Day 89 of MUC and day 42 of MOC, and prattling Polonius comes out in favour of the Donald ...

Okay, perhaps that header was a bit misleading, but surely prattling Polonius is fair game this day ...

You see, it's a thought crime to line up behind Obama ... but here's where that Polonial logic gets you. 

If it's a thought crime to get behind Obama, then surely the only way forward is to get behind the Donald...

Remarkable, this at a time when conservative, even rabid GOPers, are getting very leery about the Donald, and with polling to match. 

So that's how it's done. Assert one thing, it's all the doing of Islamic State, and then quickly turn about and say "it is not clear" whether they were acting on the direct instructions of the group.

It's the sort of befuddled distortion that Polonius would berate others for, yet he blithely leaps from that to inflating the power and potency of Islamic State.

It seems clear enough that Larossi Abballa was a petty criminal and dropkick loser turned by jail into a revenge seeker, but the case of Mateen is much murkier, with a terrible family life, perhaps conflicted sexuality, a too generous dose of anger and violence, and an interest in fundamentalist Daesh activities, but with, at this point, no evidence of any direct contact, let alone instructions.

So why conflate and distort? How will this help sort the problem? Should we join with Polonius in celebrating the insights of radical Christian hate speech (though the Donald seems to have come late to the Christian bit...).

And here did Polonius discover that some middle-class intellectuals like to pretend the threat doesn't exist? Can he find one such intellectual and produce them?

The difference is that in Australia, thanks in part to John Howard (how it hurts the pond to type that one), the threat isn't worth the hysteria or bigotry he wants to offer ...

As for the actual incidents - mercifully few in Australia - it's interesting to compare bigger killers like the motor car, grog and smoking ...

It turns out that to date they've been a bit like the spectre of shark and croc attacks. Gruesome fodder for the tabloids, but isolated.

Back in 2014, Crikey calculated that there had been 113 victims of terrorism and contrasted it with the 8500 victims of car accidents, the 2617 homicides, and 22,800 suicides ...(Crikey here).

Now a single death is one too many - no blogger is an island, etc - and there's no point in being smug and self-congratulatory, but the pond is reminded that just down the road at a 412 bus stop, a hapless teacher was stabbed to death by a mentally disturbed person living in a half way house (here, with forced Fairfax video). 

Each time the pond walks past that spot, which is often, the pond broods on the senseless killing and the person who lost his life. Then again, if you happen to be a British Labor MP, who knows when a mentally disturbed hater with neo-Nazi tendencies might pop out of the bushes ...yet strangely we rarely see the same hysteria, even when radical right wing culturally Christian Odinists produce a huge killing field.

Random acts of meaningless violence - and car crashes - have been a part of life for many decades. And that's before we get on to the sort of psychotic mind think that produces a Dr. Strangelove and talk of precious bodily fluids and sundry wars ...

What good does it do to identify moderate practitioners of Islam with crazed fundamentalists? Must we tar all Christians with the ratbag fundamentalists in their midst?

The focus on terrorism has another, entirely devious purpose, of the kind originally deployed in Germany and Italy in the 1920s, and now deployed in the service of fundamentalist hate speaker Trump, and to see how it's done, we must read the last gobbet by Polonius, which manages a level of hate against migrants that even Trump would admire (watch out, there's a third generation Irish terrorist typing this as you read):

 

For all Trump's insensitivities ...

That would probably be the sort of insensitivity that suggests that the selecting of the Orlando gay club had nothing to do with a manifestation of homophobia ...

Because, like, you know, Daesh doesn't have a thing about homosexuals nor does it indulge in homophobia that matches its hostility to women's rights, and when it flings them from the rooftop, it's merely a scientific experiment to confirm gravity ... 

Well we know what that dog whistle means ... 

For all Trump's insensitivities, he's right.

Build the wall, stop over a billion people travelling to the United States, shut everything down, make the South Koreans and Japanese get nukes, then walk away from them, take on China, ignore climate science, and in every way fuck over and fuck up the planet ..

Because more anger, violence, hostility and division will really fix things up.

This is the end journey of the game of hate and fear and division played out by GOPers with the help of Fox and the Murdochians, to the point where they now have arrived, thanks to inequality and the rich making out like carefree bandits, and an apocalyptic 'isn't doughnuts and soda enough?' moment is genuinely at hand.

Well the pond, for one, as an atheist and as a sinner in many other ways, doesn't need this sort of inflammatory help from Polonius. The pond would be amongst the first lined up against the wall by Daesh, but then it's likely the reptiles wouldn't be far behind.

In the same way,, the pond doesn't need any help from Polonius's Catholic church, itself a refuge for homophobia and hate preached in the guise of love ...

But how interesting that an aged white man shouting at clouds down under thinks Trump might be the cure rather than the disease ...

If the worst comes to pass, we can thank the quislings and alarmists and forelock-tugging lickspittle Polonius's of the world, using his same mechanisms of fear-mongering, alarm and anxiety, for helping Trump on his way ...

David Brooks managed the feat this week in The New York Times, but the pond would rather provide a link to the Tamworth Waste Management Facility (yes, they called it a garbage dump in the old days, and that would evoke Brooks' mindset better because it's not half as pretty as the pictures).

Never mind, it's time for a Parakeelia cartoon from Rowe, who grows more demented by the day, and like the pond has clearly been driven mad by this extended water torture election campaign ... and more Rowe here ...