Or how Margaret Thatcher street parties led to parents in Mosman refusing to vaccinate their children ...

(Above: Steve Bell and Martin Rowson have been having a fine old time of late. More Rowson and Bell here, and come on down The Guardian, we're still waiting).


It was a kindly reader who drew the pond's attention to Miranda the Devine confusing and conflating climate science with issues in relation to the vaccination of children, in Climate damage doomsdayers have led to a surge in hocus pocus ideas.

Astonishingly, amazingly, the Devine manages to blame climate science for a refusal to vaccinate children, and somehow bizarrely it's in ponce suburbs like Vaucluse and Mosman that people drank most heartily of the climate scienceKool-aid.

Now the pond first thought it was a leg pull, a spoof. So many loons, so little time, but she did, she really did.

She started this way:

One of the consequences of the bastardisation of climate science has been the damage to the credibility of science across the board. 

And she finished this way.

By all means we should do as the Australian Medical Association suggests, and ban unvaccinated children from attending school. 
But we should also sheet blame for the rise of irrational beliefs where it belongs, to those who corrupted science for ideological purposes.

Yes, climate science has led to unvaccinated children.

Now you might say at least she didn't blame the full to overflowing intertubes but this is barking mad stuff, beyond the valley of the crazy.

It's impossible to have a rational discussion at the best of times with someone who believes in the hocus pocus idea of transubstantiation (that's turning bread into flesh and wine into blood in your local friendly Sunday mass you useless protestants and secularists), and the imminent arrival of Jesus and the rapture and an eternity in heaven, but what can you say?

Nothing, it's like watching an intellectual car crash in action. All you can do is hope no one's seriously injured, though it has to be said that everyone at the Daily Terror who facilitates this sort of nonsense is deeply involved in the dumbing down of the known, and possibly the unknown universe.

Yes you, if you helped bring the Devine's thoughts to the world, you're intellectually corrupt and morally obscene. But you also provide tremendous entertainment for the pond, which relies on this sort of stuff for its daily bread and glass of wine ... (waiter, this wine tastes a little of blood)

Meanwhile, the pond made the mistake of watching the BBC nee Four Corners documentary last night, The Spies Who Fooled the World - you can still watch it in catch-up mode on the intertubes - and got angry all over again.

If any fool - like John Howard - doubted that the march to the Iraq war was based on lies, then surely this show laid those doubts to rest.

It was Colin Powell, regurgitating the information given to him like an uncomprehending parrot, who came off worst. Along with Tony Blair, who made an uncomprehending parrot sound vaguely informed and aware.

This matter crosses party lines. After all, Blair was supposedly Labor, even if newly rinsed in Maggie Thatcher's thoughts so he smelled fresh and new, and he was just as much a gung ho war monger as George Bush and his crew.

It was of course a favourite trick of Adolf Hitler, to make unconscionable demands and then seize on the failure as an excuse for war. In the matter of Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, the demand was that it be given the inalienable right to self-determination and autonomy (it has its own wiki here with German occupation of Czechoslovakia).

What's that you say? Godwin's Law? Fiddle de dee, the Murdoch press unilaterally abolished the law, and now there's a family of spiders living in the swear jar.

The war in Iraq proceeded on the basis of a gotcha. Get rid of the chemical and biological and other WMD's you allegedly have, but which you don't have and which you can't therefore can't get rid of, or we'll declare war.

It seems a firm enough basis to confirm what has long been alleged, that the declaration of the war was a war crime, and Bush and his colleagues at the top were war criminals, as were Blair and his acolytes and servants.

But if you used the pack of cards criminal analogies loved by the allies during the war, where would you place John Howard and the likes of Alexander Downer?

Downer would probably rank no more than the 6 of clubs - he's such an inconsequential and trivial fop - and Howard no more than the 9 of clubs, so careful were they to fellow travel while avoiding the full consequences and commitments of the fellow travelling.

But war criminals they are, along with the rest of the cabinet, who foisted the war on the protesting public while pedalling the same grotesque lies the Americans and the British were pedalling, as it turns out to the consternation and disbelief of the French and the Germans ...

It only took a decade for the truth to emerge fully and finally, and yet only a week ago Howard was out and about making speeches, as reported in Howard rejects claims Iraq war was a lie (forced video at end of link)

Which is to say he's still lying about the lies ...

Meanwhile, the pond has to admit it's long over the death of Margaret Thatcher.

But not the commentariat. When you give them a bone to gnaw, they'll chomp and chomp and chomp.

You can see the chomping in action in the thoughts of our very own prattling Polonius.

The trouble is, the header for the piece, Thatcher's critics neither balanced nor respectful, gives away everything.

