Is there a big enough bowl of water for all the blood?

(Above: and more Rowe here. And just who is that figure in yellow, with the ghoulish grin and the wink?)

So the war criminal and war monger Tony Blair has called for a bowl of water and shamelessly washed his paws in public ...

The pond often wonders how the likes of Blair look in a mirror or lie comfortably in bed at night, and the answer, if you read Tony Blair rejects 'bizarre' claims that invasion of Iraq caused the crisis, is obvious.

In a state of denial and delusion.

It seems everything and everybody - the civil war in Syria, and Maliki and Iraqis themselves are to blame - but Blair and his cohorts are cleanskins. In other news, the first world war and the behaviour of the victors absolutely had nothing to do with sowing the seeds for the second world war ...

Naturally the sheer preposterousness of Blair's denialism has attracted attention ... and while the pond refuses to link to the original Blair "essay", if you can be bothered to can suffer through an advertisement to cop Blair doing his denial for camera at Fairfax here.

But why would you bother? Why ruin a Monday? Just the photo is enough to produce a queasy stomach:

And what to you know, the war criminal, not content with his war monger past, is at it again, if you read Tony Blair: west must intervene in Iraq.

And so on and so forth. About that point, the pond shifted from queasy to outright nausea.

What's astonishing that anyone pays any attention to these days to such a comprehensively failed politician, who yet again is associating himself with the American neocon way of fucking things up.

Even the Labor party, which harboured this cuckoo in its nest for many a long year, must surely have begun to have doubts:

His remarks drew criticism from Labour's former international development secretary Clare Short, who accused Blair of behaving like an American neocon, adding he had been consistently "wrong, wrong, wrong about Iraq". 
She said western interventions created more tension, anger and bitterness in the Middle East, adding the invasion of Iraq "was done in such a deceitful way and with a lack of preparation for what was going to happen afterwards". 
Short said the extremist views coming out of the Middle East came from the Sunni community which was being financed by Saudi Arabia, a friend of the west and Tony Blair. 
She said: "More bombing will not solve it, it will just exacerbate it".

It seems that only now has Blair discovered that he underestimated the sectarian and tribal divisions in Iraq ...

No doubt there will be a lot of recanting and denialism in the coming months and years, and a lot more war mongering of the John McCain kind, since the one thing you can assert is few people learn anything from history and thus history is certain to repeat itself ...

Yes, they're all out and about ... Paul Wolfowitz, Lindsey Graham getting down with Iran, Mike Rogers demanding endless war, and so on and so forth ...

Amongst the many mistakes in Iraq, a key one involved the insistence of the winners on doling out payback - the same mistake that erupted with the punitive Treatment of Versailles. It's not an easy thing to do - win a war and set up a Marshall plan, or change an entire culture the way Japan changed from Samurai to peaceful pursuits in the 1950s - but it can be done.

The right wing Israeli government is right at the moment, by grinding the aspirations of ordinary people into the dust, showing how to foster resentment, anger and extremism ...

But Blair, cheerleader that he was, helped in the rush to war, and after the bull ran through the china shop, he's saying he's got nothing to do with the breakages? And this wretch's views are given prominence, and become part of the water cooler conversation.

It's just too much for a Monday ...

So what else is news? Well it seems, if you read the reptiles at the lizard Oz, that the witch hunt is progressing well, and any day now the witch will be dead, or at least locked up, and as for climate science, any attempt to do anything about the environment is certain to result in economic ruin.

Yes, it's just another day in reptile la la land. It's just too much for a Monday ...

The pond needed a refreshing sorbet after the stench coming from Blair, a mouth cleansing, lip smacking affair, and it looks like there's one on the horizon, at least if the reptiles really do pluck up the courage and launch a legal action against the Daily Mail ...

Though it might just be the usual huffing and puffing and posturing you expect from a frill-necked lizard ...

You see the Mail has dared to call out chairman Rupert and his lickspittle lackeys as a bunch of King Canutes.

