In which the pond has a rare encounter with a meretricious Merritt ...

(Above: and more Rowe here).

It being Friday, and with the pond anxious to get a few cartoons out to go with the cheese and cucumber sandwiches, it's necessary to look around for a reptile coat hanger, and it just so happened that a rarely spotted reptile lunged out from under a rock to help out ...

People should feel free to complain?

How outrageous, how shocking, people should realise that they're just sheep to be shorn and they should stand dutifully in the queue and drink the quietening kool aid, while providing the reptiles with a living ...

Really, for a newspaper based on the sublime art of whining and whinging and moaning and carping in a reptile chorus of complaint, it's a tad rich complaining about people feeling free to complain ...

So what brought the meritorious Merritt on to the Leak shores in this late-breaking way?

Ah the pond gets it. It's what has become known in recent times as the Trump manoeuvre, or the Trump feint or the Trump strategy ...

Publish a cartoon with profoundly racist overtones, one of a long string of cartoons with a racist tinge, and then work out a way to walk it back ...

You know, Obama founded Daesh, with crooked Hillary, and all gun owners can do is take them out to sort out the mess, and then after you've generated oodles of headlines and the attention craved, you get others to tidy things up.

Perhaps talk of procedural fairness and malice in the process...

As if there wasn't any malice in the original offending cartoon ...

It's the sort of thing that people with small hands and giant prejudices do as a way of sliding around any notion that they could instead do the decent thing, and apologise and retract.

It's not the Trump way, and it's certainly not the reptile lizard Oz way, and instead they've expended oodles of energy defending the indefensible ...

And now they're doing what the Donald has been doing, setting up a "we wuz robbed" routine should he lose ... with Merritt setting up an excuse should anyone desire to suggest that Leak and his fellow consorting reptiles might be found to have done wrong.

Uh huh, but is there any notion that Leak and the reptiles of the lizard oz might start conducting themselves with the self-discipline and professionalism expected of other journalists?

Nope.

Is there any sense in this totally meretricious bit of self-serving dribble that, as a servant of the reptiles, Merritt might himself be showing a little self-serving bias and prejudice?

Nope, but the pond left that ad for the "Rewire" series attached for a laugh, because there's nothing like a reminder that the newspaper that fought tooth and nail against the NBN, and supported and helped Tony Abbott and Malware to degut it, is now going around trying to hustle a living out of being agile and innovative and pivoting to a "rewire" ...

Roll on the weekend, but at least it allows the pond to note that Pope had an excellent title for his recent cartoon, which could be found on his Twitter account here ...

Pity he couldn't have worked in "Rewire" somewhere, but in turn that allows another Pope to run, and more Pope here ...

Hmm, that figure squatting on the house roof. It reminds the pond of some idle wretched creature, the pond can't quite bring it to mind ...

Oh that'll do, that's close enough ... oh and as for the Donald, having just watched the original feature again, the pond never gets tired of it ...

And finally, for the reader who expressed an interest in the national anthem, should the hapless doomed soul have made it this far, here's the first page of the ancient sheet music ...