In which the pond wildly overdoses on nattering "Ned" and reaches for a tingly emetic ...

The pond, being diligent, and devotedly following in the reptile footsteps, has prepared an epic feast for wayfarers on the path to ruin ... a path which includes the reptile business model, and the pond's desire to torture, abuse and lose its readers in the thickets of despair ...

First, naturally, comes news from the top of the digital lizard of Oz page ...

Nattering "Ned"! Tedious guardian of the Liberal soul, long ago delivered to Mephistopheles in a Faustian package ...

Naturally the pond was up for it ...

That's it? That's all, he wrote? The ghost of Woody Allan hovers. So insubstantial, and such a small portion too ...

Luckily, for those who look for their Saturday fix of nattering "Ned" as a prelude to nodding off for a time and a quarter nap, there was an alternative to hand ...

This is where the reptiles' - and perforce the pond's - cunning plan to torture and drive away the readership kicks in ... deliver such a Mount Everest of nattering "Ned" that few will make it to base camp, let alone the top.

It's a peculiar business model, but it's all the reptiles - and so perforce the pond - has in this turbulent digital age ...

Think of it as a crisis for the reptiles, for the pond, and oh, throw in conservatism as well ...

Now the pond realises that there are many other alternative ironies and stories that might be relished this day ... after all, why read a fake news commentator when there's the good oil coming from the Donald?

But this is no time for the faint of heart.

The devoted will have already donned sackcloth and ashes, and otherwise made preparations to join nattering Ned in the wailing and the gnashing of the teeth ... and sssh, not a word about Chairman Rupert and his minions facilitating and enabling the Donald ... or the onion muncher ...

Around this time the pond would usually run a tweet or two from the Chairman urging everyone to get behind the Donald, but instead, why not celebrate the destruction of government by those elected to govern (and by those hangers-on who have their hands up the puppet man child):

Who knew that Bannon was a master semiotician? Deconstruction?

Well, the pond must return to deconstructing "Ned" with another chunk of soup almost down there with Campbell's ...

Point of order m'lud. Nattering Ned as usual foolishly distorts history, but Australia did have an aristocracy from the get go, albeit mocked as a bunyip one by some, and had a ruling class, and had an established church (the angry Anglicans, up to 1836) and as Russell Ward established, bless his drunken heart and his weird moustache, in The Australian Legend, Australian myths had less to do with convict emancipists than with the frontier experience:

It is ironic that Ward's starting point for the Legend was the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Until Turner came along, historians tended to explain their stories in terms of European influences. Europeans had settled the US and Australia, the pilgrim fathers helping there and the convicts here. Turner demonstrated the importance of indigenous and frontier experiences: "The wilderness masters the colonist ... It strips off the garments of civilisation and arrays him in the hunting shirt ... here is a new product that is American." Turner concluded that the frontier promoted nationalism and democracy and that the most important component of frontier democracy was an individualist outlook. 
The Australian frontier, however, was much more arid than America's. Instead of finding rich lands and wide rivers, the Australian explorers were confronted by desert. Rugged individualist squatters might have made a go of it but, Ward said, the loneliness and hardships of outback life taught the value of co-operation and brought a more communitarian or collectivist outlook. Collectivism, or mild socialism, is retreating in Australia. The individualistic strand, the American way, is asserting itself. Things were different in 1958, when the Legend was published. Historian Geoffrey Bolton, who rates Ward's book as a classic and a "good read", sees it as a rallying call of defiant radicalism in the face of the conservatism of the government led by Bob "British to the bootheels" Menzies. (more here)

Well yes, the dear lad could only find a gig at UNE because of his suspect bolshevism...

But the pond must apologise for the distraction and the interruption and the wandering down memory lane to return to nattering Ned, with the assurance to readers that have stayed solid this far that at least they have reached base camp. The distortions, misrepresentations and wilful misunderstandings of Australian history will continue, but soon the tilt at the peak will begin!

Powerless conservative backbone? Gina's powerless? 

Of course it would be wrong of the pond to recall the heady, intoxicating, rapturous and exhilarating days of young love ...

The pond simply doesn't have the space to trawl back through the mutual admiration, and the missives, with corrections and admonitions and instructions, that nattering "Ned" once delivered to the onion muncher, in hope that he had another Ming the Merciless ready for the grooming ...

Instead there are still miles to go to reach the top ...

Good old Johnny ...

Politics as the deepest form of cynicism...

So that's what survivalism and splashing the cash to buy votes these days is called? 

Well, hardy travellers have reached the point where the final assault on the summit can begin, and the comedy reaches some kind of nattering "Ned" peak:

Articulate his inner core, expose his heart, address the dilemmas? Offer his own version of liberalism? 

But he's already done that. 

He's sold out on every liberal principle within reach, and been applauded by the likes of nattering "Ned" for doing so - as in climate science, gay rights, or anything else that might approach a modern view of the world. 

In what liberal world is climate science dismissed so easily? In what liberal world is science itself attacked and brought into disrepute?

In the world of nattering "Ned" and little Johnny blathering that climate change poses little threat to the future, up against poverty ... as if the inexorable shifting of income to the filthy rich had nothing to do with the establishment's constant relentless gouging and demonising of the weak and the poor ...

In every way, the supine Malware has done his best to pander to the Cory/George/onion munching brigade, with only one wise understanding - to have brought Abbott back into the ministry would have been to become the undertaker at his own funeral ...

Meanwhile, for all his deploring of the media, nattering "Ned's" Terrorist colleagues are maintaining the onion muncher rage ...

This brings to mind a Mike Carlton tweet ...

Speaking of the municipal toilet known as the Terror ...

Note well how Sharri, frantically wielding the egg beater, turns one named MP into "MPs" and calls the onion muncher a respectful "former leader", before heading off to the municipal toilet ...

Time for another tweet ...

Of course there are sensible folk, willing to avoid the fly-blown rhetoric of a nattering "Ned" or the pandering of their fellow Terrorists, to focus on the reality of the onion-muncher's situation ...

And luckily these days, it's possible to sneak inside the AFR and score a tingle ...

          

By golly, after enduring all that nattering "Ned" rhetoric and hand-wringing and chicken little claptrap about Ming the Merciless and little "Iraqi" Johnny, that's a bloody good emetic.  

Cathartic, cleansing, short and punchy and to the point, and nowhere the sort of dungheap of misleading musings of the "Ned" kind ...

Clunkhead?! Why that's better than onion muncher ...

Well not quite Ms Tingle. The unfashionable Terrorists continue to be unfashionable, some feat seeing how they lurk in a Surry Hills bunker, but how refreshing to have you visit the pond and provide a corrective to nattering "Ned's" deluded contentions, produced by a man who in his time gushed and fawned all over the onion muncher ....

There's nothing left now, but for an admirable Rowe ...

It's sad that Rowe always brings up the rear - more Rowe here - but his cartoon is an admirable companion piece to Ms Tingle and yet another corrective for those who endured "Ned" so that they might say they got to the end ... even if it's the end of the reptile business model and the end of a long-suffering pond readership ...

Next week? Surely it must be the clunkhead onion muncher as Wile E. Coyote ...