Now as everyone knows, Cnut the Great (wiki him here) is much abused and misunderstood:

The first written account of the Canute episode was in Historia Anglorum (The History of the English People) by chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, who lived within 60 years of the death of Canute (1035 AD). 
According to the story, the king had his chair carried down to the shore and ordered the waves not to break upon his land. 
When his orders were ignored, he pronounced: "Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless and there is no King worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven and earth and sea obey eternal laws," (Historia Anglorum, ed D E Greenway). The account shows Canute setting out to demonstrate that the tide would come in regardless, says Professor Simon Keynes of the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. 
But most modern-day analogies of Canute turn Henry of Huntingdon's account on its head. (and more here at the Bee Bee Cee)

But hey, we've learned today from Tony Bleagh that actual history counts for three fifths of fuck all, so let the abuse and the legal action begin, as you can read at mUmBRELLA in Daily Mail fires back at News Corp as copy theft row heats up:

...a fiery return statement from the Daily Mail Australia cites instances of its own copy and images had been taken without permission, while arguing that it was operating in line with “best web aggregation practice” and accusing News Corp of not understanding the fundamentals of online journalism and describing its local executives as “King Canutes”. 
“News Corp’s accusations are preposterous,” said a Daily Mail Australian spokesman, “This is a cynical attempt to damage the reputation of Mail Online and its hard-working journalists.”

Yes because the Mail Online is an exemplar of the standards of modern journalism, much like the output of News Corp ...

There you go, surreal comedy of the first water, as two corporations most responsible for all that's wrong, and the very worst in modern journalism, go hammer and tongs at each other ...

Today’s statement from the Daily Mail Australia responds directly to the allegations, with its own legal letter demanding News Corp’s online properties stop posting stories from its website without proper attribution or citing only an “British newspaper” and that it should end its policy of refusing to hyperlink to rivals. 
“When carrying Mail Online or Daily Mail material we have discovered that News Corp often neglect to name their source and even when they do, they most often don’t provide a link back to the original story,” said a spokesman for the Daily Mail Australia, citing examples such as photos were taken from their website, with the Mail’s ‘sidebar of shame’ clearly visible and labelled under “supplied”or where photographs were listed as “Daily Mail”. 
While News Corp pays for the right to use some copy from the UK newspaper it is understood these rights only apply to copy published in the print edition of the UK newspaper. “Rupert Murdoch is a brilliant, buccaneering innovator who built a global media empire by challenging old business models and vested interests. How sad that the King Canutes now running his Australian print operation are so unfamiliar with how the modern digital world works.” 
News Corp declined to be drawn on the reasons for its policy of not hyperlinking to others. A spokesman for the publisher said: “We stand by the fact that we believe the Daily Mail Australia is breaching our copyright by lifting substantial slabs of original content from a large number of articles from our mastheads.”

Sorry, the pond just had to repeat that bit about the King Canutes and throw in Chairman Rupert being called a buccaneer, which is to say a pirate, which should shortly see George Brandis issue a "heave to, me hearties" to the rogue, like Black Dog giving Master Billy Bones the black spot.

And it has to be said that the examples the Mailites have hurled at the Canutes are doozies:

Everybody on the sidelines is loving the game.

The Graudian also gave it a run in Daily Mail Australia hits back at News Corp over plagiarism claims.

Right now it's just lawyers at ten paces:

The Daily Mail Australia said in its Sunday statement that its lawyers would seek urgent assurances from News Corp that it would refrain from “lifting” material from MailOnline without proper attribution or internet linking. 
“DMA will be contacting News Corp after discovering repeated examples of stories and pictures being taken from MailOnline in recent weeks, without proper attribution or internet linking.” 

Oh come on guys, how about a little MAD? Is this the best you can do? Just huffing and puffing and frill flashing?

 A News Corp Australia spokesman said: "We stand by the fact that we believe the Daily Mail Australia is breaching our copyright by lifting substantial slabs of original content from a large number of articles from our mastheads."

Ah you can sense the frill folding on that frill-necked Canute ...

Look, feel free to stand by the fact, but let's head off to court. Let's get down and dirty. We need a distraction from the likes of Tony Blair and the horror of Iraq ...

On the upside, at least the pond didn't have to link either to the piratical Canutes or to the Daily Mail ...

Oh yes, the pond has a long memory: