In which the pond struggles to hug The Spectator, but wouldn't mind hugging David Pope ...

By golly, Pope is a master, which is why the pond always urges a hit on his gallery here. 

It was that last panel that particularly moved the pond.

And after the initial flinching - the pond is no Christ when it comes to lepers - it led the pond to thinking what happens when you're so deep into denial, so saturated in kool-aid, that you can't let go of the dreaming, that you keep tilting at the wind mill, that you feel the need to sustain your delusions?

The Labor party experienced it with Chairman Rudd, and are currently in the grip of a humourless, colourless man, but occasionally some of them can step back and see the fun of making a bad choice.

And now even some of the reptiles can see that they were engaged in a barking mad folly these last five or so years, swept along by a surging swamp of joyous nattering negativity and now forced to deal with the hang over:

Well yes, that's stating the bleeding obvious, and it's only taken a few days, and a quick withdrawal treatment, for some of the reptiles to get off the kool-aid and come back to something resembling earth.

But what happens when you're deeply involved and engaged, and spent the last five years of your life backing the wrong man, a man so direly inept, so woefully out of touch, so backward thinking that he was irredeemable, and such a disaster of a luddite Prince Philip kind that it took only two years in power for the majority of his colleagues to realise that they were flogging a dead horse to nowheresville, paddling their leaking canoes through endless rapids up to the 'all get out here' terminus at the end of shit creek ...

Well, it turns out that you stay in the grip of your delusions, and you're given to writing orgasmically funny bits of bile ...

Now the pond rarely hares off to the spectacle offered by the loons at the Spectator. Any rag that boasts James Allan, Terry Barnes and David Flint on its cover as its key selling points, is clearly a rag that's beyond the valley of the loons ...

But anyone who can pen a set of lines like this surely should be working the very best comedy festivals in the world ...

Tony Abbott PM was a class act, as the electorate will come to appreciate over the next few months and years. The measure of his achievements in less than two short, frenetic years in office eclipses by a country mile the achievements of any government, state or federal, since the early Howard years.

Dear sweet long absent lord, an establishment which has superior strength kool-aid, way better than any procured by the reptiles of Oz, despite their claim to use only the very best, supplied by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen ...

Now the piece has no signature attached online, and presumably has the weight of an editorial, and we all know who the editor of that appalling colonial outpost is ... that lightweight gadfly of appalling comedy ...

Beyond satire?

Indeed, indeed, and certainly way beyond the pond's usual tolerance of loons ...

But, but you say, surely the pond made those couple of lines up? They couldn't have really been written by a real person in touch with reality, even if loaded up to the gills with kool-aid?

Okay, here's the evidence. The pond admits it looks a little suss, being dated for the next day, but that's just another example of the way they run the online magazine. The tree killer edition will come out tomorrow, so the online date must be tomorrow too - well at least you can see they're determined to be out of touch and operating on the wrong time in every way possible:

Ah, the cajones ... how pleasant to see the masculinists in charge. Man up with the gonads, Mr Turnbull ... surely you don't think a little mansplaining will be enough to get you in big with the very manly lads at the Spectator ...

And how wonderful to learn that running gulags allows for generosity of spirit. If only Adolf had been alive to grasp the subtlety of the argument ...

But after that spurt - if you will forgive the pond its masculinist image - of brave outrage, thereafter the rest of the piece begins to limp and sag, as indeed often happens after a spurt ...

Oh indeed, that last little flourish, that spurt-let, if the pond may be so bold, rather than call it an ejaculatory dribble, in the penultimate par has a certain charm ...

This magazine believes that although Mr Abbott’s personal unpopularity was a lead weight on the Coalition, when it came to the crunch the strength of key accomplishments and the self-evident lack of appealing ideas from Mr Shorten would most likely see this government creep back in with a reduced majority. On top of which, recent initiatives such as the plebiscite and the refugee intake would undoubtedly have broadened the Coalition’s appeal, as the ‘softer’ 2015 budget had already done. Indeed, a cynic might conclude that Mr Turnbull and Ms Bishop launched their brand-wrecking attack in order to pre-empt the positive bounce in the polls that the likely Canning win and these centrist measures were bound to elicit over the next few weeks and months.

There's nothing like a little sci fi, a what if, of the Kevin Brownlow, It Happened Here kind ... completely unprovable, a meaningless assertion swept aside by the sweep of history, already done and dusted ...

But now you can see why that Pope cartoon is so prescient.

There are some who can't adjust, who can never adjust, who will never be able to come to terms with the real world.

What to do with them?

Oh please Mr Pope, can the pond just give succour to a leper? Or could we just send a few blankets to The Spectator's office?