Please, won't someone end the reptile commentariat industry ...

As usual, the google splash gets it much more right than the reptile splash. 

There's the Trumpian rhetoric in the header - because a swamp creature knows about the swamp - and the thumbnail of Leak as a Christ figure, as opposed to that crazed bespectacled face peering out at the camera with an unnerving, smirking intensity ...

It's the google splash that prepares the reader for the crazed, delusional vision in the piece itself ...

Now before we go too far down the track, deep into the reptile swamp, the pond would like to remark again on that peculiar illustration which shows Leak, or cartoonists in general, as Christ-like figures crucified ...

In the good old days, it would have been hauled before a court for blasphemy - part of our glorious Judeo-Christian tradition - but these days, the comparison is merely comical, farcical, and delusional, in equal measure ...

It even transcends the Oreo channeling the Trump ...

Indeed, indeed, all solid economic reform and job producing proposals in that lot of congealed hate and bitterness, and therefore all the stranger that it should strike the pond as being roughly equivalent to a Hitchcockian stubbing of a cigarette into a fried egg ...

But the pond must hurry on with the Oreo solutions, because there's a double treat this day ...

And so the pond must quickly hand out its prize of the day for those who made it through the Oreo swamp and returned from the wilderness.

Treasure it, save it up and stuff it in an Xmas stocking ...

... because there's a bonus special treat ...

Indeed, indeed, though the pond reserves the right to shriek, moan, wail, groan, sigh and hysterically laugh at the Shanahan too ...

Yes that did it. Those last few sentences, which show the enormous, befuddling stupidity of Shanahan.

But then right there at the start, there was the notion that Shanahan wasn't complaining, when it was an endless complaint ... though there was a pretence at some kind of tolerance, until the notion of blasphemy came trotting out like an illustration for an Oreo story.

Never mind, it was that last par that really got the pond going, with the bizarre notion that somehow a joke about Easter and Christ and a centurion and a bearded scribe was a clever attack on Islamic fundamentalism.

If intent on a bit of decent blasphemy, with bonus actual wit, why not a Pope?

Now if Leak had drawn a portrait of the Prophet - in the way of those European cartoonists, some of whom died for their work at the hands of crazed fundamentalists - or sent up the Qur'an, in the way a Christian governor in Indonesia might have done, he might have had something to boast about.

But how is a portrait of a bleeding Christ and a centurion carrying on a debate with deluded Islamic fundamentalists, except in the most arcane and metaphorical form?

Shanahan offers Leak a kind of martyrdom for the effort, which is truly offensive when compared to the genuine martyrs who were bold enough to go straight to the heart of the matter ...

This is the real horns of the dilemma, which routinely results in this sort of idle gibberish ...

Simply drawing the delusional Prophet is enough to guarantee trouble, and that's why few cartoonists are brave enough to go there ...

The problem the always fiercely atheistic pond has with Leak is that any of his crass cartoons is almost certain to guarantee some sort of sympathy for long-suffering moderate Islamics ... persecuted by the fundamentalists and by fools like Leak, urged on by the simpering mindless stupidities of a Shanahan ...

And having done it for moderates, she and Leak can do exactly the same for Aboriginal people as they do to Islamics ...

It is completely impossible to explain to thick-witted, dumb reptiles of the Shanahan kind that after a couple of centuries of enduring black bashing, more even black bashing, dressed up in the guise of "truth telling" remains, at its ignoble heart, black bashing ...

Not once does the Shanahan give this a nanosecond's thought. What's Hogarth, scribbling away in England, got to do with a proud and entrenched history of colonial black bashing?

Not once either does Shanahan explain how Leak uses humour to get his message, or his racist black bashing, point, across.

Instead there's the usual blather about "valid arguments" ...

Sam Goldfish had the right response to this sort of well-meaning, earnest blather which confuses satire with morally uplifting activities ...

More on the saying here, but if the pond could translate it for benefit of Shanahan and other reptile dummies ...

"A message? A valid argument? Just draw a cartoon that's funny. Messages are for Western Union. If you've got a message, send a telegram. Or write a leaden column for the reptile Oz. If the Oreo and the fundamentalist Catholic can do it, anyone can."

The immortal Sam also had another saying, which covers both the Oreo and the Shanahan ...