In which the pond reluctantly lets the reptiles into the bug out ...

 

We are all preppers now - the pond saw some amazing sights in supermarkets on the weekend - but the pond isn't so sure that it wants to spend quality time with the reptiles in its bug out …

What use is ratbag right wing ideology during a climate or a health crisis? Surely the prime reptile function will stay intact - four legged SloMo good - when really they should think about self-isolating …and for evidence for this thesis, the pond reluctantly turned to the Major …

Of course, of course, the pond should have known it's all the fault of the ABC and the Labor party … but what provoked the Major so? Well there's a clue in the photo used in the next gobbet … oh no, not the former Chairman and Swannie and the need to re-fight the battles of 2008 all over again …

Why does it stick in the Major's craw so? Is it wags like that refugee from the lizard Oz, now at home at the Saturday Paper here, and featured in The Insiders on Sunday, and the jokes they crack?

Relax, the next gobbet features a snap designed to sooth alarmed reptiles everywhere … Scotty from marketing on the case, even if the marketing only started a couple of weeks ago ...

Our Adam thinks a technical recession unlikely? Good luck with that. Out in the real world, the preppers are stocking their bug outs, and they're not listening to reptile good cheer along the lines of  "most viral cases are 'very mild'".

Ah, the climate cult. And Hugh Morgan the champion… and yet for all the Major's bluster and most excellent delusions, the pond has the feeling that if the bug doesn't get the world, then surely reptile climate science denialism of the Morganite kind will … but luckily the pond's time with the Major is coming to an end ...

When the latest panic subsides? Then we can return to reptile delusions and wild dreamings?

Well if the Major was an excellent example of living in an alternative universe, one where supermarkets weren't being ravaged by lemmings, naturally the dog botherer would be on hand to crank it up to twelve … and what a poignant juxtaposition there was between him and simple Simon, assigned the task of beating up the figures for SloMo ...

Well, this is no time for reptile hagiography, not when the stands are deserted ….

... and the pond is trapped with a ranting dog botherer in the bug out … and what do you know, it's all the fault of the ABC …and a few others like the oscillating fan, who shockingly, as well as scribbling for the lizard Oz, turns up on the ABC …

A victim of the virus has nothing on the suffering of the dog botherer ...

It's all calm and rational? The dog botherer must have sent the servants out to the supermarkets on the weekend, to be spared the sight of the looting and the hoarding …

But please, note how smoothly the dog botherer segues from blaming the ABC to blaming Twitter - a medium incidentally whereon he managed to consistently make himself a right royal galah before deciding to walk away from it … because his sort of inflammatory nonsense is best kept to the gibberish and blame-game shaming of a lizard Oz column … and how how the bitterness and the bile sticks in the dog botherer's craw ...

Of course in an alternative universe, it could be that Swan did something useful …while Scotty from marketing's team?

More here, but isn't it strange that the marketing guru, the super selling whiz, seems to have forgotten the basis for his reputation for quite a time? 

It helps explain the dog botherer's deep discontent … it's hard work defending fuck-ups, which is no doubt why he finds himself defending himself on a daily basis … and no doubt he will come up with a witty defence in his final gobbet ...

MDS to match TDS? That's the new real disease?

Only in the deluded mind of the dog botherer. There's a real virus out there, and cheap jokes about MDS are beyond the valley of anyone twittering away ...

At once the pond felt the need of a Rowe cartoon, with more Rowe here …

And now some credit, because there was one reptile who stayed true to pre-virus days, and rabbited on in a viral-free way  … 

Come on down feminist recovering Oreo …

Indeed, indeed, because the US never commits war crimes …

Now all proceeded well for the first few gobbets, with the reformed feminist Oreo faithfully following the US exceptionalist line,  and never mind the work of the court in relation to a variety of matters worthy of exploration (as in a wiki here) ...

Uh huh, but was it torture, and was it deplorable? Well the pond skipped through the next gobbet to get to the Oreo crunch …

Sorry the pond loves its crunchy Oreos ...

In short, is water boarding torture, and has the US ever been held to account for its Geneva Convention breaking activities, outside a few internal raps on the knuckles?

And this is where the Oreo tended to get a little lost ...

Well yes terrorists are liars, but water boarding is torture … and perhaps it's worth spending a little time sorting out how a country allegedly at the head of the fight for freedom, democracy and yadda yadda, got itself into that mess, and why it refuses to allow itself to be be investigated, in much the same way as Australian conduct in Afghanistan, or East Timor, or elsewhere, is covered in a congealed murk … especially when US and Australian investigations have ranged from the desultory to the outrageously fraudulent, conducted behind Star Chambers doors ...

If there's nothing to hide, why do apologists of the recovering feminist kind sound so defensive?

Why do they sound, though it's hard to imagine, so Mike Pompeo, another in a long line of hypocrites, liars, frauds and "whatever it takes" ratbag Yanks posing as statesmen…

On Thursday morning, during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s confirmation hearing for Representative Mike Pompeo, of Kansas, Donald Trump’s nominee to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he took a question from Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California. “If you were ordered by the President to re-start the C.I.A.’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques that fall outside of the Army Field Manual, would you comply?” Feinstein asked. In other words, if Pompeo were asked to break what is the clear law of the land, under a 2015 act of Congress, by directing his agents to torture detainees, would he do it?
“Senator, absolutely not,” Pompeo replied. "Moreover, I can’t imagine that I would be asked that by the President-elect.” The first part of his answer is, in a low-bar kind of way, reassuring, although it would be quite something to hear a nominee vow to break the law. The second part, though, if Pompeo really means it, represents another kind of shortcoming in an intelligence official: a failure of imagination. After all, during the campaign, Trump said that he wanted to bring back waterboarding “and a hell of a lot worse.” The President-elect (who is said to have been drawn to Pompeo because of his virulence on the subject of Benghazi) has not abandoned that position; even as he expressed wonder at General James Mattis’s antipathy toward torture, he said that it hadn’t changed his mind. One would like to think that Pompeo is ready for Trump to surprise him.
And the doubts raised by Pompeo’s response don’t even encompass his potential response to any changes to the law that a Republican-controlled Congress might pass, and that President Trump might eagerly sign. Pompeo, in his public testimony, did not put to rest questions about positions on torture that he himself has professed in the past, or about what he might encourage Trump to do, if Trump should turn to him in private. Pompeo, in past statements, has defended the use of waterboarding under the Bush Administration, with the bankrupt argument that, although torture was illegal, waterboarding was not torture, and nor were other “techniques” that lawyers in the Administration signed off on… (New Yorker here)

So in Oreo's world, water boarding is torture, and yet according to her heroes, it isn't.

Go figure, but it's safe to say, it's never gone away, and likely it won't in the future, with only the current bug crisis providing a distraction … and the US will strive to stay a law unto itself, only this time the law is the Donald … which is to say bugger all by way of law …

And yet imagining the US is Persil-pure is a bit like imagining life in China or sundry other dictatorships of the Vlad Putkin kind is bliss on a stick …if only recovering feminists managed to take a look at the outrageous behaviour of the worst in what poses as the best, and thereby provides the best excuse for terrorism yet devised …