In which nattering "Ned" Kelly exhausts the pond, and possibly the reptile business plan for anyone under ninety ...

It befell hapless "Ned" Kelly to report on the latest attempt by local narcissist and onion muncher Abbott to remain in the spotlight ...

Do they draw straws for this sort of assignment? Or are guns held to their heads? Or do they willingly go over the top and charge the machine gunner, and discover to their relief that it's only a wet spray of smirk?

Italy? What happened to Greec? Whither Iceland? How about Ireland? Perhaps post-Brexit UK? Or North America as the trade wars kick in?

The story's about as absurd as recent reports that arm-breaking Mark Latham, stirred by the Donald, is being tempted by a return to politics in his very own fringe Loon party ...

Well stranger things have happened - after all, the Donald scored the presidency - but luckily we can get rid of the onion muncher's narcissist turn in a single spray ...

Has there ever been a better example of futility, one a dictionary might use in defining the word?

Abbott's constitutional reform, arcane and exotic as it is, has no chance of being passed in his parliamentary lifetime, as long, or as short, as it might be ...

Why do the reptiles pander to him so? Every outing like this makes him seem even sillier and more irrelevant than he really is ... and it's almost impossible to exaggerate how silly and irrelevant he was sounding before the piece appeared ...

It's grotesque that "Ned's" precious time should be wasted on this braggart loser dropstick when "Ned" has far more important things to do ... like boring the pants off anyone under ninety and doing his level best to destroy what remains of the reptile business plan through ennui, tedium and interminable, never-ending suffering ...

Actually the Donald won because of the arcane complexities of the American electoral system, a bit like the unrepresentative swine that so moved the onion muncher that he felt the need to bore the pond to tears.

In the popular vote, no matter how the Donald might like to change the ratings or the poll numbers with lies and nonsense, the Donald actually lost, because voters found the alternative worse ...

But never no mind, because the real point of nattering "Ned's" piece is to blame the victim ... 

It's all the fault of identity politics?

Well actually, only if you've drunk the swamp-infested kool aid with "Ned" and you want a simplistic and moronic stab at attempting to explain the complexities of who voted for what and why ... and if you imagine that the only alternative to juvenile viciousness is closed-minded progressive ideology.

It takes a pretty comprehensively closed mind to come up with that sort of binary analysis, but that's our "Ned", who in his dotage must be considered unreadable by anyone under ninety. The pond had thought of limiting it to anyone under thirty, but why should the pond be consigned to a geriatrics club to sniff a snorter of dry sherry with "Ned"?

And now, as we move on, we shall discover that "Ned's" main task seems to be re-writing other sources ... 

To say that the Donald stands for visions, it has to be said, isn't so much a visionary assessment of a visionary, more a kind of demented vision of the sort that routinely afflicts demented reptile Catholic mystics ...

As for Lilla, as pathetic and craven as the next quisling ready to fall into line with fundamentalist Christians, might the pond just refer to a story in The New Yorker, Surviving Solitary, by Rachel Aviv, which just happens to be outside the paywall for the moment ...

How anyone reading that could leave it without a sense of injustice bemuses the pond:

Conversations drifted toward police shootings. “The more things remain the same, the more things remain the same,” Woodfox said after someone described a shooting. When a young reporter from a black-news Web site asked him for a five-minute interview, Woodfox quickly got to his point. “We have to protect Black Lives Matter like we didn’t protect the Black Panther Party,” he said. Later, he told me, “I can’t tell you how proud I am of them.” The greatest disappointment of freedom, he said, was realizing how little had changed. “It’s the same old America.”

You know, somewhere back in the dim, distant, lost times of the founding of the United States and the grand flourishes of the American constitution, and the declaration of independence, the cloak of smug tyranny decided that the rights of ordinary people could be dismissed as bleating ...

You know, because race, gender and sexual identity, as if certain inalienable rights didn't happen to apply to blacks, gays, TGs and the rest of the rainbow of life ...

Well fuck that, and fuck the idle chatter about the age of identity liberalism, when all that's code for is the right of angry old white men of the nattering "Ned" kind to think they can go on ruling the roost ...

