Quality time with the bromancer causes the pond to leak all over the leakers, and Ted "just call me Thomas Dewey" Cruz ...

The pond confesses to having ignored many pressing matters of state and reptile advice of late, yet the reptiles continue to beaver on late into the night, ever ready to right the ship of state ...

Where to start, who to chose? And then there's this ...

Well the pond can't take it all in. So much to see and so, so little time.

Let others snack on their Oreo biscuits, the pond is content with this sort of headline, surely constructed by someone with a raffish sense of Tamworth humour ...

Well at least it didn't say he'd been pissing on submarines in the way a thugby league footballer might piss on couch or in gutter ...

Thank the long absent lord the poodle has spoken and when the poodle speaks, the pond always settles. 

Of course the talk of leaking has gone on and on ...

You can read that denial by the flabbergasted wall puncher at the ABC here, and this report at the Fairfaxian krispy kremers here (with forced video) ...

I yam what I yam.

Yet this is a passing strange and wonderful story, since the entire point of the leaking on the submarines seems to have been to get everyone's knickers in a knot or at least flabbergasted by the delays ... and yet ...

And then there was this delicious report in the Graudian, here, including but not limited to:

For all his (Costello's) bullshit and bravado, most eyes were on the current prime minister and the vanquished. Turnbull and Abbott sat within range but there was no interaction after the first handshake. No eye contact. It was like having the divorced parents at the same wedding table.

Oh dear, the pond knows the feeling well.

Strange days indeed, but it whetted the appetite the pond's appetite for a bit of bromancer spin. Come on down bromancer, sock it to us ...

Now the point of this forensic examination is to confirm in detail how utterly correct the Abbott government was, and how eminently correct the man - who doesn't leak on couches, but might be open to leaking on submarines - is when contemplating the current situation.

First, in the cunning way of a QC confronting a Pellist, the bromancer shuts gates and builds webs, by pretending to shout a pox on all their houses...

And now, having established sundry faults, time to sheet home the current carry-on to Malware's team ...

Shouldn't the bromancer have ended it this way? 

And so we solemnly declare that replacing Malware with a wall punching, sidewalk strutting man of action is the only way forward.

Bring back Tony and Kev for 2016. Reward the leakers for their manly efforts ... because they did so well the first time around ...

In fact this effort so whetted the pond's appetite for bromancer insights that we turned to his report on matters American ...

They don't write lines better than that last par, do they?

Who'd have guessed that the bromancer might be a cheerleader for one of the most loathsome and loathed Republican contenders?

Has the idea of what a conventional Republican might be has now become so debased that Cruz could be compared to Thomas Dewey, rather than, say, Joe McCarthy? Or perhaps at a pinch, Barry Goldwater ...

The rest is dull by comparison, but just for the sake of completeness, the pond includes it here.

Well anybody who's made it this far deserves a treat, so why not rush off to read Bill McKibben's review of Jane Mayer's book Dark Money, at the NYRB and at the moment outside the paywall as The Koch Brothers' New Brand.

The pond always waits on its hard copy of this precious magazine, and this yarn provides some hilarious background, not least the way that the Koch family made squillions by servicing the needs of Stalin and Hitler...

The origin story of the Koch brothers, however, is like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel, connected to most of the darkest forces of the twentieth century. Their father, Fred Koch, had invented an improved process for refining crude oil into gasoline. The Russians sought his expertise as they set up their own refineries after the Bolshevik Revolution—at first he said he didn’t want to work for Communists, but since they were willing to pay in advance he overcame his scruples and helped Stalin meet his first five-year plan by building fifteen refineries and then advising on a hundred more, across the Soviet Union. 
Next, he turned to another autocrat with busy expansion plans, Adolf Hitler, traveling frequently to Germany where he “provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg.” It turned into a crucial part of the Reich’s military might, “one of the few refineries in Germany” that could produce “the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes.” And it turned the elder Koch into an admirer of the regime, who as late as 1938 was writing in a letter to a friend that “I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard.” Comparing the scenes he saw in Hamburg to FDR’s New Deal, he said it gave him hope that “perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.” 
Fred met his wife at a polo match in 1932, when his “work for Stalin had put him well on his way to becoming exceedingly wealthy.” They built a Gothic-style stone mansion on the outskirts of Wichita, with stables, a kennel for hunting dogs, and the other paraphernalia required for pretend gentry, and in the first eight years of their marriage they had four sons: Frederick, Charles, and a pair of twins, David and William. The first two were raised by a German governess who “enforced a rigid toilet-training regimen requiring the boys to produce morning bowel movements precisely on schedule or be force-fed castor oil and subjected to enemas.” Luckily for the twins, she left for home when they were born, apparently because “she was so overcome with joy when Hitler invaded France she felt she had to go back to the fatherland in order to join the führer in celebration.”

And then there's this sort of deliciousness ...

Mayer mostly avoids editorializing, concentrating on the revelations she’s uncovered with her prodigious reporting. But in the last pages she notes: 
    It was impossible not to notice that the political policies they embraced benefited their own bottom lines first and foremost. Lowering taxes and rolling back regulations, slashing the welfare state, and obliterating the limits on campaign spending might or might not have helped others, but they most certainly strengthened the hand of extreme donors with extreme wealth. 
Sometimes the hypocrisy ran so deep that it almost seemed like an inside joke. In 2009, Americans for Prosperity ran a TV ad attacking environmental laws featuring “a louche-looking young man, plucking away at a plate of canapés.” He identified himself as 
    Carlton, the wealthy eco-hypocrite. I inherited my money and attended fancy schools. I own three homes and five cars, but always talk with my rich friends about saving the planet. And I want Congress to spend billions on programs in the name of global warming. 
As Mayer points out, it was David Koch, founder of AFP, who had inherited hundreds of millions, gone to Deerfield, owned four homes including an eighteen-room Park Avenue duplex, and drove a Ferrari.

You can't make this sort of stuff up, and now the hapless American people turn to a billionaire with fascist tendencies to stand up to the machinations of billionaires who made their money from fascists and now spend their billions encouraging the most extreme fundamentalism in US policies, domestic and abroad ...

You won't find any of this in the bromancer or in papers run by the billionaire Chairman ...

But it does set the scene for a Pope cartoon, where the billionaire chooks come home to rest, and more Pope here, and a Rowe cartoon where the chooks turn into Dr Strangelove, and more Rowe here.