Of blinking Abbots, predictable vixens, confusionist Lomborgs and fascist skeletons in the Mail's attic ...

(Above: more David Rowe here).


So Tony Abbot blinked ...

Abbot?

Well we take our cue from the mighty Jakarta Post:

What a creepy, crawly, fawning, simpering, apologetic, back-stabbing performance it was, the little the pond bothered to check out, so now it will be up to Scott "blathering in tongues" Morrison to stiffen the spine, and pretend the mad policies trotted out to the electorate can and will actually be implemented.

All the Abbot did was dissemble about his previous rhetoric and kick the can down the road so that he could emerge a cleanskin, proclaiming peace in his time, and leaving the mopping up and the dirty work to others. As a strategy, it's not much of a strategy ...

It was an old saw in Tamworth - oh if we could only mention Tamworth, now it's Barnaby "hicksville, attending weddings is a real job of work" Joyce la la land - that a bully would, like a cur, turn and show tail when exposed to a larger force ...

The preferred form of words, should you care to employ them, is "softening the rhetoric":

Well played reptiles, good job.

Yep, statesman Tony is softening the rhetoric, and never mind that it was the vile rhetoric that helped create the sense of a national emergency and a national panic.

Now strangely past, once those born to rule once again get to rule ...

Naturally the make-up department at the lizard oz was busy applying lavish amounts of pancake, with this the best spin of all from Paul Kelly:

Those damned elites again!

And what do you know, after all that arse-licking, the Indonesian elite might well squander the opportunity that the splendid, gracious, generous, giving Abbot has offered them ...

Have you ever seen spin disappear so quickly up its own fundament? And the Murdochian hagiographers keep beavering away ...

What else?

Well today Dame Slap takes to frumpy Angela Merkel, which allows a side-swipe at Julia Gillard, as per the header Gillard's not a patch on Merkel (sorry, no links to the lizard Oz lite, it can only lead to tears).

For what it's worth, here's the Dame Slap punchline:

Merkel is no Margaret Thatcher; the German Chancellor mystifies people more for her lack of vision. That said, Merkel is a refreshing contrast to our first female prime minister. Merkel has never tried to trade on the fact she is a woman or the first female Chancellor of Germany. There have been no confected gender wars or no attention-seeking claims about misogyny. Unlike during Julia Gillard's short time in office, there have been no leaked internal memos during Merkel's many years in office explaining how to play the female card for political purposes. 
She has outlasted and outperformed our own female prime minister, and when Merkel retires to write her memoirs, they will likely make for a more intriguing read than the ones being written now by Gillard.

Yes and likely enough they'll be more entertaining than reading Dame Slap who is, in Russ Meyer terms, now beyond the valley of the predictable vixen.

Will the reptiles at the lizard Oz ever let Gillard go?

Probably not, they'll clutch her to their literary bosoms like well-worn rag dolls until it's their time to go to college ... how else to explain a negative review of a book yet to be written or read?

Meanwhile, the reaction of the reptiles at the lizard Oz to the most recent news in climate science is reassuringly predictable:

Now the pond has long ago given up on Lomborg and his home away from home amongst the reptiles at the lizard Oz, so please allow a lengthy quotation from another source:

Ever since his controversial (and error-ridden) 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg has minimized the threat posed by global warming, arguing that – while he claims to accept the science documenting that the planet is warming – it is far from a top priority for humanity to confront. 
He argued then, as he does to this day, that the environment has improved over the past few decades and industry has cleaned up its act so there is no need to implement new regulations to curb carbon pollution. (Of course, he ignores the fact that it was 1970s-era environmental regulations that brought about such air and water quality improvements by forcing industry to clean up its act a bit.) 
In Lomborg’s home country, the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty reviewed the 2001 book and identified a litany of dishonest practices, ranging from “Fabrication of data; Selective discarding of unwanted results (selective citation); Deliberately misleading use of statistical methods; Plagiarism; and Deliberate misinterpretation of others’ results.” 
Ironically, the Committee decided it couldn’t reprimand Lomborg because he lacked any inkling of credibility or training in the climate sciences, so they took pity on him and absolved him of responsibility for his errors. And boy, were there errors! An independent review by Danish scientist Kare Fog documented 319 specific errors, exaggerations or logical flaws in The Skeptical Environmentalist. 
Undeterred by such a thorough debunking, Lomborg used the book to launch a lucrative career on the speaking circuit, especially popular among the Exxon- and Koch Industries-funded climate denier crowd, which loved his efforts to convince people that climate change was too expensive to address and that everyone should focus attention elsewhere on 'more pressing' problems. (Bjorn Lomborg's Climate Confusionist Spin is Never Ending, with links, and there's more on the fuss at his wiki here).

