In which the pond avoids the fall of Rome for the more majestic fall of the house of Abbott ...

(Above: the reptiles have been in the news of late for the wrong Hitlerist reasons, and this fine breach of Godwin's Law leads to Quentin Kenihan's Facebook page here. Scroll down for the relevant text).


The pond doesn't propose to add to the terror porn and fear-mongering currently doing the rounds, which, thanks to the reptiles of Oz, reached some kind of apogee with this morning's effort by Niall Ferguson:

Now we're talking about the fall of Rome?

This sort of half-arsed useless nonsense is exactly the point of terror attacks, as is the 24/7 recycling of terror porn on western news media. It's exactly the sort of behaviour that gratifies and serves the terrorists.

Ferguson, in his own humble way, is a facilitator of extremism, as is the media in their way, but they are too stupid to know it.

There were other portentous, pompous hand wringers out in force:

Well if 40-50k extremists roaming the desert terrifying the civilian population, and a motley bunch of ratbag fundamentalist sympathisers induces talk of the fall of Rome - if the west is such a fragile construct - then it's no wonder the west is losing the war of ideas. Just harden the fuck up you whimpering, moaning whiners and Chicken Littles ...

And of course some of the more useless politicians of recent times have seized the moment to return to strut the boardwalks, posing as the toughest of the tough, and flourishing yet again the tired rhetoric of the past:

Abbott was still yammering on about vicious evil, and what his leadership did at home and abroad, and so the pond was immediately drawn away from the carnage to other stories, most notably this effort, to see how tough the tough guy was when it came to a simple execution, one which would only have involved metaphorical blood.

And what do you know:

Say what? The strutting onion-eater couldn't bring himself to deliver the news, to strike a clean blow? What did he do then?

He called Cory and Cory did his bidding and concealed Abbott's role? And the only out offered is that "he ever directly asked", which leaves plenty of wriggle room for indirectly asked ...

What a mess it was, and what a failure Abbott was ... and of course he doesn't want to be drawn into the entrails, which weren't just a bloody mess over a few days, but were a tangled heap of gore for the entirety of his rule.

As a result, there's a lot more in the book, but the pond stands by its firm resolution of not buying books about politics, and instead is content to pick up some of the droppings. 

This from a couple of days ago:

There's a lot more in that story, google for your pleasure, including lines such as this:

One of the women overlooked told us that she was advised, “Don’t worry, in 24 hours the story will blow over”, exemplifying the PMO’s poor political judgment. There were no excuses for having only one woman in cabinet, and everyone seemed to know it, except Abbott.

The story goes on and on about Abbott and his attitude to women in government, and then inevitably the subject turns to Credlin - who this very day, in another story, continued to fascinate the reptiles because she took up kick boxing.

Back in the day of course she was the Hulk to Abbott's Bruce Banner:

There you go, instead of idle chatter about the fall of Rome, how much better to remember the good old days of the fall of the house of Abbott ...

And speaking of houses, the pond was shattered to learn that Chuck and his consort had left the country ... why we hardly spent a moment with the future king ...

And they wonder why the notion of domestic violence is so common ...