In which the pond is almost distracted, but lines up with the Caterists to put righteous snout in public trough ...

Naturally the wags were out in force, the comparison to the mega-distracting onion muncher being simply too distracting ...

"It isn't really possible to be a proper backbench MP as a former prime minister," he told ITV. "Everything you do will become a big distraction and a big diversion from what the government needs to do for our country." (here at Fairfax).

It fulfilled the pond's need for fully saturated irony.

Of course others have been more titillated by the sterling performance of Senator Bid smacking down her gay brother on television and burbling on in the Senate ...

It's Yay to Yae or Yea or whatever.

Good old Lateline, good old Bid, good old Senate, and they also had the major Mitchell on, displaying a fine array of plumage and an exceptional sense of self ... privacy v spill the beans? Would you give me a ride across the pond?, asked the scorpion of the frog ...

But enough of novelty items and gimcrack toys, today is Caterist day, and so it's with deep reluctance that the pond accepts that there's more juice in Sam the man.

The pond is sooh over Sam, but the reptiles can never leave a favourite old rag doll alone, and must keep wrestling with it until the very last of the stuffing has gone ...

Of course the pond immediately felt the need to re-write the contents of those splashes so they better suited the Caterists ...

Caterist's anti-government grant, anti-welfare, anti-leaner posturing:

No one bats an eyelid when the federal government sector pitches in to fund the Menzies Research Centre ...

Or:

Caterist's anti-government grant, anti-welfare, anti-leaner posturing trashes Menzies' legacy:

Nick Cater's anti-government grant posturing trashes Menzies' legacy ... in truth, the willingness of the federal government to assist the influence of the Menzies Research Centre on the civil debate has seldom been more astonishing ...

Well with that ritual out of the way and off the pond's chest - what a weight it is every week, to see this taxpayer bludger insolently saunter into the public eye and pretend he's not a wretched mendicant - it's on to the main show, where the Caterist gives Sam the man a hard time for a humble $1,600 or so, while on the 11th day of February 2016 the light-fingered Menzies Research Centre Limited picked the pocket of the Department of Finance for a much more useful $245,279.10.

Yes, don't forget your ten cents worth ...

Of course the pond could keep on doing a re-write:

Suddenly we’re in nonsense territory, listening to the kind of rhetoric unheard from a mainstream reptile columnists since the 1930s, when Ming the Merciless raged in favour of the conspiracy to demean the working man led by timber combines, shipowners and coal barons, and decided to ship pig iron off to Japan because they were likely to need it in the coming war. 
The difference, one suspects, is that Ming the Merciless actually believed in tooth and claw capitalism and, in the days before Department of Finance’s worst excesses of welfarism and grant-giving were apparent, arguably had an excuse. 
For Caterists and the hipster generation, it’s merely another postmodern jape, blathering on about lifters and leaners, while doing a hearty and damned good job of leaning. Apparently, the Caterist named his cat Ayn Rand in honour of her clever accessing of welfare under another name. 
Caterists use Department of Finance funding to conduct vanity show trials in the lizard Oz, summoning anyone to the left of Genghis Khan to appear in lizard Oz columns where they can be given a theatrical grilling about their dangerous tendency to welfarism and leaning.

And so on and on, though truthfully, the pond would be on safer, more amusing and entertaining grounds by simply running a Rowe cartoon, and more excellent Rowe here ...

That's enough to sustain the pond through the last bit of Caterism for the day ... but at least the pond can now feel justified and righteous. After all, if Sam the man taking money from the Chinese renders null any attack on some of the elements of the capitalist system, what does an epic bout of a quarter of a million bucks of Welfarism do for the Caterists?

Oh perhaps one last after dinner mint waiter, if you please ...

Yet Caterist welfarism and hypocrisy are not burning issues in the twittering reptiles of the Daily Terror never mind the twitting reptiles of Oz, where the Caterist's halo has barely been tarnished. In that strange, self-referential world, in which bizarre birds such as the richly plumed major Mitchell and prattling Polonius exist, the reliance on government grants, the sustaining of right wing influence by a federal government department, would be a major scandal if leftists or progressives were involved ... for the Caterists, it is merely a sensible bit of 'cash in the paw' wheeling and dealing of an Ayn Rand's cat kind ...

But of course the pond would have been much better off running a couple of cartoons celebrating Barners' dedication to a reasonable assessment of the national interest and plans to reduce the debt burden ... 

With such jibber jabber leading to the only sensible and Caterist-preferred leaner, grant-funded, logical answer ... more feather-bedding, more pork-barreling, more perks, plums, and perquisites, more snout in the public trough ... and luckily more Pope here ...