Decanting the recanting and savouring the esters ...

(Above: more Wilcox here).

There is much recanting going on amongst the reptiles.

There is a whiff of republicanism turning up even amongst the Terrorists:

That's Laurie Oakes, explaining how Chuck's relationship with the country is a decidedly uneasy one, and has been since the silver-spooned prat turned up at Geelong, how knights and dames helped Turnbull to power to welcome Chuck on his fifteenth visit, how Chuck floated the idea of becoming GG, how Di drew the crowds and Chuck gloomily sulked about how he may as well just stay in the car, and how David Hill's book on the monarchy contained this anecdote:

Speaking of affection, Charles faced a particular problem on visits to Sydney in his bachelor days before marriage to Lady Diana Spencer. 
He could not stand staying with NSW Governor Sir Roden Cutler because of the difficulty in sneaking young women into Government House late at night. 
It prompted the then head to assert it was “difficult to believe that Prince Charles could ever be accepted as king”. 
The book quotes colourful entertainment promoter Harry M. Miller, whose home became a refuge for the prince, describing how Sir Roden would sit up “fully dressed in pinstriped splendour” waiting for the prince. In the end, “Charles had to order Cutler to bed”.

Now the pond has no problems with royals being randy - what an inspiration Prince Edward was - but if we want a rake for a ruler, why can't one of the local lads get the gig?

Then there was this ...

That's Susie brooding about how the crowds are down - "They are just pleased anybody comes out to see them" - and how interest in the royals has now jumped a generation ... except, of course, that Chuck is determined to inherit the crown, and the spawn can wait their turn ....

Poor Flinty is pushing it uphill and remarkably the ACM website hasn't had a posting since June this year. They've shifted over to Facebook, but you have to be logged in to peruse the follies, so naturally the pond refuses to link to such nonsense ...

Meanwhile, some of the reptiles are doing their own form of recanting of a peculiar, tediously lengthy and torpid kind, and who else to show the way than the pompous Paul Kelly (no reflection on the singer intended).

Kelly is in the reptile vanguard designed to explain to conservatives how the new wind might be good, and how perhaps Fraser was a grasping thug, who would have won an election in proper style if he hadn't been so greedy and devious (need we add so guilt-laden that in later life he swung wildly off to the left?)

Yes, in selling his book, Kelly is also selling the notion of a republic and the right to dissent to the behaviour of Fraser's cur:

However cutting through the thickets of verbiage requires a really good chain saw as Kelly wanders off into heresy land...

It turns out Malware, in this new world order, is a man for the season, and a man for all seasons. A right royal Chauncey the gardener:

Okay, there's the book selling part of the business done - it's out this week folks - or is it done?

Can we squeeze just a little more juice out of Malware to keep the tome off the remainder shelves for another week?

Well you have to go back to the start of that tediously lengthy gobbet to begin to assemble the laughs.

The Nation Review a radical newspaper? Only a tedious old man shouting at clouds could possibly imagine this is an appropriate use of the word "radical". The wiki gets it right:

Nation Review was aimed at Australia's new urban, educated middle class, providing mocking political commentary, offbeat cartoons, iconoclastic film, book, music and theatre reviews, and food, wine, and even motoring columns. The paper's satirical tone matched the style of Australian university newspapers like Honi Soit and Tharunka, from which publications many of its contributors and editors had indeed graduated.

Which is why years later you can find alumni like Leunig railing at injections, Patrick Cook off in the wilds of the right, Germaine Greer getting agitated about TG folk and Phillip Adams scribbling for the reptiles of Oz.

If that's radical, then the pond's a wild-eyed Bakunin nihilist.

But the pond shouldn't be distracted by radical dreams, because what's interesting in all this is Kelly's attempts to come to terms with Malcolmisms about things like the dismissal and the republic, and to explain how really, deep down, Malware remains aligned with the stars, and the Abbotts and the Howards, and everything's going well in the garden and with the vegetables and the fruits and the soil and the seasons ...

Of course, there's an ominous note at the end ... The conservatives lie and wait - they believe, sooner or later, Turnbull will misstep, big time. They might be right - but it didn't happen this week.

But that proves just how irrelevant Kelly is, as outdated as his carry-on about the dismissal.

Malware has already made a big misstep - the NBN is an ongoing disaster which will only reveal its infinite follies and rich betrayals over the years - and besides Kelly's line could be turned around for this man of all seasons ...

It's not just the conservatives that lie in wait ... it's also anyone who expects things to be done.

What happens if the Queen carks it and Chuck ascends the throne? Where will Malware be then? What happens if a vile campaign of fear and loathing leads to a vote against gay marriage? Where will Malware be then? What happens if tax reform mainly amounts to a GST slug? What happens if stripping weekend entitlements turns the country even more towards the employment practices of the United States? As if we didn't already have enough 7-Eleven examples ...

Slowly but surely, Turnbull is building up a log of claims, many of which he will be unable to deliver, and then Kelly explaining how conservatives got it wrong on the dismissal for forty years  will seem like a passing dream.

The best thing Malware has going for him is Bill Shorten, which says much about the tragedy of Labor but also about the exceptionally easy situation Turnbull currently finds himself in ... until the crunch comes.

Kelly probably doesn't realise the disservice he does by scribbling this sort of nonsense ...

Turnbull nominated national security and economic management. He could have been Abbott or Howard...

Well security takes many forms, as does economic management, and saying Turnbull is just like yesterday's men shows that all Turnbull's talk of agility and innovation and mobility is wasted on aged reptiles shouting at clouds ...

It's taken the reptiles of Oz forty years to come to understand that the dismissal was a flagrant abuse of power and that the monarchy is a useless irrelevance and that Chuck might well be its final undoing, so we'll probably have to wait forty years more for them to discover the enormous stupidity of many of their current positions ...

Climate science anyone? Alas poor Chuck, all they care about is your crowd potential, and not your message ...

Luckily the pond will be long gone, but still hungers to see the day that The Australian will be recalled in its dying days - all things must pass - as a radical newspaper ...

And so to a joke doing the rounds on twitter, which the pond recycles only because the twitterati irritate the reptiles so .... what an elegant simplicity it has ...