Thursday, December 15, 2016

In which the pond indulges in the usual mad bad to the bone bromancer and meets a new reptile ...



When in doubt, the pond always turns to the bromancer, never brilliant any day, always awful the next, in terms of style, one of a kind ...

Watching the bromancer come to terms with the Donald is a bit like visiting Norman Bates' cellar and hearing the muttering ...

They're probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. (A pause, as the fly lights on the bromancer's hand) I'm not going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They'll see... they'll see... and they'll know... and they'll say... 'why, the Donald, he wouldn't even harm a fly...'

Or some such thing, because it's 'bromancer deals with the Donald' time yet again ...



Actually if you read The Rockefeller family fund versus Exxon here, and here, you can see that Tillerson was at the head of one of the most appalling corporate citizens doing the rounds, heavy on lobbying, full of lies and deceit, and deeply cynical in its actions ...


Never mind, follow the links for the footnotes and in the meantime, it's back to the bromancer, going a little mad, but then we all go a little mad sometimes ...

...it isn't as if the Donald were a maniac, a raving thing... it's just that... sometimes he goes a little mad. We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven't you?

Lay it on us, bromancer ...


Now at the end of this, the pond was bemused.

There seemed to be plenty in the maddened bromancer about the bad Trump, and the dangers of Tillerson, but where was all the stuff about the good Trump?

It seemed to the pond, on a cursory reading, that the bromancer had come up with sweet bugger all good stuff ...

Never mind, because the pond discovered a fresh face visiting reptile la la land, and a fresh face blaming the mug punters is always a cause for celebration ...

Yes, it's time for the deplorables to cop a bucketing ...


It was as if the reptiles, who keep saying how dumb the Australian academy is, discovered Laing and ran the piece by him as a way of proving their point ...



Now Laing lost the pond from the get go by indulging in the blame game, but then lumping together Julia Gillard, Campbell Newman and Mike Baird established in the pond's mind that we were in the company of a prime goose ...

How does talk of daring to be Campbell "Can't Do" Noddy Newman or Casino Mike make any sense at all?

Somehow the punters are at fault for swallowing the lies of spivs and sharks?

Eight or so pars into the piece, and the pond was inevitably disappointed and started looking around for a new academic scribbler, but felt compelled to move on to the last gobbet ...


Political science?

Now there's a bloody oxymoron of nonsense ...

Of course we've heard all this before ... over and over again in reptile la la land ...


You can google the rest ...

A bit of political history might have come in handy while talking of the political science ...

Here's how it played out in the first decade of federation, with prime ministers coming and going so fast, it explains why they should have put in revolving doors ...


You can get those pictures here ...

The only honest transition took place when Barton left to work on the High Court ... the rest of the decade was full of first class political hi jinks which look the modern mob look like perk-seeking amateurs.

As for Troy's blather about coups, here's the ADB  on one transition ...

... Forrest, an old colleague, resigned in July 1907 over the Liberal-Labor relationship, which became more difficult after Watson resigned the leadership in October. Labor withdrew its support in November 1908 and the Earl of Dudley, governor-general, sent for Fisher. Deakin came under pressure to form a united front against Labor, whose militant 'machine' and electoral activities he feared increasingly. As Labor ranks had swelled at successive elections so Liberal-Protectionist numbers dwindled until the party was the smallest in the House, and its future looked bleak. Labor radicalism had outflanked and outpaced Deakinite liberalism. 
Neither (Sir) Joseph Cook, who had succeeded Reid, nor Forrest would serve under one another. Deakin, waiting in the wings, convinced himself that he could liberalize the conservatives and preserve radical liberalism. In May 1909 he agreed to the fusion of anti-socialists, Liberal-Protectionists and Forrest's 'corner' group. A bewildered Fisher was curtly dismissed. 
Close friends still believed in Deakin's integrity, but to many others his actions seemed nothing but a naked grab for power, a base move to regain office at any price by a man who thought he was indispensable. 
The political confusion produced some of the most dramatic scenes in Federal parliamentary history. Lyne — never a friend of Deakin and now a foe — denounced his former leader as a 'Judas', a charge which the vindictive Billy Hughes believed slandered the disciple. 
Deakin was sworn in for the third and last time as prime minister on 2 June 1909.

