Yes, the pond is deeply sorry too ...

Yesterday First Dog published an important and wide-ranging apology on behalf of The Australian.

While appreciating the Dog's valiant attempt to apologise for the rag's cretinous, curmudgeonly, cloddish, loutish behaviour - frequently passed off as vigorous investigative journalism, to the great shame of Woodward and Bernstein - the pond eventually decided there wasn't much point accepting the apology, when the actual recalcitrant villains of the piece continue on their sordid way without the slightest sign of regret or remorse, or any indication at all that they intend to change their ways ...

Speaking of climate denialism and their denial of their denialism, for example, you could hunt high and low for any indication that the lizards were remotely aware or interested in the launch of the latest report on climate by the CSIRO and BOM:

You can, thanks to the full to overflowing intertubes, bypass the irrelevant reptiles, and head off here and either download the report State of the Climate 2014 as a pdf, or read it online.

Heck, the pond is agency agnostic. You can do exactly the same at the Australian government's BOM, here:

You'll find a report on the report, currently down the page and tucked away in the environment section of the Fairfaxians, with Peter Hannam's Australia experiencing more extreme heat, high fire danger days, says the latest State of the Climate report.

But at least it's there.

No doubt in due course the Murdochians will wheel out the hacks, the paid professional assassins, to nit and cherry pick and cast doubts and dispute, while at the same time running the old, and odd, editorial line about how they accept the notion that the climate might be changing, and then do their best to deny any of the implications ... Bjorn Lomborg, anyone?

So what do we cop instead today?

Well there was a comedy item, of the hagiographic kind:

Oh yes, that's sure to have Vlad the impaler trembling in his boots.

And then like brain-dead clockwork came this:

Even the splash was a classic form of trolling click bait.

Many on the intertubes, for example, see nothing wrong in asserting that Nick Cater is a fuck witted wombat.

You see the impeccable logic?

"Many at the ABC" followed by "see nothing wrong in reporting unfounded allegations", in itself an unfounded allegation of the first water.

Well it wouldn't do if there wasn't a reference to World War II, and a veiled reference to Hitler, and naturally, being a Caterist, Cater obliges in the opening pars of The anti-military bohemian collective (inside the paywall for your peace of mind):

Peter Coleman once wrote about bohemians who met at Sherry’s coffee shop in wartime Sydney to consider “more important things” than the war. 
Nowadays the bohemians are organising the Opposition Leader’s diary and have decided that there were more pressing matters to attend to than welcoming home our troops in Darwin after their longest ever war.

Uh huh. The pond immediately stood by for an impeccable impression of Colonel Blimp, refracted through the addled mind of an armchair general.

And sure enough, the Caterist promptly careered and careened through a brief impressionistic history of the past which managed to link together inter alia, Billy Hughes, Labor and conscription in World War 1, the Wobblies, Arthur Calwell and the Vietnam war, and Gough Whitlam and the Vietnam war, with Whitlam "decidedly cautious about being associated with the anti-war movement, understanding that causes that stouten hearts on university campuses sit awkwardly with the broader population."

Indeed. Which no doubt explains why Whitlam ended Australia's involvement in the Vietnam war on election, and abolished conscription, and why many Australians, when looking at Vietnam and its government, right here and now see it is still ostensibly Communist. (Vietnam Communist Party tightens grip).

Outside dedicated right wing loons, many in the Australian population see the Vietnam war as a fuck up and a waste of time.

Oh dear, Caterism is catching. But hang on:

Twenty years after the North Vietnamese victory, in April 1995, an opinion poll marking the thirtieth anniversary of Prime Minister Menzies’ commitment of a battalion to Vietnam and the twentieth anniversary of Saigon’s fall found that 55% of Australians thought that it was wrong to have sent troops to Vietnam and 30% considered it the right thing to have done. (here)

Well there's wrong, and then there's futile ...

Next the Caterist careens on his way, bumping into Allan Ashbolt, Jim Cairns, Radio Australia, the first Gulf War, Bob Hawke, Robert Springborg, the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, the killing of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, David Hicks, navy brutality, Stephen Conroy, groupthink at the ABC, Jon Faine and a few listeners, and wondrously fatuously stupidities of this kind:

For politicians, this is the most treacherous category of cultural debate, one that pits the Wobblies and bohemians against Australians like Michael and Moira.

Actually the most treacherous category of cultural debate is that a man who peddles reductionist, essentially stupid and meaningless stereotypes that pits Wobblies against the western suburbs, and still, somehow, thinks that what he has to say is of any use at all:

There is no room for indifference. You either enlist or you do not. Either Conroy is on to something or he is completely barking mad.

Well as the pond always says, you have to be completely barking mad to call others completely barking mad, which is why the pond can assert with some certainty that the Caterists are completely barking mad, and in urgent need of a course in history, as opposed to a course in ideological caricatures.

The only upside? Well it made the pond revisit Colonel Blimp yet again for wisdom and insight:

And there's plenty more if you google Colonel Blimp, proving that everything changes only so it can stay the same.

But there was a downside.

You see, the pond wanted to close on the latest bizarre exercise by the reptiles at the lizard Oz, even weirder than publishing Nick Cater, which is pretty weird for starters.

Now you might be thinking of the weirdnesses noted in Media Watch last night - the Tele slipping on Slipper, and the vicious, gutter, bully boy personal assaults - Attacks get personal - which saw the reptiles  sink their steel-capped toes into Michael Stutchbury and give space to that pre-eminent boofhead John Singleton so he could ravage anyone within earshot.

But no, it was this exercise in post-modernist, surrealist irony, worthy of a Salvador Dali, or even a Bunuel, found here, behind the paywall for your protection:

Really weird stuff, but happily it brings us back to First Dog. The Dog noted the strangeness:

By some strange synchronicity, Andrew Marlton had turned up on Insiders on the weekend, talking about cartooning. He's got his eye on them:

Which no doubt helps explain why his apology for the reptiles was so heartfelt and extensive, and inclusive:

(You can get the original, in one piece, by heading off to Crikey here, though it might still be behind the paywall).

Yet the Dog didn't even mention by name Dennis 'the bouffant one' Shanahan or Nick 'the Caterist' Cater.

But he did cover the bases, and we're all sorry, sorry that grown men and women can happily put their names to this stuff ...

And we're sorry that a once useful broadsheet, now in sharp decline and fall, sees the way forward as turning itself into a down under clone of Faux Noise.

We already have one of those to lighten our days with its apocalyptic paranoia, as Jon Stewart noted in relation to Arizona. And if you missed that by wasting your time reading the reptiles at the Oz, lordy lordy, you really do know how to waste time, and we're sorry for that too.