Primary appeal is Caterists' blather ... primary sense has gone missing ...

It's that time of day when the pond must set aside any notion of pleasure and do its Caterist duty ... but first why not do a detour to Ralph Steadman's Animal Farm illustrations?

There's something about that drawing which, in an ineffable way, reminded the pond of the Caterists. Perhaps it was the hint of the way the pigs were managing to avoid the slush of taxpayer funding beneath their sodden, muddy feet ...

Never mind, hey nonny no, what's up for grabs today?

Oh sheesh, that's just what the pond didn't need ... but duty calls ...

Ah, right from the get go, a post-ironic, post-reflexive, post-thought moment from that master of dimwittery, too opaque to realise that what he's about to do puts him in the category of the keyboard cognescenti tapping wildly ... and perforce the pond must then become a wild tapper about the tapper tapping wildly ...

Never mind that in due course the Caterists reveal themselves to be hostile, and paranoid, and fear-mongering and inclined to raise a Trumpian spectre which must be solved by producing a two party state, with the Liberal party in control of the Senate for all eternity ...

But the pond gets ahead of itself ... we must trudge through the verbosity of sludge ...

Please, give the pond a break. Trump is running as a Republican candidate. Trump presents as a Republican, his followers present as Republican. If that's not right, then something's wrong with the Republican party.

For a long time, at least in the pond's living memory, Republicans have yearned to follow the strong leader mentality, ranging from Joe McCarthy through Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon ...

Indeed, if you want some interesting thoughts on leadership, you might spare yourself the Caterist delusion, and  head off to Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker (outside the paywall for the minute) and Shut Up and Sit Down:

To some extent, leaders are storytellers; really, though, they are characters in stories. They play leading roles, but in dramas they can’t predict and don’t always understand. Because the serialized drama of history is bigger than any one character’s arc, leaders can’t guarantee our ultimate narrative satisfaction. Because events, on the whole, are more protean than people, leaders grow less satisfying with time, as the stories they’re ready to tell diverge from the stories we want to hear. And, because our desire for a coherent vision of the world is bottomless, our hunger for leadership is insatiable, too. Leaders make the world more sensible, but never sensible enough. 
Should our leaders keep this in mind? Do we want them to lead with a sense of submerged irony, of wistful self-awareness? When we’re swept up in the romance of leadership, we admire leaders who radiate authenticity and authority; we respect and enjoy our “real” leaders. At other times, though, we want leaders who see themselves objectively, who resist the pull of their own charisma, who doubt the story they’ve been rewarded for telling. “If a man who thinks he is a king is mad,” Jacques Lacan wrote, “a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.” A sense of perspective may be among the most critical leadership qualities. For better or worse, however, it’s the one we ask our leaders to hide.

Sob, enough of this and Lacan, it's back to the Caterists, inevitably seeking to blame something, anything, in the usual simplistic, addle-brained Caterist way for a weed that's grown in the Republican pasture ...

What an inconvenient pile of dribble.

Trump hasn't exploited hate and resentment of Hispanics and Muslims? What was all that talk of building a giant wall and excluding an entire religion from the country then? Mere playful jest?

The trouble here of course is that Caterists are so myopic, so resentful of being a taxpayer-funded member of the urban sophisticate class that all they can blather about is their loathing of their own kind ...

As for the rest, it's worth noting that Republicans control Congress, they control the Senate and they have for years had a majority on SCOTUS. They've only missed out on the Presidency, and their resentment, their hostility, their anger, ranging from shutting down the government to refusing to do basic constitutional things, such as consider a replacement for Scalia, has resulted in an eternity of petulant hysteria.

Right at the moment, the establishment is Republican. So if the establishment sucks, why is everyone flocking to a billionaire strong man who presents as a Republican with all the solutions for America's current dilemmas?

That's where the Caterists' hindsight isn't worth the digital space it occupies in the full to overflowing intertubes, let alone the killing of trees to see it in print ...

What, fear mongering again?

Well actually, if push came to shove, and it was a choice between Ricky Muir and Cory Bernardi and George Christensen, the pond would pick Muir every time ... heck, even the fundamentalists on the cross-bench sound more civilised than that pair.

There's no need for a crystal ball to see where this is heading.

Clutch at the fear, and let's see the Liberals in charge of the Senate for an eternity, thanks to stronger primary voting, and delusionally optimistic Greens, and in consequence a lifetime supply of taxpayer grants for the Menzies Research Centre ...

All in the name of fearing a Palmer turned Trump ...

How strange then that this Palmer spectre, this Trumpism down under, was nurtured for years within the Liberal party bosom, before the snake turned on its own kind and the venom - a particularly potent Queensland form - began to flow ...

In much the same way as the Republicans were happy when Trump was pursuing his birther delusions and giving the Kenyan Muslim a hard time.

And yet, the worst example of Trumpism yet down under entirely escapes the gaze of the Caterists ... that's right, the wall-punching unilateral knighter of benighted knights ... the man who brought nattering negative hysteria to a peak even Spiro would have admired.

Compared to him, the cross-bench in the Senate is a fine sample of representative swill ...

Never mind, it's time for a couple of cartoons from the excellent Rowe, more Rowe here, and the best papal cartoonist never to rule over the Vatican, and more Pope here ...