Forget that circus ... the pond has the reptile sideshow on display ...

The reptiles were late on the scene, but soon had their very best first eleven on the case. And as always, the pond was there, not so much for the crisis as for the reptile coverage.

After all, the pond has already made its peace with Chynahh - the food's way better for starters, and the big brother syndrome is right at the front door. No need to worry about creeping Orwellianism, celebrated in one of George's lesser known prophetic works ...

But back to the first eleven, and the dog botherer was first out of the block yesterday, and even allowing for his remarkable standards of fatuity, this was a level of fatuousness the dog botherer rarely achieves ...

Because the Donald's gone to war with Islam, and so should we ...

Clumsy and heavy-handed and therefore completely justifiable....

The one thing you can say about this - apart from the inability of the pond to make such stuff up - is that this sort of onanism on a knee-jerk, 'quick, pound out a few words, dog botherer' is as short in length as it is in insight ...

My analysis? Oh you useless, pretentious fop ...

Wiser heads must prevail. With the Donald in charge? What a routinely stupid man ...

As for the tabloids, they saw it as a chance for joke front pages ...

Echoes of ecky-thump, but then the imagination got fried and the movie references even lamer ...

Tabloid bullies working for a bully love the tabloid bully mind, and the cheap reality TV show headline ... though Malware should be used to the bully mind, having worked with Kerry Packer ...

And then this morning the reptiles sent out nattering Ned, in a bid to turn the issue into verbal sludge ...

Take that dog botherer. That's how to ask a 'beyond the valley of the fatuous' question. 

Next week in the reptile Oz nattering "Ned" asks an even deeper question: is a red-bellied black more trustworthy than a  common brown, a copperhead or a tiger ...?

Sheesh, just a few hand-wringing pars, and already the pond is nodding off ... lucky this came along in the nick of time to help out the Mexicans ...

Back to nattering "Ned"... but at least it's short ...

Somewhere along the lines, the dog botherer and nattering "Ned" got their wires crossed. Suddenly a chance to support the Donald's many wonderful policy initiatives turned into the notion of the Donald as petulant and immature.

The pond had to turn to the real, genuine, authentic voice of the reptiles for a deciding opinion ...

A sideshow? Oh surely just a part of the circus, and a circus the reptiles dodged and weaved as their master endorsed the Donald and Fox News fell into line ...

Uh huh, so that's what it's come to for the reptiles, regurgitating old news as an editorial... while in the meantime they don't pay attention to the shit that's being pulled with the NSC ...

And now for the judge's decision in the matter of the dog botherer v. nattering "Ned" ...

A strong ally might have been expected to bleat and baa like a sheep? With a deep-throated enthusiasm? "I am sheep, hear me roar?"

Suddenly we must all be swept up in hysteria about refugees?

Ah, so the voices have it for the dog botherer. We're supposed to come out in support of a stupid, inflammatory wall, and a crude,  clumsy, heavy-handed war with Islamics, except, it seems, Wahhabist fundamentalists...

Is it any wonder that the pond reaches for a Pope, and points to more infallible papal jesting here?

Well, the pond did clip one other contribution, but then wondered why it bothered, or why Caroline Overington bothers to get out of bed ...

Well the pond knows the answer to that one. He had to organise the coup ... and time was pressing ...

And now the pond must complete the Overington, if only because it's there. It's easy to imagine Overington staring off into the distance, then suddenly turning to the keyboard, and pounding away with her imaginings, which read like a second grader's attempt at a reality TV script ... but if you're going to do mindless speculation ...

... why not keep it short, like the master Donald himself?

Nope, Overington insists on imagining ...

The best thing to say about the Overington? 

Well the pond needs words to fill up the spaces between the pictures, even if the words themselves evoke a picture of a vacuum tube lodged inside a brain ...

And so to the Rowe of the day, last but certainly not least, as he taps into Joseph Campbell yet again ... with more mythic Rowe here ...