In which the pond eventually gets to drink a glass of the finest reptile tears ...

 

A correspondent kindly reminded the pond of this image, long forgotten by the pond after the cartoonist veered off into la la land ...

Somehow it seemed to fit the reptiles this day, and this delicious parade at the HUN ...

Poor Bolter. After all that screeching and yammering, that's the best he can do? Why it's like that mob gathered at the bowling club bar ...

Way beyond the valley of the delusional and the sublimely impotent ...

Now the pond had no dog in the fight, not being Victorian or able to vote in Victoria, but as another correspondent noted, the state election was a reminder that, for all the huffing and puffing of the HUN, and the lizard Oz, they're supremely irrelevant on occasion and can be safely ignored. 

The HUN mainly exists to cater to the form of mass hysteria known as the AFL, and the ranting ratbags of the far right have done little to help or change minds or voting patterns, except perhaps to help the Victorian Liberal party indulge in yet another bout of self-harm ...

Luckily the pond never bothers with the Bolter and the HUNsters, but the lizard Oz reptiles were at it again today, in search of a messiah ... while simplistic Simon felt the need to rope the mutton Dutton into the disaster ...

Oh Fergo, Fergo, that's the best you can do to redeem the disaster? Josh as the new Messiah?

And did simplistic Simon really have to drag the poor mutton Dutton into the mess,  and reduce him to wondering why the Liberal party in Victoria is full of barking mad fundamentalists, many of the Xian kind? 

Trooly, rooly believing all that stuff about dictator Dan and Covid, when the majority of Victorians seemed to realise that you needed to be alive if you wanted to be able to beef about dictatorships, and that maybe beefing about masks and vaccines wasn't the best way to beef ...

The sullen, surly reptiles matched that leering snap of a smirking Dutton with a snap of sinister comrade Dan in the tree killer edition...

There was another bout of Lisa Wilkinson tedium at the top of the page, and the notion that negotiation regarding a bill was "giving ground", as opposed to arriving at an agreement - once considered a political art form - and lo, a snap of comrade Dan glaring out at the reptiles and vowing to serve a full term ...

And all the Bolter could do was urge him to resign.

Yes, it was a day to drink reptile tears, and the pond was almost tempted to indulge in a jug of Fergo ...

Just like Nemo? But was Fergo referring to Captain Nemo or some latter day Pixar imposter? The pond will never know, because instead of drinking Fergo's tears, the pond was made to eat its daily dose of reptile climate science denialist gruel ...

First the pond should note that this column conforms to the pond's strict demand that all climate denialist pieces in the lizard Oz should begin with a snap of satanic windmills. The only refinement the pond can suggest is for the cult master to return and introduce Don Quixote into the picture, so that the notion of tilting at windmills would be perfect.

Next the pond can hear some wondering about James Philips' qualifications as a scientist, let alone a climate scientist.

Well if this is the same James Philips, scribbling "about me", it turns out that he's just a doddering old lawyer farting into the void ...

If indeed that is who he is, how he ended up in the lizard Oz scribbling about science and energy and all that jazz must remain a mystery ...

That is however a new one on the pond ... Bernie Madoff! 

The reptiles have always flung about conspiracies, but Bernie is a step up in hyperbole. Meanwhile, on another planet ... Record heat over Great Barrier Reef raises fears of second summer of coral bleaching.

And so to a short final gobbet, and the big reveal ...

Indeed, indeed, it was a Sydney lawyer, historian, company director and writer casting a learned, informed eye over energy, climate science and the whole damned thing ...

And so with gruel done, it was time to wash it down with reptile tears, and who could provide a tastier glass of tears than that Kirribilli lad moaning about inner city 'leets ... (but having lived in Kirribilli for a time, the pond learned the hard way that Kirribilli was where rough, tough members of the worst of the working class and the lumpenproletariat eked out a miserable hand to mouth existence, forced to make a stew out of the jacaranda flowers on McDougall street, the pond's preferred street, as it fronted the park, and you could amble down to contemplate the harbour, as rough lumpenproletariat types munching on their flower stew are wont to do).