Talk about a business plan ...

"Ned's" the real news?

Now here's where it gets truly funny ... Lilla, and by extension, nattering "Ned", busy spinning a column out of copying down his lines, starts to talk about identity liberalism as being narcissist ...

As opposed, of course, to the Donald and his supporters, who apparently don't have any tendency to be white, dumb, religious crazy, isolationist, inward looking, narcissist and self-regarding as they sing "what about me, it isn't fair, I've had enough and want my share" ...

Oh sheesh, the Donald ... because 18C ...

You can't make this sort of reptile folly up ...

And what is this nonsense about "the British civilisation heritage"?

Didn't that include Sir Ernest Gowers' book on Plain Words? In the pond's day, nouns were meant to be treated with respect, however uppity they got. I mean, adjectives you can do anything with. Impenetrability!

You know, if you google those words by Ned, he's the only one who can be found on the intertubes to have used that expression (perhaps the pond's report of it will be the second).

But more importantly, we're still only a little way into this tedious old fart going on about everything:

There is an irony here of course, and the irony is this. The reptiles of Oz are in the middle of a failing, flailing attempt to keep a business model - tree-killing newspapers - alive, and somehow they think this sort of endless, tedious rabbiting on is the way forward ...

It reminds the pond of other business plans and grand schemes ...

Apart from the comedy, does "Ned's" piece remind the pond of any other period in history?

Well no doubt there were many learned pieces in Germany in the 1930s explaining the rise of Adolf as being all the fault of the decadence, wild sexuality, and decadent art of the Weimar Republic ... dolefully explaining how your average German had lost their way, and so naturally they had to turn to a leader who would get them back on the path.

These wretches only abandoned liberalism because it was infested with liberals. If there'd been a decent form of liberalism without a liberal in sight, all would have been well. There would have been no need to tolerate all the pinko perverts because they would have been out of sight.

In this form of Alice logic, crowds never get it wrong, and minorities are there to be persecuted, especially if they keep on carrying on about their rights ...

It helps explain the endless amount of horseshit, dressed up as "reasonable reasoning" that hack "Ned" and his cohorts, delivers this day ...

Well it goes without saying that we know where all this "emotional reasoning" comes from - back into your cages complimentary women ...

Now he's hand-wringing about a two-generations long campaign in the west for individual rights?

A mere two generations?

What a prime doofus. The balancing of individual against societal and collective rights has been going on since long before agriculture encouraged humans to gather in cities ...

Well so long as there are News Corp bigots, encouraging the Pauline Hansons of the world - surely the finest flowering arising from Daily Terrorism, HUNdom, lizard Oz and Bolterish beliefs - they must expect some trouble with their business plan, and they must expect a little push back.

Nattering "Ned" long ago forsook the notion of gracious conservatism, which encouraged tolerance and diversity and was generous in spirit towards minorities.

Does this mean everything must be insipid and bland and politically correct?

Well no, the pond is up for anything, and as it's the reptiles idea to run Bill Leak incessantly, what do they make of this outing by Steve Bell, to be found here?

Of course as Bell's cartoon acknowledges, there was a precedent, details at the British Museum here ... and exposition here ...

Ostensibly it was about the tiny feet of the Duchess, but buried in the sub-text is a joke about the craven, supine, lick-spittle press ...

When Princess Frederica Charlotte of Prussia married Frederick, Duke of York and Albany on 29th September 1791, she entered into a love affair with the British press who were charmed by her supposed daintiness. By all accounts a very slightly built lady, she was possessed of two things that seemed to drive people to distraction and just what were those two things? Her tiny feet. Supposedly measuring less than six inches in length and usually clad in exquisite footwear, the feet became famed. Copies of her tiny shoes were sold as royal souvenirs and fashionable ladies wore their own shoes ever smaller in an attempt to emulate her. To Gillray, this clamour over the Duchess was too good an opportunity to miss.

Indeed, small feet, small hands, and small whatever ... and now we have the Donald's hair ...

So it goes ... and so, unless frowning, nattering "Neds" forbid it, so it will go on, until the Donald explodes, as Donalds always do ...