In which prattling Polonius celebrates the Pellists (surprise, surprise) and the dog botherer chews up the homework again ...

So many choices ... though strangely they always turn into dumb choices.

Here's the Overington - the pond is so over the Overington before it began - ending a piece about Malware waiting too long to reveal his self-serving purchase of the Prime Ministership (and at no small expense for those without a lazy $1.75m) ...

People can handle the truth? The way they handled the Donald's proud display of his tax returns?

Now we're told there wasn't a row on the phone? A row that Overington wrote about only yesterday?

Now she's being told she's a purveyor of fake news? And she takes it? She likes it? She agrees with it? He speaks the truth, people like the truth, they can handle the truth... while Overington peddles lies and fake crap? Sad ...

Overington must decide. Will she play the dumb bimbo all the time? Or will she just play the dumb bimbo on reptile time?

There doesn't seem to be any other choice, placing as she does the NT News at the forefront of people who "get it" ...

Well the pond gets it - "Sad" - but it's loyal to its regular choices and to the stars of the Catholic Boys' Daily, and thus to prattling Polonius, though please allow the pond to first set the scene.

According to the intertubes, it was Stephen King who came up with "may your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest day", though the pond suspects it was Einstein, though if anyone insists it was Niels Bohr, in the interests of spreading the Overington truth, the pond will agree ...

Of course James Joyce carried on at greater length in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which adelaide.edu.au, bless their helpful academic socks, has in full here ...

That might seem a bit stern for a Saturday, but that's what happens when you read the Catholic Boys' Daily and come across a protesting prattling Polonius ... 

It's Saturday as Sunday, fire and brimstone time, or dissembling hypocrisy if you will, and all the vivid memories of the hideous punishments, the lies and the deep, profound distortions of reality come flooding back ...

Now that's sure to herald a classic bit of dissembling and distraction, up there with the best of Catholic Boys' Daily scribbling...

Of course it send the pond travelling back in time to the classroom and to the howls of protest routinely directed at the teacher ...

Please Miss, naughty Susie is doing it too, why don't you pick on her, why don't you target her? Why pick on me, please Miss, it isn't fair. Sure, I was doing it too, but everybody was doing it, and she should be punished ... maybe even harder. Thought about that Miss?

It's as good a reason as any to abandon the church's talk of absolute moral principles, for the sort of conditional hypocritical bullshit and moral equivalence the true believers peddle so well ...

The pond would like to think that in due course Polonius will be sent to a term in hell - well eternity is a relative concept, in much the same way that good old Mark talked of totally unique in his farewell to Good Games ...

Maybe the dissemblers can be sent to the totally eternal ...

The pond knows you can unnerve Catholics by consigning them to hell ... it's a bit like warning children that Santa has spotted their naughtiness and they're likely to collect a good sack of decent clean Aussie coal, oi, oi, oi, for Xmas ...

But enough of a preamble, it's on with the "please Miss the hypocritical homework excuse was swallowed by the dog" routine ...

Now for anyone with a love of pedantry, they just read Polonius saying "Cardinal George Pell, his fellow archbishops and bishops in the rest of Australia led the world in the exposure of these crimes".

The pond apologises for writing it down so clearly - snorting Weet-bix through the nose can be a dreadful, painful experience.

Polonius was cleverer of course, not making the bold claim directly - he knows the dangers of the Weet-bix snort - but making it an indirect inference, using a movie and David Stratton as a distraction, so that it might whistle through to the keeper, who catches the ball with a clean pair of hands (though perhaps with a really dirty mind)..

And look, there at the end, courtesy of Polonius channeling Doumit, is that classic line ... you know, please Miss, others are the ones wot dunnit it too, so why aren't you spending much more time on them miss ...?

Oh there's no doubt that Polonius would have been a clever boy at school, and ask all the right questions ... and have all the right answers and excuses ...

And so to the rest of the apologetics, in the sense of spouting rhubarb in defence of imaginary creatures .... oh, look, over there's the ABC.

