Tolerance? Bah humbug, it's a fundamentalist Rupert Christmas ...

(Above: that headline found here, but only if you want to visit the Daily Fail, also lovingly known as the Daily Flail).

That's it, that's more than enough. It has to stop and it has to stop now. The pond is sick of it. The pond won't stand for anymore.

Ray Hadley handing out a D- to Tony Abbott, which in most academic circles would count as a fail, just a minor step up from an epic F?

Where's that leave the pond? What's left but sackcloth and ashes?

The pond is fully aware of what's going down. The conservative commentariat are berating Abbott as a way of demonstrating to the public that he's not a fiendish ideologue, he's just a soft-hearted pussy, a wet-lettuce Liberal everyone should love - except feral right-wing ratbags of the ranting, raving, Ray Hadley kind ...

It's a clever ploy. How on earth can the pond hand out Abbott a D- now? Join Ray Hadley? Or Dame Slap? Or the Bolter? Or the reptiles, or any of the others of the ranting, raving right wing kind who've been tearing strips off Abbott these past few months?

Why sooner should the earth open and the pond be transported to the fiery pits of hell ... (hey, religion is handy for metaphors if not much else).

Even worse, reports are now emerging that Abbott is preparing to do exactly what the media has demanded of him, which is to say a cabinet re-shuffle, as if re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic will help change the direction of the ship.

Who knows if James Massola's Prime Minister Tony Abbott to spend weekend pondering frontbench reshuffle is a genuine EXCLUSIVE - sheesh, have they stopped leaking to the reptiles at the lizard Oz? - but the coy Abbott seems determined to give the reptiles even more fodder to get excited about.

Abbott government insiders insist that no final decision has been made on whether to implement a reshuffle this weekend. 
 Conversations about the reshuffle have been pushed back by the Sydney siege this week, which have taken the Prime Minister's full attention and could delay the end-of-year reshuffle, which is considered the "orthodox" approach. 
Discussions are said to be tightly held, with Mr Abbott, chief of staff Peta Credlin, Liberal Party director Brian Loughnane and deputy chief of staff Andrew Hirst part of the discussions.

Eek, it's that Credlin woman again. And her partner! Shades of dynastic excess.

Massola claims Abbott wants to save his big re-shuffle until the end of next year, which shows that the captain of the good ship Titanic remains sanguine. Well, that's what you'd expect of a D- student, if only he could be called that ...

Meanwhile, the epic stupidity of George Christensen won't be denied. Yes, the sweet lad is making a determined late push for Crikey's Areshat of the Year award with a series of tweets (some of which can be found at New Matilda here).

The man has an enormous capacity for self-promotion, and an equally enormous capacity to not contribute a single distinct thought when it comes to actual policy, surely an enormous achievement even when surrounded by top notch contenders like the poodle ...

It got so bad that even poor old Ewen Jones had to pretend he didn't know who the screaming, ranting gent on the bus was ...

(that juxtaposition found at Fairfax here, with forced video).

Yes, Ewen you intolerant lefty twitter warrior you ...

Actually if you head off to Ewen's website, here, damned if you can find much about the LNP, but the logo's there if you scroll down to the bottom of the page ... though perhaps he should think of changing the text to read Despair. Punishment. Failure. Let's keep Australia on the rack ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles are in top notch form, recycling the recent tragic event into yet another part of their ideological wars ...

This takes exceptional skill,  up there with Senator Leyonhjelm, since everyone knows that the only appropriate response to death by shooting is to demand that the marketplace be flooded with guns, and Australia turned into a rough approximation of the old West, and Sydney a most excellent imitation of Dodge City in its hey day ...

In one editorial, the reptiles made it clear that they were at one with gorgeous George:

Not to be outdone in woolly thinking, Crikey’s Bernard Keane tweeted: “The fury of the Right that their terror toy has been taken away from them by #illridewithyou is palpable, isn’t it?’’ What rot. On Twitter, Deakin University academic Scott Burchill condemned associate editor Chris Kenny for writing two columns about the Sydney siege and the threat of Islamist extremism without mentioning Australia’s bombing campaign in Iraq.

Yes, when you're a ranting ratbag right wing ideological hammer, everything's a lefty nail.

Of course if you paint the killer as a classic member of a fanatical terrorist group, part of a well organised evil empire, you might pause at some point and wonder why the security services failed to take note of a man who left so many conspicuous examples of his ratbaggery on the record. It was hardly necessary to ferret through oodles of metadata to discover the man's behaviour and views ...

But on and on the reptiles ranted, pumping up the Islamic terrorist hysteria to eleven. The funniest thing? 

Well the pond means funny only in the 'peculiar' way because events in Pakistan are profoundly disturbing, but here's the line on this:

The murder of 141 children and teachers in Pakistan is beyond comprehension.

Why not try out this line instead?

The murder of 141 Islamic children and Islamic teachers in Islamic Pakistan by alleged Islamics is beyond comprehension.

But that would undermine the monolithic simple-minded black and white narrative which pits Islamic fundamentalism against Western civilisation, with no subtlety, nuance or further insight allowed or required.

Strange. There's Chairman Rupert, good mates with a major Saudi Arabian shareholder, and there's Saudi Arabia on hand as the chief exporter of virulent, violent, fundamentalist Wahhabism to the world ...