Same as it ever was, and if the pond had the time to wander through the instability in each of the subsequent decades (anyone for a great depression or a few casual, lazy world wars?)

Those who forget history are doomed to imagining that they are living in very unique* times (* usage licensed from Radio National) ...

As for that concluding guff by Laing ...


Punch above its weight, rolling up its sleeves and sundry other assorted clichés of the banal kind? Meaningless jibber jabber ...

We should step back and get the overall picture?


John Curtin in the same breath as Ming the Merciless campaigning to ban commies and sending off his various political friends and enemies to gulags or diplomatic Siberia or the High Court? (Speaking of coups, how about Garfield?)

And you want a better class of political discourse?

Is "fuck off" sophisticated enough for you?

And so, as the Donald started off the show, to a few cartoons and a reminder that The New Yorker - which the pond subscribes to because non-reptiles must be rewarded - has a cartoon section here ...











5 comments:

  1. Me thinks that the bromancer should read the interview with Justin Frank on the Thom Hartmann website titled the Mind of Our Narcissist in Chief.

    And the Bill Moyers posting titled Its Ayn Rand America Now Republications Have Stripped the Country of Its Last Shred of Morality

    The "moral" of both essays is that there is NO good Trump.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Dorothy,

    The research fellow from Monash not only seems to have a poor grasp of political history but also appears to be similarly lacking in drawing any practical lessons from current politics abroad.

    His simple panacea to the woeful political environment is that the major parties can be reshaped by a revival of grassroots membership. Not only is this often actively discouraged by parties and politicians (how else did an appalling creature such as Bronwyn Bishop keep being selected as the Liberal candidate for Mackellar for so long) but he fails to notice this has actually recently occurred in the UK and the results have not been pretty.

    The British Labour party recently moved to the highly democratic “one member, one vote” (OMOV) system for selecting their leader and encouraged people to join by reducing the membership to £3. Membership increased in unprecedented numbers and when given the option they picked the supposedly “token” leftwing candidate -Jeremy Corbyn.

    Unfortunately Corbyn was a little too socialist for his predominately Blairite colleagues in parliament and the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) refuse to work with him or are even in total rebellion.

    This lack of a coherent and unified opposition party might not have been a major problem except for the fact that the woefully inept Tories are now in charge of removing the UK from the European Union and nobody is keeping them in check.

    The resulting train wreck isn’t going to just harm the UK, it could well have global economic consequences.

    DiddyWrote

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Talk about that Laing donkey having a poor grasp of political history DW, sheesh.

      He writes: "It's the system that produced great leaders such as John Curtin and Robert Menzies".
      Which is backed up by Bramston writing: "... one of the world's oldest democracies"

      So, firstly, Australia only became a 'democracy' in 1986 when a pair of acts by the Commonwealth of Australia and the UK Parliament finally removed the legislative power that the UK Parliament held over Australia. How can a place claim to be a 'democracy' when it is subject to laws in which it has no say enacted by people it does not and cannot, elect ?

      Then, let us also be crystal: Curtin was a good PM by all accounts, but really, in terms of forming and defining Australia, no other PMs come anywhere close to Andrew Fisher (2nd term) or Joseph Benedict Chifley (only one term). A total of around 7 years in which those two PMs created modern Australia.

      But then why would anybody expect a Monashian to actually possess facts in this poet-truth world.

      Delete
    2. facts in this poet-truth world ?

      rhymes of the times?

      blank verse?

      3 word slogans?

      or worse?

      Delete
    3. All of the above, Anony.

      Delete

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