In which the pond is shattered by fickle Dame Slap but finds consolation with the Bolter and the bromancer ...

It's very unsettling, very disturbing, for a conservative blogger to discover the world has been turned upside down ... we all know the feeling ...

Wednesday is Dame Slap day, and that's it ...no argument, no discussion ...and then suddenly it's not.

Now there's no point going back to yesterday and pretending to take an interest in Dame Groan. Sadly Dame Groan is so desiccated you couldn't use her on a lamington, while Dame Slap is fruity. But suddenly she's been disappeared, another of those well-heeled Devine bludgers who think they can just bugger off from the job whenever they feel like it.

So the pond had to turn to alternatives, and what a dismal choice it was ...

There's always the Bolter of course ...

Now the pond understands that the concept of monomania is no longer in technical use, but what a handy term it is when contemplating the Bolter contemplating Malware... a form of partial insanity, a pathological preoccupation, a mental illness whereby the mind is limited in expression to one idea or area of thought ...

The opening of the Bolter piece captured it all in one ... the lost loved one, and the hated new arrival ...

The long absent lord knows how the Bolter defines Liberal - it's likely even Genghis Khan wouldn't make the cut because of his centrist ways ...

But the pond shuddered at the idea of reading the rest of it - the idée fix, the manic compulsion, the obsessive fixation, the fear and loathing were sure to be predictable ... and full of the usual nonsense ...

Incredibly, half of voters have changed their mind and not just because Labor leader Bill Shorten has a golden tongue. No, blame Turnbull for being so half-hearted in arguing for the plebiscite he promised at the election. Part of that is personal. The plebiscite was thought up by his predecessor, Tony Abbott, to allow same-sex marriage to be legalised without splitting the Liberal Party. It would have worked but Turnbull stuffed it.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda, because the onion muncher could stuff a superior turkey, and could have spent his time in a plebiscite campaign standing on principle and opposing SSM. That would have been a grand sight ...that would have worked, and all because the onion muncher wanted to legalise it without splitting the Liberal Party.

Is it any wonder that occasionally the pond feels like grabbing the Bolter and giving him a smack on the chops, saying "listen to what you're scribbling, you stupid, stupid man" ...

Then it's on through assorted other matters, the Republic, schools, and as always 18C, and then a last bit of petulant foot-stomping ...

Already he’s had a warning this week from Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, whose Australian Conservatives movement could be turned into a rival conservative party at the flick of a switch. Bernardi urged Turnbull to pick up some of the more acceptable parts of the agenda of the resurgent Pauline Hanson, particularly on “migration, culture … jobs, manufacturing” — plus a ban on more refugees from Iraq and Syria. Bernardi is right, and Turnbull must offer voters an alternative to the Labor-Green agenda, not just a watered-down version that satisfies nobody. But again, that familiar question: could Turnbull actually sell anything, even if his political life now depended on it?

It left the pond singularly unsatisfied, as most forms of madness are wont to do.

What the pond needed was a dose of fruity, and so reluctantly it had to turn to that old reliable, the bromancer ...

Sure, however you cut it, it's just more of the US election and the debate, and the usual infinite capacity of the bromancer to be tone deaf, but what else to do?

Now if the pond might just interrupt at this point, it seems that we must never mind that most fact checkers after the first debate marked down Trump heavily for the number of porkies that he told, up against the relatively modest number told by Clinton ...

The point here is that old ploy of equivalence. If you say they're both full-on liars growing more alike, resembling each other, why then you might think the Donald is a perfectly acceptable candidate ... so the bromancer getting agitated about trade deals is just a fig leaf on this basic truth ...

Moonshine it might be, though if you look at the budget under Clinton, the country didn't do so badly in terms of deficit/surplus, as can be fact checked here.

Of course it's possible to prefer a degree at Trump University and a business methodology which sees bankruptcy as a routine good solution, and renegotiating national debts with creditor countries will be a wonder to see ...

But how do we know that the bromancer is secretly on with Trump? Well the last gobbet gives a clue ...

That's deeply, deeply weird, all the more so in the face of what motivated, and still motivates, Trump's birtherism.

Does it get any more blithe or carefree for the bromancer to assign the African American population to high crime areas, and expect them to just get on with life as they're assaulted by both cops and criminals?

It's about as sensitive and as insightful as this sort of approach ...

"Our government has totally failed our African American friends, our Hispanic friends and the people of our country. Period," Trump said in Akron, Ohio, straying from the prepared remarks the campaign provided to reporters. "The Democrats have failed completely in the inner cities. For those hurting the most who have been failed and failed by their politician — year after year, failure after failure, worse numbers after worse numbers. Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it's safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats. And I ask you this, I ask you this — crime, all of the problems — to the African Americans, who I employ so many, so many people, to the Hispanics, tremendous people: What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I'll straighten it out. I'll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?"

Well maybe dignity and self-respect for starters ...and a capacity to accept that since before the Civil War, the United States hasn't had an inherent racial bias, still clearly visible today in the politics of birtherism, the white supremacists that love teh Donald, David Duke, the KKK and so on and so forth, and the deep south, which remains very deep, though these days in a Republican way after they stole the racists from the dixie Democrats ...

But enough of all that, fortunately the pond has the Pope providing infallible coverage of matters domestic, with fragrant echoes of Cory, George and Bolterism, and more infallible papery here ...