Polonius - today must be the day he wears his trousers rolled and he ate a peach - was truly indignant and outraged:

The death of Margaret Thatcher demonstrates the double standards among sections of the left. In Britain, Thatcher-haters are running an online campaign to push the song Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead to the top of the charts. Apparently it's acceptable to brand Britain's first female prime minister, and its longest-serving leader in the 20th century, as a ''witch''. 
In Australia the word usage has been even more offensive. Last Wednesday The Age ran an opinion piece by Michael Lynch. He wrote that ''for everyone who painted her [Thatcher] as a dynamic moderniser … there was another who regarded her as a heartless bitch''. Lynch made it clear that he was in the latter category. 
So it seems it's OK to use the ''b'' word with respect to the conservative Thatcher. This would be unacceptable - and properly so - if such a term of abuse was used against a leading social democratic politician like Julia Gillard. 

Oh indeed. Shocking and outrageous hypocrisy. But m'lud, the pond pleads extenuating circumstances, and not just the way the right in Australia thought it perfectly okay to label Gillard a barren witch and Bob Brown's bitch.

It's the very same defence our prattling Polonius outlined for Tony Abbott in issue 161 of his Media Watch Dog, in which Henderson bizarrely imagines he's Nancy, a dog.

Down Freudians down. Heel, get around behind.

Nancy Asks: Have you read Professor Judith Brett’s piece in The Monthly? Brilliant. Dr Brett (for a doctor she is) nailed Tony Abbott’s action in standing in front of a “Ditch the Witch” sign as “deliberate”. That cut through. La Brett dismissed all the evidence that the sign was placed behind Abbott without his knowledge and just went for him. I’m proud that my taxes are used to fund such scholarship at La Trobe University.

It turns out of course that the song featuring our very own Dorothy was placed behind the pond's back without its knowledge, and then to the side of the pond, and in front of the pond, but sheesh, the pond simply couldn't see it ...

It's got absolutely nothing to do with the pond.

There are many other moments of high comedy - you can always rely prattling Polonius to produce a level-headed balanced and respectful summary of history, in which strangely his fingers are on the scales and the results always come out solidly conservative and right-wing.

To do this sometimes requires fudging, which is handy because Polonius is adept at classic fudges.

According to Polonius, Margaret Thatcher had a stroke in 1994, and thereafter she simply became a ranter. Hence Bob Carr's mention of a racist comment made by her in 1999 doesn't count.

Senator Carr has always admired parts of Thatcher's agenda. Thatcher should be judged when she was at the height of her powers - not after she was diminished by debilitating illnesses in retirement.

Thatcher was still publishing her thoughts as late as March 2002 with Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, dedicated to Ronald Reagan, and it wasn't until a series of strokes that year that she abandoned public speaking.

And yet, to avoid the charge that she might have harboured racists thoughts or muttered the odd racist line to Bob Carr in 1999, Henderson consigns her to senility and debilitating illness by 1994.

Or certainly by 1995, when he had the privilege to see Thatcher at a private dinner and judged her off with the pixies, or at least 'struggling somewhat'.

By golly, with friends like that, who needs enemies?

There's plenty more laughs, though sadly some of it suggests that our very own, now aging Polonius, might also be in the grip of senility and memory loss.

Meanwhile, there's just time to mention that it seems the commentariat has been sent into an enormous flap. Bizarrely recently Miranda the Devine offered up Emily's List would never have chosen Thatcher.

The Devine is starting to sound weirder than Thatcher in her 1995 senility and dementia ...

And poor old Charles Miranda gets positively hysterical in Farcical death parties symbolise a nation in crisis.

The dear sweet boy harumphs and harangues like the very model of a modern major-general, and starts out this way:

I might be wrong, but Margaret Thatcher secretly suspected Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, forced whole cities on to welfare, and was really a Russian spy behind the alien abduction and faked death of Elvis Presley.

Actually he might be a completely fatuous goose, because Margaret Thatcher publicly proclaimed that Mandela was the head of a terrorist organisation, the ANC ... and the rest is just pathetic window-dressing of a feeble comic kind to hide the bleeding obvious.

Presumably Henderson would argue that she was in the grip of dementia at that point, though this would date the onset of dementia to 1987 when she famously said:

'The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation ... Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land' - Margaret Thatcher, 1987 

While others said:

 'How much longer will the Prime Minister allow herself to be kicked in the face by this black terrorist?' - Terry Dicks MP, mid-1980s 
 'Nelson Mandela should be shot' - Teddy Taylor MP, mid-1980s (From 'terrorist' to tea with the Queen)

Never mind. Miranda concludes with a resounding pukkah Colonel Blimp flourish:

Ironically Britain needs another Thatcher-like character to reset the nation's moral and social compass.

Yes, yes, like the Scouts and the Catholic church do.

Reset the moral and social compass, and shoot some of those pesky bloody black terrorists and teach Saddam Hussein a lesson, and explain how climate science has led to vaccination phobia ...

You have to laugh, because the only alternative is tears ...

“Silky’s clock got terribly excited too. It chimed twenty-nine without stopping. ‘I shan’t wind you up tonight if you don’t keep quiet,’ said Silky suddenly. And that finished the clock! It lay down in a corner and didn’t say another ding or dong!” (Enid Blyton, The Faraway Tree)


(Below: more of the usual suspects, Bell and Rowson, and remember they're here).