Please miss, it was the ABC wot done it too, please punish them, and let the noble Pellists have an early mark ... they've been ever so good, they wuz world leaders, they wuz ...

It is of course all beneath contempt, a position where Polonius frequently finds himself when attempting to defend the indefensible ...

It was however unsurprising to hear from Polonius that Catholics no longer go to confession.

Confession, is of course, part of the sacrament of penance, in which people confess their sins and are forgiven. The Catholic Encyclopaedia goes on at great length about the Sacrament of Penance:

Thinking men even outside the Church have acknowledged the usefulness to society of the tribunal of penance. Amongst these the words of Leibniz are not unknown ("Systema theologicum", Paris, 1819, p. 270): "This whole work of sacramental penance is indeed worthy of the Divine wisdom and if aught else in the Christian dispensation is meritorious of praise, surely this wondrous institution. For the necessity of confessing one's sins deters a man from committing them, and hope is given to him who may have fallen again after expiation. The pious and prudent confessor is in very deed a great instrument in the hands of God for man's regeneration. For the kindly advice of God's priest helps man to control his passions, to know the lurking places of sin, to avoid the occasions of evil doing, to restore ill-gotten goods, to have hope after depression and doubt, to have peace after affliction, in a word, to remove or at least lessen all evil, and if there is no pleasure on earth like unto a faithful friend, what must be the esteem a man must have for him, who is in very deed a friend in the hour of his direst need?"

Neither the Pellists nor Polonius nor the church in general have shown much interest in confession, penance or the accepting of guilt ...

Instead they blame secular institutions or other churches or the ABC or anyone else passing, perhaps even the dog wot done it ...

No point then in going to confession. Better line up for a totally eternal time in hell, and a tasty meal of excuses ...

Well it wouldn't be a decent Saturday without the dog botherer, and while pond readers drop like flies, the pond persists with its peculiar pleasures ...

It goes without saying that any politician that pleases the dog botherer is sure to displease the pond.

Now speaking of that dog syndrome, note how the sly dog botherer works climate science denialism into his tract ...

Oh sheesh, we've been here before, the celebration of suburban values by a political hack and a media insider ...

Let's get back to persecuting gays and denying climate science and persecuting wogs and all the other fine values that mindless followers of believers in imaginary friends insist upon (heck, let's take it further and go the complimentary woman routine, and celebrate a young earth and joke about evolutionary monkeys and deny women the right to control their bodies while strengthening the glass ceiling - handy if you've got a television network to run).

Oh and do a tie dance, because that always works out well ...

Simplistic mindless blather by a simpleton, who possibly does imagine that "suburban values" were a big help for Einstein, or even Niels Bohr ... though it was pleasing to note that the fascist thought police were out and about making sure that anyone showing off some amusing memes might front up for the sack ...

But back to the dog botherer, who just wants the Donald to come down other, in some form or another, because Overington ... and because he's never been in the political class and certainly never cheered on the invasion of Iraq ...

Who could imagine that we actually all live together on a fragile planet, and that blowing shit up, as the population grows beyond endurable bounds, is a sensible way to proceed?

Well there's no answer for that one in the cartoons ...

Yes, there's no answer to any loon espousing the "me first" attitude of nationalistic white supremacists as the answer to the world's problems ...

But then the dog botherer doesn't imagine there are international problems that might actually require trans-national solutions that might be helped by a little international harmony ...

Instead the Liberals should sell out - oh sorry, "co-operate" with One Nation, because Malcolm Roberts is the way forward ...

Integrity? Confession? Penance? Take a stand against the loons?

Nope, steady as she goes number one, let's fuck the country the way the Donald is fucking the States, in the grand hope that sometime soon we can truly fuck the planet ...

Well the pond looked around seeking inspiration from another doggy cartoon ...

What to do, what to say when the dog botherer is in his rhetorical stride?

Uh huh.

Woof ...

Woof woof ...

Woof woof woof ...