The fact is, so many reptiles are slaves to intellectual fashion, and intellectually are not dissimilar to Oscar the Grouch ...

(Above: a lovely tribute and a malediction from Pope this day, and more of the truly essential Papist here, much better than the pious proverbial hope that Malware might live in interesting times).

It was hardly unexpected that the Nick Ross matter would run dead in the mainstream media.

The reptiles of Oz, much given to ABC bashing, did nothing but reprint, at length, an ABC denial.

Oh sure the story bobbed up in the Murdochian empire's attempt at a liberal feint, news.com.au, as Former ABC journalist claims the public broadcaster gagged him to not upset Malcolm Turnbull. And it turned up in a few foreign locations, as in the Daily Snail, Journalist claims ABC 'gagged' him because of his support for the National Broadband Network, and in the Huffing and Puffing Post as Ex-ABC Editor Nick Ross Claims NBN Coverage Gagged To Please Malcolm Turnbull.

But Fairfax, the key reptiles and naturally the ABC, have run dead on it.

Sure there might be a bit of an odour for a few days, of the kind you always get with roadkill, but in the end, the NBN is fucked, so move along people, nothing to see here, just worship at the helm of the chosen one, who so handsomely did the fucking ...

Why is there an irony in this?

Well as always, the pond has to look no further than prattling Polonius, trawling for trade, thanks be unto Google ...

Hmm, that just reminded the pond of how Indonesia's failure to stop the boats led to recent tragic events.

Strange no one in Murdoch la la land has made the connection to the rightness and justness of the wall puncher's policies ...

Never mind, here's the thing. Confronted with Nick Ross making all sorts of accusations about the ABC, what does prattling Polonius do?

Publish a piece which in the most arcane way attempts to link a retired ABC journalist with ZDF's coverage of recent events in Germany.

Talk about a comprehensive mix of the senile and the stupid, though that's to underestimate the capacity for paranoia and for the tying together of gossamer threads into a vast conspiracy to present an alternate world ... though if anyone infests an alternate world, it surely must be Polonius, and his prattling history lessons ...

Here's how it's done ...

There we go again. It seems that the people who work in the bunker in Surry Hills are amongst the left-liberal intelligentsia that dominates Western media.

How else to understand that the reptiles that infest the bunker work for Chairman Rupert, who controls a goodly slice of the tree killing and digital domains at work not just in Australia, but also in the USA, where Faux noise, books and a Hollywood major get added to the mix, and in the UK - hey guvnor, want a phone tapped?

If that's not dominating western media, what is? QED, the reptiles are bleeding heart members of the left-liberal intelligentsia ...

Oh go jerk a chain in the dunny out the back, as we used to do in Tamworth in the old days ...

What's particularly pleasing is the way that Polonius is inclined to other rhetorical flights of fancy ... for example ...

The fact that so many left liberals are slaves to intellectual fashion ...

That's a fact?

In whose lunchtime?

It's as stupid as saying ...

The fact that so many died in the wool BA Santamaria fellow travelling Catholics are slave to the stultifying intellectual fashions of the Vatican circa 1955... the year of the split, and we're not talking a Sonia McMahon dress here ...

Never mind, you get the drift about dressing up prejudices as "facts", when they couldn't pass down a Cologne alleyway on a dark night, even when dressed up as a "factoid" ...

But this is the way things work. If you're a moderate Islamic, you're constantly berated for failing to speak out on a 24/7 basis against barking mad fundies; if you're a "self-declared feminist", you need to go around declaring 24/7 that you deplore assaults in Cologne and Rotherham and anywhere else violence against women can be pinned on foreigners that the commentariat deplore.

Of course if you also happen to mention that being called a witch might be an issue, at that moment you can be denounced as a harpy fright bat with flapping arms and floppy thighs and a big bum and how funny and witty that is ...

But enough, because the pond must also admire the smooth segue. Note how the master slips from berating uppity irritating feminists to a mention of Kerry O'Brien, who dared to scribble a book about Keating ...

And so we move on to the history lesson ...

Of course there's an extraordinary set of statements in there, especially as the right, in Australia, and elsewhere, in the 1960s and 70s, and later, had a record of supporting extraordinarily appalling governments in Vietnam (Ngo Dinh Diem, anyone), Chile (Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, anyone), Greece (Regime of the Colonels, anyone), Iran (the Shah, anyone), and so on and so endlessly forth ... with many of the follies later coming back to haunt the world (Cambodia, anyone).

Yes, when it comes to extraordinarily stupid statements of the 'check the mote in your own eye' kind, Polonius is up there with the best.

Ah, but contemplating all those regimes (and thinking about all the others until tedium and ennui set in) means the pond has temporarily lost its train of thought.

The pond understands that it's terribly unfair that O'Brien might think Australia is unfortunately adept at running gulags, because ... well, we are adept at running gulags with a brutality that might surprise your average manager of Soviet gulags ... but please, exactly how do ZDF and Kerry O'Brien run in parallel?

So glad you finally asked so that prattling Polonius might deliver the coup de grace...

Yes, there it is ...

The retired ABC presenter's position is not dissimilar from that of the journalists at Heute ...

So that's how the game is played ...

Not dissimilar ...

Please, add your own airy wave of the hand.

That's how to do a smear.

Not dissimilar.

You know, if you play this game right, you might be able to construct an elaborate column, with rhetorical flights of fancy, which concludes triumphantly that Sydney Institute columnist Gerard Henderson's position is not dissimilar from that of Pope Pius XII during the second world war ...

Relax, it doesn't have to mean anything. It's just the casual art of the casual smear ... and the more arcane the better.

Well the pond is always willing to tug the forelock and follow the master.

The blathering prattling Polonius's position on the Nick Ross matter is not dissimilar from that of the journalists at Fairfax, the ABC and the rest of the House of Murdoch ...

Unfair, stupid, meaningless, an irrelevant comparison, a juxtaposition of oddities, a desperate attempt to defy Sesame Street's game of One of these things is not like the others ...

Or is it?

After all, Polonius could have prattled about the ABC and its censoring ways ... yet he chose to write about a retired ABC journalist, gone from the scene.

Sinister and weird, or what?

Oh dear, such are the ways the pond wastes the increasingly valuable, rapidly diminishing days of its life ... and worse still, on a wretchedly slow, dysfunctional, frequently broken broadband service that would produce rioting in the streets in Singapore if it existed there ... (hey Optus, Singapore's broadband speed now 10th fastest in world).

And so to a Steve Bell cartoon, just for a change of pace, and more Bell here with an explanation, in case you missed the heartbreaking viral photo...