Now on with the Kirribilli lad's talk of inner city utopian fantasies, because you don't get to be an expert floodwaters in quarries whisperer by living in Kellyville ...

Oh it's too sweet, this blather, and yet how the reptiles tried, with Mark Knight doing his best to match the lesser Leake ...

The HUNsters are such wags, but back to the Caterist, being tortured by the 'leets, as only a Kirribilli lad can be ...

Note well the Kirribilli lad's attempt to put "the Andrews factor" to one side, as if the HUNsters and the lizard Oz hadn't waged a relentless war to make dictator comrade Dan the issue of the day ...

The flood waters in quarries whisperer seems to think that it was something to do with wanting to avoid a climate catastrophe, but every Caterist reader knows that it's dinkum, sweet, innocent Oz coal that will save the day ...

The barking mad Family First fundamentalists are the way forward? That's something to contemplate ... especially as they're blathering about the virtue signalling 'leets living in leafy suburbs full of jacarandas ... who could they be thinking of?

The pond thinks the caption on this one was meant to read ... "um we'lll learn from this", but it came out mangled ... still, the visual captures something of the reptile way ...

And so to a bonus, because what's a Monday without a Major outing?

The Major does run on for quite a few gobbets, but that's because the reptiles leavened him with snaps, as you do when confronted with the tricky business of trying to beguile readers through a boring old fart ...

Is a snap of Joe the way to begin?

The pond's mind immediately began to wander, and incidentally the new issue of The New Yorker was devoted to climate change, with Elizabeth Kolbert doing a gimmicky A to Z which seemed to be outside the paywall, but the pond can never tell ...

At least going from A to Z is more interesting than going from A to B with the Major, as his own reading habits reveal just why the tedious old drone is consistently led astray ...

Barking mad Matt Tiabbi and Glenn "off with the pixies" Greenwald, and still carrying on about the Clintons and deep state conspiracies, and still running up the flag for the mango Mussolini?

And sure enough, after the snap of the reptiles' orange Jeebus, there came a snap of that Clinton woman ...

TK News, Hunter's laptop and all that? The pond began to think of the Major as one of those festering old farts that infest the full to overflowing intertubes ...

Shouldn't the Major be trying out new material, perhaps a new song?

No? Okay, serve up another snap of a demonic figure ...

You have to hand it to the Major. That line "none of this is to argue Trump did not make mistakes in office", and then skating past the likes of Faux Noise and the NY Post to propose that "It has been a disaster for journalism's credibility".

It reminds the pond that the Major has lost none of the skills sharpened by his hunt for Manning Clark's Order of Lenin medal ... which in its day was a disaster for his credibility ...

And so to one last snap and one last gobbet ... and the usual enemies lined up, because the Major never tires of reliving the Salem witch trials ... and yes, of course renewables, though strangely no snap of satanic windmills or solar panels inducing nightmares ...

Did the Major just scribble about those people prepared to pay for an unfair and unbalanced faux noise?

But how kind of him to list all those sites that are free ... and remind the mug punters who paid for his guff that they were just a bunch of suckers forking over their readies for the Murdochian combine.

In wrapping up, the pond might note that other publications open up their archives, and as the pond has already mentioned The New Yorker, after swallowing all that Major guff, why not head off for a sorbet ...

It was Andrew Marantz way back on 8th January 2018, who wrote How “Fox & Friends” Rewrites Trump’s Reality...

President Trump woke up on November 3rd, turned on the television, and started tweeting shortly before 7 a.m. “Everybody is asking why the Justice Department (and FBI) isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary & the Dems,” he typed. “People are angry.” By “everybody” and “people,” he seemed to mean, as he often does, the three anchors of the top-rated cable morning show, “Fox & Friends,” who happened to be discussing that very topic live on air, deploying their trademark brand of folksy, disingenuous outrage.

Soon afterward, one of the co-hosts said, “And now the President is tweeting about this.”

“I think he’s tweeting right now!” another said. The thin fourth wall between Trump and his TV had been broken once again.