Indeed, and Lomborg can always rely on a sale to our very own local Kochians, the Murdochians, and sure enough his interminable song remains exactly the same:

With its moderate tenor, the new IPCC report ought to make our debate more constructive. Instead of being scared silly and overreacting, we need to realise that global warming is just one of the 21st century's challenges, and one that we can address today with low-cost, realistic innovation.

Yep, no need to get alarmed, just carry on as usual, with a bit of R and D, and a little splash of cash, all will be well, and meanwhile, keep on shipping that coal and buggering up the reef ...

Total cost to Australia to sort it out? Why it's loose change, a snip at about $3bn, and guaranteed to provide a benefit about 500 times higher than present policies. (And as a bonus, it might well cure acne, and what a relief to teenagers).

As the pond's NZ friends might say, why that's as chup as chups.

You think the pond jests? Of course not:

We need to get realism back. Yes, global warming is happening. In the long run, it has an overall negative impact. Yet economic models generally find that moderate global warming is a net global benefit. Globally, cold is a far greater contributor to deaths than heat. With increasing temperatures, avoided cold deaths will vastly outweigh extra heat deaths. By mid-century, researchers estimate 400,000 more heat deaths but 1.8 million fewer cold deaths.

Why that's a net bonus of 1.4 million fewer corpses and to hell with the loss of fertiliser, and let's not forget soon we'll be able to routinely traverse the Northwest Passage, with coal for cargo!, and drill for oil in all sorts of places once judged too difficult ...

And so on and so forth, as sly a fifth columnist as ever you could expect to find in a columnist ... and finding a fitting home amongst the reptilian hagiographers ...

Speaking of fifth columns, at one point the pond thought of dedicating today to the Republicans of the United States, but how long can you spend saying people are barking mad?

Surely it's simpler to just call them barking mad, and let the caravan move on ... at least for a couple of weeks, until the Tea Party has an even better chance to reduce the world economy to a shambles ...

No, what caught the eye was the epic effort by the Daily Mail to smear and defame a dead man, who happened to be a Jew and happened to join the British navy to fight the Nazis in the second world war.

It was a vile attempt to get at Ed Miliband - an indication of how Miliband is closing the gap on Cameron - and it makes the vile parrot's vile local joke about Gillard's shamed father look like the effort of an Anglican vicar at a tea party.

The pond rarely links to the Daily Mail - lie down in the gutter long enough and you're sure to look like mud, not to mention the fleas - but you can read about the fuss here.

What the grotesque right wing rag did revive in the pond was memories of its days under Lord Rothermere, who famously disliked Jews, and famously supported appeasement, Oswald Mosley, the British black shirts (the BUF), the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.

Rothermere corresponded with and met Hitler, congratulated him on invading Czechoslovakia and encouraged him to invade Romania.

There's more at his wiki here, but how quixotic of the rag to berate Miliband's father for being a Brit-hating Marxist when they have such a mad uncle and former Hitler-loving fascist owner locked in the attic.

It could, with only a minor bit of distortion, be said that the Daily Mail is the Hugo Boss of British journalism ...

Does it help to dig through the past in this way? After all, the pond now is sometimes driven around in a Mercedes Benz, and in student days was known to use the Führer's pride and joy, the people's wagon ... and there's a Boss suit in the house ...

Not really - truth to tell, a heck of a lot of the upper class in Britain, all the way up to the royals - were Hitler lovers, but if the Mail is going to do it as a way of defaming a current politician, then everybody should be doing it ...

Because in the process they make a nonsense of the sort of defence mounted by Greenslade in Don't damn the Daily Mail for its fascist flirtation 80 years ago ...

Yes, damn the Daily Mail for its fascist flirtations and crypto-fascist instincts right now ...

(Below: what a fine figure of a fascist lover he made).