Yes, when conducting a war of civilisations, make sure you know how to sweep inconvenient truths under the carpet.

It has to be said that the reptiles are now employing exactly the same rhetoric that Hitler and his henchmen deployed in Nazi Germany to justify domestic paranoia and a lavish security apparatus, and foreign adventurism.

The pond will cheerfully kick a dollar or two into the Godwin's Law swear jar, but the reptiles should consider doing the same for this sort of rhetorical flourish:

Such utterly different views on the sanctity of life are why we sometimes struggle to take heed of the severity of the existential threat posed by Islamist extremists. There is no room in this battle, perhaps decades-long, for naive Islamist denialism. 

Except if one of your major shareholders is a big cheese in fundamentalist Saudi Arabia ...

If we are to confront the enemy, and avoid terrorist attacks, we must not be blind to the pernicious nature of extremism; it will never be defeated by smothering it in misguided affection, faux understanding and dangerous notions of tolerance.

Seig heil. War without end, tolerance dangerous, understanding faux, affection misguided. And armchair warriors on the march ...

After such apocalyptic visions of the world in never-ending war - since the reptiles assert the right to keep bombing the shit out of countries far away - it seems almost comical, but inevitable, to note that the reptiles are also maintaining the rage, and their war,  with Julian Disney.

Disney was so outrageously intemperate and ill-advised as to urge that the media treat the Martin Place matter with caution and discretion, as opposed to the astonishing gutter vulgarity displayed by the Daily Terror, as it went about the business of supporting and sustaining terrorism (who could argue with Joshua Dabelstein's effort at New Matilda, The Only Terrorist Organisation Involved in The Sydney Seige Is The Murdoch Press Empire).

The reptiles were ropeable and in their opening salvo, did their very best to sound like George Chistensen at his Twittering best, though strangely they hid their dementia and their ranting behind a paywall gold brick bar:

The terrorist who killed two people in Sydney this week has created a dreadful quandary for the hand-wringing, morally superior Left. The reality of lethal Islamic terror has clashed head on with a view of the world that has much in common with the Stockholm syndrome. Terror might have erupted in Martin Place but instead of dealing with the consequences, the posturing Left would prefer to avert its eyes.

Yep, you really couldn't get a better example of a kool aid drinking ideological zealot determinedly looking through the wrong end of the telescope at everything, always dividing the world into left and right, and always determined to explain how anything left of Genghis Khan was contemptible hand-wringing of a morally inferior kind.

Well follow the logic. If the left is morally superior, but the reptiles at the Oz are so morally superior that they can point out that the left, which thinks that it's morally superior, is actually morally inferior, then it goes without saying that the reptiles are supremely morally superior, albeit in an alarmist chicken little way ...

Or some such thing.

You see, here's how it's done. Disney, too mild-mannered for his own good, and too constrained by his position and his circumstances, to say anything about the outrageous behaviour of the Daily Terror - busy doing the work of terrorists - could only make some mealy-mouthed clucking noises and expressions of piety, while making a few general observations about media mis-deeds.

That's the sort of pigeon guaranteed to send the reptiles into a frenzy:

Because Professor Disney’s critique amounts to a fact-free zone it does not deserve to be taken seriously. He refused this newspaper’s request to name the publications that were guilty of wrongdoing and to cite examples of their “errors” “exaggerations” and “dangerous misinformation”. 

Indeed. Let's not mention the hysterical Daily Terror busy doing the work of terrorists.

His refusal to back up his public statement with facts raises the risk that his critique of the coverage of the Sydney siege will be applied to all media outlets. 

Yes, we all know who he's talking about, but he can't say it can he, nah nah, because there's already been complaints about the rag some mistake for exceptionally rough toilet paper ...

In other words, the chairman of the Press Council has smeared the industry that pays his bills. 

And never mind the blot that the Terror is on the industry ... though soon enough perhaps 'cottage industry' will be a better turn of phrase ...

Professor Disney, who leaves the chairmanship early next year, has also destroyed the council’s ability to be seen as an unbiased arbiter of any complaints about the coverage of the siege. The right thing for him to do is to own up to a gross error of judgment and apologise for such unseemly behaviour.

You can see how this works, and it's there in that key line buried at the end of the rant:

Professor Disney, who leaves the chairmanship early next year, has also destroyed the council’s ability to be seen as an unbiased arbiter of any complaints about the coverage of the siege.

It's a pre-emptive strike, and so the shameless and outrageous behaviour of the Daily Terror has given way to yet another attack on Disney.

The Murdoch press is now so wild and out of control, it's doing genuine harm, and the fact that the editorialist of the alleged upmarket broadsheet version of the ideologues can sound like George Christensen says more than the pond knows ...

Did the reptiles ever think of writing this?

The right thing for the editor of the Daily Terror to do is to own up to a gross error of judgment and apologise for such unseemly behaviour.

Probably not.

Ah well, it will soon be all over for the year. In a couple of days, the pond will be downing tools and joining the great Australian slumber until the new year ...

But that just leaves time to slip in a cartoon from David Pope, and more Pope here, as at last the NRA can join the killer tobacco industry in having a representative down under.