In which the refugee pond, wanting to avoid the rat in the ranks, seeks safe haven with the Caterists ...

Before proceeding on this day, it's worth recalling prattling Polonius's effort last weekend ... to be followed this day by this story tucked well down the reptiles' digital page ...

In his column, the dissembling equivocator and sly relativist rabbited on endlessly at the way the royal commission spent too much time inquiring into the "causation of what are mainly historical crimes." The shameless, insufferable, unrepentant defender of the indefensible then went on to rabbit on about the historical crimes of Richard Neville ...

Will Polonius ever offer the kind of apology offered up by Francis Sullivan? Not on your nelly, it's not the Polonius way ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles are transfixed by another phenomenon ...

What a good doc that was, but actually this time it's only one visible rat, a certifiably repugnant loon, with dubious charm and dubious capacity to attract others to rabid outlier causes ...

But of course the reptiles are so loonish and so fixated on loonish ways, that they don't write the rat off as an eccentric, but rather celebrate the rat as a potent force ...

Such is the power of the Gina ...

This enabling brings to mind the pandering of Clive of the Titanic by Tony Jones on late night ABC current affairs ...

Meanwhile the Fairfaxians and the Hartcherites remain boggled by and fixated on the extraordinary cavortings of the Donald as he suggested there weren't just rats in the ranks, there were killers in the US ...

"To suggest moral equivalence of what the US does and what Russia does, even if true, is really amazing. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan saying that, or George W. Bush? It's inconceivable. Even a professor, like Obama, may have thought it but would never have said it. Most Americans like to think of the US as a moral actor in world affairs," Wesley explains.
"Even when they admit that the US has done something immoral, they like to think they did the wrong thing for the right reason," says Wesley. "There's only a very small segment of the US population – a very small fringe on the Left – that thinks that the US doing the wrong thing is evidence that America itself is immoral...."

...Trump's comment is the remark of someone who sees America as just one country among many, all equally unprincipled. Countries deal with each other without any sense of right and wrong but solely on a transactional basis of who can extract what from whom. It's about power and advantage. This helps explain a president who doesn't seem to see any difference between democracies and dictatorships, between allies and enemies. Last week he told Mexico's president he might order the invasion of his country, though his staff explained this as humour. At the same time he refused to criticise Moscow's invasion of Crimea or Ukraine.

And so on here ...

Is there any wonder that the pond, in this vale of tears and confusions, turned to one of its favourite comfort foods?

Phew, what a relief ... here no talk of ...

... just talk of that rat comrade Bill ..

As a result, there are plenty of signs that the Caterists have yet to catch up on the new world order ...

Hmmm, there's nothing the pond loves better than to pitch Fairfax reptiles against the lizards of Oz to see who survives in a jungle fight ...

In denying the possibility of an independent media, Trump inadvertently grants the Chinese Communist Party a great victory. Xi Jinping has urged a "fierce struggle" against "dangerous ideas" such as Western-style universal values. A party mouthpiece, the Global Times, gloating over Trump's assault on the media, says that "it's time to de-deify" Western media and the ideal of free speech. 

And in denigrating US allies as not having any inherent worth, Trump gives the Chinese regime another great gift. One of America's unique strengths is that, while China is essentially alone in the world, the US sits at the centre of a formidable system of alliances with some 40 countries. The less these alliances are worth, the smaller America's unique advantage. 

A ruthless, amoral world of transactional exploitation and relations based on power alone is also known as the law of the jungle.

The Caterists don't seem to have noticed that there's a little confusion going on here, what with populist Cory emulating populist Donald, and populist Donald wanting to bung on a war with China and abandon allies and terminate free trade and put a tax on anything - people, goods - that moves across borders in a way he doesn't like ...

Must the Caterists now revert to the White Australia policy - a policy supported by every decent colonial Pom for over a century? - to bring down comrade Bill? Perhaps the Caterists need a new Black Donald policy?

Haven't the Caterists noticed that the right has been hijacked by populists wanting to make Australia great again?

It's difficult, this support of the Donald, while simultaneously deploring the Donald's policies, by assigning them to comrade Bill ...

It's either a paradox or outright hypocrisy, or in the case of the Caterists downright stupidity, and given that it's the Caterists, it's a relief that the latter always applies ...

Poor Caterists ... what a waste of energy and space.

The Caterist needs to talk to the Donald, or perhaps to Cory, and most certainly to the hand ...

Other times, other days, Polonius-style, it was possible to find the Caterists celebrating the arrival of the Donald as a force that would shake things up ... 

Well he's shaken things, including all that was once beloved and peddled by rote by the Caterists..

And yet these days all the aggression remains fixated on the irrelevance of comrade Bill ...

Sad! Each day the Donald continues to delight ...

The condition the Shorten-fixated Caterist is suffering from is apparently known, by students of rat behaviour, as transference, the unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another ...

The good thing? 

Well by harping on about the historical crimes of a racist ALP, matched, it has to be said, by various conservative forces, save when Ming the Merciless thought it wise to send pig iron to Japan to help them in their war preparations, the pond has completely forgotten to mention the Caterists' status as indigent, cash in the paw, government grant bludgers ...

Ah well, there's always another day, another column explaining how it's good the Donald has shaken things up ...

Instead, there's just time for a Rowe cartoon, featuring a rat in the ranks abandoning ship (and more Rowe here) ...