Day 72 of MUC and day 25 of MOC, and Dame Slap becomes a birther ...

Perforce, as we head into day 72 of Malware's unofficial campaign, and day 25 of Malware's official torture of Australia, the pond has to keep track of the reptiles of Oz campaign of fear ...

This day it's the doctors, and with no fear of blowback, thanks to a Barnes flapping in the breeze at the departing hooting owl ...

Well the doctors have their answer to their feeble attempt to tackle Malware and the reptiles ...

Sorry docs, you and your campaign here have been targeted by the Government Gazette, and the diligent reptiles have gazumped your arrow with a top notch fear campaign ...

There's too many doctors, there's too much of the health ...

And so on to the pleasures of the day, and what a singular pleasure Dame Slap has produced ...

Indeed, indeed, and no doubt there were scribblers back in the day scribbling It's time to take Herr Hitler seriously, or perhaps It's time to take Il Duce seriously ... though the latter was always a tougher ask, and the resemblances between the Donald and the Duce or perhaps Berlusconi are much more acute ...

But stay, the pond can already hear mutterings of Godwin's Law and rattling of swear jars for a coin donation ...

Forget it, the pond has supped deep of Xian bigotry and bile ...

You see how trippingly the holocaust and Nazis and the gay agenda dance off the bigot's keyboard?

Thanks to the bigoted, bilious Xians, the pond has got a year's free use of Nazi comparisons in its war chest!

But back to Dame Slap ... no doubt there will be a few who remember her wonderful series of articles It's time to take Lord Monckton and his climate science and his warning about the UN using climate change to advance world government seriously  ...

So her story this day, It's time to take Trump's birther campaign seriously, is just another example of her ability to get ahead of the curve ...

Indeed, indeed, it reminded the pond of a piece in the NYRB by Mark Danner, The Magic of Donald Trump (outside the paywall for the moment), in which Danner, inter alia, quoted a perceptive Richard Rorty from way back when:

Watching him blather and mug as he casually leaned over the podium in Boca Raton, seeing him cultivate the applause as if directing a symphony and then raise his two hands in thumbs-up gestures as he surfed the waves of applause and the deafening shouts of “USA! USA! USA!,” I recalled a remark that the philosopher Richard Rorty made back in 1997 about “the old industrialized democracies…heading into a Weimar-like period.” Citing evidence from “many writers on socioeconomic policy,” Rorty suggested that 
... members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. 
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots…. 
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
As Trump put it in Nevada, “I love the poorly educated!” Rorty’s words prophesy not only the strongman’s rise but his blithe refusal to let “political correctness” prevent him making sexist and bigoted remarks, and his fans’ euphoric enjoyment of their hero’s reveling in the pleasures of free speech. He says what he wants: he is rich enough, strong enough, to do what he pleases. Strength: though he has had no experience whatever in foreign affairs, polls consistently show he inspires the most confidence among Republicans when it comes to protecting the country.

It was inevitable that Dame Slap would join in the chant for a strong man, and never mind the actual nature of the strength ...

Oh indeed, indeed, that wicked Bill Shorten ...

Well just as the fascists had their quislings and their facilitators, it was inevitable that the Faux Noise roll-over to the Donald would reach down under, and just as inevitable, that Dame Slap would be in the vanguard ...

And there, right at the end, talking about a workers' party and real wages, is why Dame Slap suggesting the need to take Trump seriously sent the pond into a round of hollow, post-ironic Sierra Madre laughter.

You see, you can get a Trump quote on anything to trump a Trump quote on anything. 

Dame Slap's got a workers' party and a wage rise?

The pond's got Trump's actual employment and wages practices, and this ...

Of course within the week, Trump had walked it back with I never said wages are too high. 

But this is what we're supposed to take seriously? 

A man who makes Hitler seem like he had a coherent strategy and vision?

Seems so ...

So if we don't vote for Malware, we'll end up with Donald Trump ... or perhaps Pauline Hanson? And we shouldn't mind a little casual bigotry along the way ...

Planet Janet is always bizarre to visit, but this is surely an example of the extreme self-loathing that lurks within her ... because she's exactly the sort of phenomenon that the Donald's supporters despise.

Well the fascists had their nervous quislings and facilitators too, and no doubt they wrote exactly these kinds of columns long ago, back in the 1920s, when times were much tougher than they are today ... but damned if the pond is going to take the Donald or local politics so seriously that it must lose its sense of humour, especially if it means giving up the chance to chortle along with Dame Slap ...

Which brings the pond to its real gripe of the day.

Dammit, Fairfax get a grip. 

The pond is well aware that you're trying to pretend that your centralised brand has some kind of local relevance ... but the result is that you end up treating the one genuine jewel in the Canberra Times crown with a disturbing lack of piety ...

This is what happens when you attempt an inept re-direct on a gallery ...

Just get your shit together and treat Pope with proper papal reverence and the pond can go back to pretending The Canberra Times has got something to do with Canberra, as opposed to a brand recycling material from The Age ...

In the meantime, you can find more Rowe here celebrating Dame Slap celebrating the local Donalds busy at their work...