In which the bromancer and the Bolter combine to reveal the truth about lizard la la land ...

(Above: David Rowe's fine portrait of the Emperor's new clothes, and more Rowe here).

Of course the pond was tempted - after the excoriation, humiliation, banishment and exile of Gra Gra Richardson for holding a Swiss bank account - readers will vaguely remember the affair because not a sign of the shamed Gra Gra's hide or hair has been seen since - naturally the Emperor's new tax dodging clothes would be an easy exercise in point-scoring ...

But as always the reptiles determine the pond's agenda, and today presented the wonderful spectacle of a rabid right wing ratbagger - to wit, to woo - the bromancer, pretending to be a balanced and disinterested observer of the wonders of the world, and blessed with a strong centrist position.

Indeed, indeed, by golly that big Mal vibe is catching. It's pleasing to know that no one's guilty, but please, remind the pond, what was the actual collective, collectivist charge?

Oh never mind, let's just have a taster:

Uh huh. Let's see how that plays out in Murdoch la la land:

More of the Bolter later, stripped of his inflammatory clips - of a kind the pond could easily match by putting together some of the more hateful outpourings of the kind provided by Westboro Baptist Church (remember dead Fred, now compost, though some would like it if he'd ended in hell, hating on Australia?)

Let's get back to the bromancer, who to prove he hasn't lost his mojo, must begin by excusing Abbott and hating on the lefties:

Yes, there's your balanced pundit at work. "It is normal for the Left to talk rubbish ..." And so on, as if the bromancer's intelligence and capacity not to write rubbish had been remarkably improved by a lifetime of servile licking of Tony Abbott's boots ...

And since the boot-licking bormancer mentioned foolish right-wing narratives, now let's go back to the Bolter for another dose.

First the pond would just like to cherry pick one remark by the Bolter, which is emblematic of his cultivation of ignorance and sophistry:

First the sophistry. Notice the claim that the golden rule is a "direct quotation" from just one religion.

That gives the Bolter an escape hatch from the obvious point - that many cultures and many religions have over thousands of years had some form of the golden rule (a point the callow Bolter will later grudgingly admit in his febrile scribbling).

It takes only a moment to do a Greg Hunt and head off to the wiki for Golden Rule, and check out Islam:

The Golden Rule is implicitly expressed in some verses of the Quran, and is explicitly declared in the sayings of Muhammad. A common transliteration is: ِAheb li akheek ma tuhibu li nafsik. This can be translated as "Wish for your brother, what you wish for yourself" or "Love your brother as you love yourself".

While there, it's possible to check on the way the saying turned up in ancient Egypt, the near east, China, India, Greece and Persia, and this little note in the Christian section:

According to Simon Blackburn, although the Golden Rule "can be found in some form in almost every ethical tradition", the rule is "sometimes claimed by Christianity as its own".

So why did the Bolter support this claim to hegemony?

Well because the Bolter always peddles hate and bile and ignorance, dancing his way through the truth with his sophistry ...

Here he is in the reptile Oz, stripped of the hate videos, but with the hate words flowing:

Sheesh, maybe the pond would have been better off with a trip to the Cayman Islands. The Bolter is at last going to explain the role of Christianity in producing two horrendous world wars? That they were really all the fault of the Islamics? Or perhaps the Commies and the Islamics?

In your dreams ...

Still, that's enough of the Bolter for the moment, because the siren song of the balanced bromancer calls:

Uh huh. Speaking of people who hold passionate beliefs recruiting the impressionable, and newspapers that gratuitously fan Muslim paranoia, it's time to return to the Bolter delivering a rant which speaks not the truth, nor is remotely calm or respectful. And guess which rag it can be found circulating in?

Now it's easy enough to see the Bolter's malicious intent. It would be easy enough for the pond to trawl through the old testament and find any number of passages that celebrate war and rape and slavery, not to mention genocide committed by the bloodied hands of She Herself ...

Indeed many a pleasant meditative Sunday has been spent contemplating the Skeptic's Annotated Bible,  and the very angry Xian god on view there, and while there are links at the top of the page to the skeptic's Quran and the sceptic's book of Mormon, and while these offer equally enormous stupidities, the pond has always liked to romp amongst the assorted Xian follies of its childhood.

Let it just be noted that there are so many theological and historical stupidities in what the Bolter writes in his hagiography of Christianity that stray readers are invited to contemplate them for their pleasure ...

It's as if the Holy Roman Empire was wiped from memory, as if the House of Windsor wasn't at the head of angry Sydney Anglicans, as if indeed, the Jewish state was in no way Jewish, and only the Iranians had invented theocracy ...

And let us remember the rag which carried one version of the Bolter's opus:

Uh huh, that'd be the cheek-turning Christianity that's currently bombing the middle east and has been currently doing so for well over a decade - let's not discriminate between evangelical and Russian Orthodox, and let's not count the previous bombings conducted by the British recorded by the BBC in The 1920s British air bombing campaign in Iraq ...

Let's tip toe around what the cheek-turning Christians have been doing in Afghanistan for many years - and let's not distinguish between secularists, Russian Orthodox folk and evangelical Americans.

All the pond can do is admire a piece which excuses Christians and Jews, and dumps the entire load on the Islamics ...

And how does it all connect? Well the bromancer worshipped the mad monk, who was worshipped in turn by the Bolter, now in the advanced stage of a general grief (there is much debate as to whether he's in the fourth or fifth stage), and both work for the Murdoch press, which has done its best over the years to whip up a foaming fury of hate of Islam and a fear and a loathing which has slowly but magnificently produced the fruit of hate locally...

And suddenly the bromancer turns up on the very same pages as the Bolter riding a donkey over palm fronds ...

Which helps explain why the Murdoch press is no solution to anything.

Never has been, never will be, though it does help explain why the pond finds more substance in a New Yorker cartoon contest ...

Well played Shelly ...  if only it were true, and now ... have you thought about writing comedy routines for the bromancer and the Bolter?