In the Fox News studio, the fresh tweets were displayed in bold type on a thirty-foot-wide screen, Trump’s larger-than-life Twitter avatar peering, Rushmore-like, into the middle distance. (Presumably, the real Trump, in the Presidential bedroom, peered back, an elderly youth gazing into a shallow pool.) A co-host read the tweets aloud, and then, completing the feedback loop, said, “This has been the question that people have had about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.” By “people,” she seemed to mean, as the anchors of “Fox & Friends” often do, Donald Trump.

“Fox & Friends” ended at nine. Moments later, Trump arrived on the South Lawn of the White House, answered a few questions from reporters, and left for a ten-day trip to Asia. A few days into the trip, en route from China to Vietnam, he walked to the rear of Air Force One, where the press corps was sitting, to deliver some off-the-cuff remarks. “I know they like to say—people that don’t know me—they like to say I watch television,” he said. “People with fake sources—you know, fake reporters, fake sources. But I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents. I’m reading documents a lot.”

This was weird, even by Trump’s standards. For one thing, “reading documents a lot” is high on the list of activities it’s nearly impossible to imagine Trump doing, along with foraging, Pilates, and introspection. For another, no one on the plane had said anything about television. It later became clear that the impetus for Trump’s outburst was an e-mail he’d just received from the Times—a list of fifty-one fact-checking questions for an article about him. Of these, he felt compelled to respond, indirectly, to just one, about his “prodigious television watching habits.” When the piece came out, it reported that Trump begins his day by watching TV in bed, where he “tweets while propped on his pillow.” (Trump, on Twitter: “Wrong!”)

Trump has been candid about his TV dependency for years. In a 1997 interview with Howard Stern, he described escaping from his own wedding reception—his second, when he married Marla Maples—as quickly as possible to look at coverage of the wedding. “I ran back and turned on the television,” he said. (A diagnostic test called the Television Addiction Scale asks subjects to agree or disagree with several statements, including “When I am unable to watch television, I miss it so much that you could call it ‘withdrawal.’ ”) During his trip to Asia, he tweeted, “I was forced to watch @CNN, which I have not done in months, and again realized how bad, and FAKE, it is. Loser!” Of course, apart from rare circumstances (jury duty, North Korea, “Get Out”), no one, much less the President of the United States, is ever “forced” to watch TV. One imagines Trump writhing in pain, using his tie as a blindfold, while his staff scrambles to find him more documents to read.

On a recent morning, a chyron on “Fox & Friends” read “study: 90% recent trump coverage is negative.” The study—by the Media Research Center, a right-wing nonprofit whose declared “sole mission is to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media”—came up several times during the broadcast, as did an F.B.I. agent’s anti-Trump text messages, a pair of offensive socks that Colin Kaepernick had worn once in 2016, and the fact that it was very cold outside. Morning TV relies on constant repetition, the assumption being that most viewers, unlike the President, will be too busy to watch for long. (A chart of Trump’s 2017 tweets, created by a University of Chicago graduate student and plotted by time of day, reveals an unmistakably dense band between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., when “Fox & Friends” is on the air.)

“Wow, more than 90% of Fake News Media coverage of me is negative,” Trump tweeted. He ended the tweet by naming his source, as well as his favorite exception: “@foxandfriends.”

Every morning begins with an artificial L.E.D. sunrise, all teal and goldenrod, like an orange-juice carton come to life. The camera starts on the bottom floor of Fox News’ lavish main studio, then glides upward—past a translucent staircase, past thirty-foot windows overlooking a still dark Sixth Avenue, past innumerable video screens—until it locates the three co-hosts, perched on their signature white “curvy couch.”

There's a lot more, but really the cartoon at the top said it all, a reminder that, when it comes to understanding how deeply weird the Murdochian love of a wannabe autocrat and preening narcissist, the last place you should arrive at in your A to B travels is the Major's tired, aged, out to pasture conspiracy-laden noggin ... shouldn't he just be settled in front of the telly for a dose of alternate reality?