wrong on the dismissal for forty years  will seem like a passing dream.

The best thing Malware has going for him is Bill Shorten, which says much about the tragedy of Labor but also about the exceptionally easy situation Turnbull currently finds himself in ... until the crunch comes.

Kelly probably doesn't realise the disservice he does by scribbling this sort of nonsense ...

Turnbull nominated national security and economic management. He could have been Abbott or Howard...

Well security takes many forms, as does economic management, and saying Turnbull is just like yesterday's men shows that all Turnbull's talk of agility and innovation and mobility is wasted on aged reptiles shouting at clouds ...

It's taken the reptiles of Oz forty years to come to understand that the dismissal was a flagrant abuse of power and that the monarchy is a useless irrelevance and that Chuck might well be its final undoing, so we'll probably have to wait forty years more for them to discover the enormous stupidity of many of their current positions ...

Climate science anyone? Alas poor Chuck, all they care about is your crowd potential, and not your message ...

Luckily the pond will be long gone, but still hungers to see the day that The Australian will be recalled in its dying days - all things must pass - as a radical newspaper ...

And so to a joke doing the rounds on twitter, which the pond recycles only because the twitterati irritate the reptiles so .... what an elegant simplicity it has ...


14 comments:

  1. Reading accounts of the goings-on in the Prime Ministerial apartments on the evening of the Great Deposing remind me of the chapter in Wind in the Willows when the partying stoats and weasels are driven out of Toad Hall.

    All that squealing, body tackling, snapped ligamenture, broken furniture, wine poured on chairs, cussing and caterwauling brings to mind sharp whiskery snouts and long slithery tails. Such anger because the fine-suited, silver-tongued Malcolm Toad was back.

    Now who is Ratty? Sinodinos? And Moley? Can only be Andrew Robb.

    Miss pp

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  2. How could the events of November 1975 have damaged the fabric of the nation? Labor was reduced to its rightful place - as a rump - and the Libs got power. Isn't that the natural state of the fabric?

    This has been my belief since at least 1988: John Howard is an evil, evil man. Sure, Fraser acted like a turd over the events of 75, Abbott is and always has been a brainless twit, but Howard is (and remains!) the root of all things evil in Australia.

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    1. I'd agree with that. Fraser and Gough set up a processing system for Vietnamese refugees in defiance of demagogue politics. Howard opposed it in Cabinet. Fraser later gave much credit to Gough's courage for bipartisan effort because a public campaign would've damaged Labor's support base, Howard as a polling nerd knew that and made his first stab at it trying to revive White Australia immigration policies in 80s.

      Later in the 90s he quietly inflamed Pauline Hanson's racism, only turning against her when One Nation started to erode Coalition support in Qld. Tampa provided his opportunity, coming so soon after 9/11. The aim was always to belt Labor over the head with it, and very much what the Pacific Solution was all about.

      When Abbott took leadership he didn't seem to have a chance in polling but quickly raised Boats! and Nauru as issues. Labor had its own problems with originating detention, albeit quietly, and seemingly like a rabbit in the spotlight when confronted with beate-up anger on the issue. They might have neutralised it as an issue via Malaysia but Greens joined Coalition against it.

      But it goes back to Howard, the Fear and Loathing, Dog Whistling, and Race Politics. An evil genius.

      Delete
    2. Thanks GD. I think I'm from about your vintage (I was 18 when Whitlam was dismissed) and you don't hear much about the 80s politically any more, but that was the time of the gestation of pure evil spirit within little Johnny.

      Dorothy rails against the evils of the Devine; Howard was much more powerful, and therefore had much more potential to influence things in this country. He was the ageing fuddy duddy, the seemingly harmless uncle bemoaning the state of things, what with all those Asians, and while he didn't support racist policies, could well understand the feelings of those who did.

      He normalised racism in Australia, and continued to feed it. Tampa and 9/11 must have been a godsend to him; I remember wondering at the time whether he might have even had a hand in their engineering, so perfectly did they fit his politics.

      9/11 I doubt it, but Tampa? And then my tin hat falls off and I realise it was his masterful handling of it: children overboard, we will decide etc.

      Howard's cunning was ever on display. You only had to look through the avuncular veneer, and have the confidence to know that fear was an emotion that he was exploiting and promoting, not reflecting, to see that.

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  3. Not enough "evils" for Johnnie imho.

    I'm sure there's a story to be told about the "spivification" of the Liberal party when its power base shifted from the elegant (if somewhat dim) Ms Melbourne to the tarty Ms Sydney. It somehow, though simplistically, describes how the tenor of our gummints has changed.

    Is that sexist? Sorry.

    Bil

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  4. Dorothy, you forgot to mention one character who wrote for the Nation Review and subsequently changed into a self important over blown pompous windbag. I am of course referring to Keith (windbag) Windschuttle.

    At least Leunig and Adams maintained their sense of humor. Adams has published some excellent joke books, and Leunig is still superb. Which is more that one can say for Patrick Cook who was once upon a time my favorite whimsical cartoonist. He became a completely unfunny cartoonist and writer for the Spectator.

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  5. Who the f*** is Steve Price? I honestly have no knowledge of the man. But apparently he is already bitching that the ABC didn't have rolling coverage of the Paris attacks, even though 7, 9 and 10 did.

    Apparently he lacks the required grey matter to use his remote to switch to ABC 24 which was the first to break this and has been covering it non-stop.

    The dickhead must be a reptile.

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    Replies
    1. He also somehow missed that 9 played the cricket all day (except for the scheduled news break)

      When all you have is a hammer....

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  6. Steve Price left school in 5th Form. Does that tell you something?

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  7. As a follow up to the Wilcox cartoon at the start, here's some paranoid lunacy from Quadrant, if, judging by the amount of responses to the daily nutbaggery, I must be one of their few readers.

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    1. I dunno Dave C, Quadrant does have a section called 'doomed planet.'

      Delete
  8. Donald Trump's contribution to the French atrocity.

    "Isn't 'it interesting that the tragedy in Paris took place in one of the toughest gun control countries in the world?"

    The French Ambassadors' reply.

    "This message is repugnant in it's lack of any human decency. Vulture."

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    Replies
    1. I don't know; I'm still somewhat inclined to posit globally that all the warmongers, arms wielders and dealers, and ceaseless and merciless violence advocates do a pseudo-reasonable job of keeping everyday-busy draping themselves and others in uncivil highlights.

      Delete

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