It being a meditative Sunday, there's karma karma karma coming to the chameleons...

(Above: and the rest of that First Dog here).

Self indulgently heading off to the sick bed for the afternoon, the pond came across an episode of Midsomer Murders, a rarely watched show, though it saturates the airwaves, ABC and multichannels, like a Sydney cockroach.

Having been rigorously trained in the detective aisle of the Tamworth municipal library, the pond picked the villain early. You see, there was a religious fundamentalist going around being nice to people, a history and French teacher allegedly with a fiancee in South Africa.

It turned out - spoiler alert - that he was a barking mad serial killer, offing people for daring to have sex out of wedlock, unloved by his fiancee and wreaking havoc in the charming little village of eccentrics.

Well there's not many other useful roles for barking mad psychopathic religious fundamentalists to play these days, unless it's keeping children in Nauru in a clap happy way or organising a tinpot group into a band of uniformed thugs happy to strut the streets harassing innocent bystanders ...

And that's how Midsomer Murders made the pond end up thinking yet again about that other mundane TV show, Border Farce.

In the ordinary way, the person who wrote the press release would have been gone, the person quoted in the press release would have gone, for being quoted and not reading it, or worse, being quoted accurately and then attempting to implausibly deny it, and the person who hired the senior official would have gone for hiring such incompetents and doing nothing about it, and even better, the politicians responsible for the entire farce would have fallen on their swords or been asked to ...

Dutton has always struck the pond as being a copper short of a baton, not the the kinky one that went off with the hooker in that Midsomer Murders episode, but more the assistant who makes life hard for Barnaby with his inept enthusiasm ... and anyway, it's really Morrison and Abbott who set this mess of uniforms rolling with their re-badging into a paramilitary, quasifascist parade.

 If you give an organisation heaps of money, and a generous dose of paranoia and fear-mongering, any border begins to look like any street anywhere in the country ...

So instead of any action, what do we cop?

Actually the mistake began earlier than the press release,  obviously Abbott is the mistake, and it's hard to pretend your office didn't have any knowledge of that:

Of course the Murdochians were on hand to trot out another excuse, of the dog didn't read its homework kind:

It always sticks in the craw for the pond to agree at any time with the Billistas - what a pity Albo didn't score the guernsey - but the reptiles for some strange reason decided to give him a splash:

Well yes, if you set up a paramilitary organisation with nice uniforms - still not quite up there with the decent blacks and leather of the good old days - and guns and oodles of money, and an ill-defined brief of paranoia and fear, and keep security hysteria ticking over in the run up to Canning, you should pay attention to what they might get up to, including the risible notion of announcing that they're going to be prowling a certain area at a certain time looking for malfeasants, presumably on the basis that malfeasants share the skills of Peter Dutton's office, and won't bother to read where the plods will be plodding ...

But that's enough of Midsomer Murders and fundamentalist barking mad true believers and plodding plods, because the HUNsters had other fish to fry this Sunday:

A sixteen page souvenir?!

The pond was swept back to the 1950s in an instant.

Take that, jolly Joe!

But look below, why there's jolly Joe doing his impersonation of Santa Claus.

Never mind Joe, the HUNsters clearly loves ya.

But wait, what's this HUNsters?

So much for Santa Claus, and aren't the reptiles in a state of abject confusion?

Of course there's just one flaw in Maiden's thinking. If treasurer-cide gets a guernsey, the one thing you can learn from Midsomer Murders is that one killing leads to another, and PM-cide would be likely to follow, and pretty quickly, probably as a sign the second act is starting ...

And then we'd have a clap happy speaker in tongues as our fearless leader ...

So what's the pitch?

Tony Abbott should sack Joe Hockey as Treasurer for Christmas. 
Trouble is, nobody thinks he has the savagery to do it and use a looming reshuffle to install Scott Morrison in the job. Or Malcolm Turnbull, the only Liberal who would deliver instant economic credibility to the job. 
It is what’s known in politics as the turkeys voting for Christmas. 

The trouble is, of course, that ScoMo doesn't seem that much interested in being treasurer anymore. He's interested in being head honcho, and being treasurer is just a way station that's rapidly becoming pointless in relation to the grander plan, what with the election looming and the time needed to settle in. And then Maiden begins to sound really desperate:

The refusal to come to terms with the fact that Hockey is a lame duck is a real shame because the last treasurer with any authority was Peter Costello, who exited the stage in 2007.  
If Abbott wins the next election, it will be 10 years since there was a treasurer who could cut it in Question Time. 
Oh, what a time to be alive.

If Abbott wins the next election ... talk about an optimist.

And so begins another bout of leadership speculation, albeit in the guise of treasurer job speculation ...

And so the leadership speculation at last comes out into the open.

Which leads the desperate Maiden into an even grander folly, the notion of a Morrison/Turnbull alliance:

Actually Ms Maiden, the karma bus is coming for Tony Abbott, if  we still follow the principle that the man in charge of his underlings should wear the responsibility for the nincompoops in his charge ...

Perhaps not. That's why there's always a number of murders in Midsomer before the dumb coppers finally work out there's a crazy on the loose, and a woman in peril, but whatever you do, don't put her in protective custody, because we need her for the third act, and a boring replay of all the killings.

Only this time it's the entire country waiting on the third act...

Either way, the pond doesn't mind how it plays out. The reptiles don't know what to do, and that's why jolly Joe can be featured on the front page as Santa, and then roundly denounced as a bumbling idiot who can't count, on other pages, and ever so slowly it's dawning on the reptiles that some kind of karma bus is coming for someone, and possibly before Xmas ...

And it might well be a speaking in tongues fundamentalist clap happy crazy. What an excellent change from a Catholic fundamentalist ...

Oh it's a good time to be alive ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, the good old Chairman is also in the wars. Someone let him out from his day job of tending the flowers at the garage ...

Oh dear indeed, and you can see why the Brendan O'Neills of the world hate the twitterati, because it's such an easy way of pointing out the blindingly obvious, and being twitterers, the tweeters did:

Such a stupid man, at least in areas where cleverness counts. Making billions, easy peasy; having the first clue, terribly hard ...

And so for those who missed the second part of that most excellent First Dog cartoon, which celebrates the way the pond has lived both in north Fitzroy and on the strip in St Kilda!