In which the reptiles help spread gossip about Watergate ...

It's been swept away by the digital tide - all things must pass and must quickly in the day of the digits - but last night for a singular moment the pond couldn't believe what it was seeing ... and thought the moment worth preserving in a kind of digital blogging formaldehyde ...

There was tricky Dick, cheek by jowl with tricky Don.

Oh sure there were signs of normalcy - prattling Polonius rabbiting on about the ABC and the former Chairman returning like a ghost to rattle his chains, a bit like Tony Blair returning to lead the remainers in a new campaign against Brexit, and probably thereby ensuring the determination of many to leave ...

But back to the major spectre on the battlements. Already the ghost of tricky Dick stalks the front digital page of the lizard Oz?

It had to have come from the Wall Street Journal of course, but in its own way that too was significant. This after all is a rag which has had its editorial room on turmoil over its perceived favourable tilt to the Don, and even asking the question is to turn Fairfaxian in a Paul McGeogh kind of way ...

Even the Watergate players who are left alive have been getting into the game, as with John Dean at The Atlantic a month ago ... 'He Is Going to Test Our Democracy as It Has Never Been Tested'

Sometime early last fall, John Dean says he began having nightmares about a Trump presidency. He would wake in the middle of the night, agitated and alarmed, struggling to calm his nerves. “I’m not somebody who remembers the details of dreams,” he told me in a recent phone call from his home in Los Angeles. “I just know that they were so bad that I’d force myself awake and out of bed just to get away from them.”

And lo just a month later, a mug shot of the Donald and the Richard jostled on the front page of the Oz, just a month into the Donald's reign ...

In the original, the illustration was a little more sedate, before the reptiles seized it, rebranded it and served it up down under as click bait ...

There no tricky Dick, no tricky Dick there, just a rather stern looking Donald seemingly in possession of his faculties ..

Of course being the biased WSJ this sort of rhetorical question is just a feint, in the Donald style, to berate others attempting to harm the keeper of the flame.

And while the fuss and the historical comparisons go down, in the meantime away from the noise of the man man howling at the press as if the reptiles were the moon, the Donald had already taken his first step to undo banal talk of climate science and unleash coal upon the United States ...

Yes, it's coal coal coal for the Yanks, while the reptiles stay fixated on history ...

Ah of course. It's all about the weevils in the media ... for all its attempt at bluster, and the juxtaposing of the photos, it's just another bit of WSJ pandering, serving as lizard Oz click bait, let out on a late Friday in an attempt to bolster the numbers ...

It never gets old, does it, the rhetoric about draining the swamp, while the swamp becomes home for billionaires and Goldman Sachs alumni ... and somehow the corrupt behaviour that's turned up is all the fault of an anthill of leakers ...

This is how weird it's become in the United States. Lying is seen as a top-notch business strategy. Lie your socks off, and all will be well, provided you don't get caught.

What was even weirder was the way that the reptiles felt the need to illustrate the Henninger playing defence with a gif ... though whether it would please the world's leading narcissist is probably open to debate ...

Bizarre, sad.

As for the rest, apart from being terrible, it was another short portion ...

The pond particularly noted Henninger's contempt for comedians. Why is it that fuckwitted Murdochian reptiles are so up themselves and so humourless?

Does it help explain why the Donald watches SNL in a seething, tweeting rage?

Are they all narcissists?

Is that why Henninger can't see the humour and the irony in decrying all the torturing of the Donald, only to conclude by threatening the return of 1974?

Is this why Henninger can't phrase the simplest matters correctly? It was the Electoral College that wanted the Donald, as he keeps reminding the world ... the popular vote wanted another. To suggest otherwise leads to another whole world of paranoia, nonsense, lying and delusional thinking ... though to be fair to the WSJ, they are pretty adept at it ...

Never mind, for those who missed the other comedians, not the Murdochian ones ...