In which the pond reluctantly must spend a lite time with Miranda the Devine lite ...

Please ... the pond is a mere cork on the great reptile ocean, bobbing along as the currents dictate ...

It's not the pond's fault that the lizards of Oz have suddenly discovered the great Coopers scandal, and Caroline Overington - or as the pond likes to think, Miranda the Devine lite - decided to join the discussion ...

Sure the pond would rather be off here,  reading Errol Morris talking about the Donald imagining that he actually is Citizen Kane ...

There's more at the link, but the pond's duty isn't to intelligence or insights, or even rosebuds.

Instead it's a diligent record of reptile thinking, which might lead to the Donald and to rosebuds, or even to worms in the rose ... or back to Miranda to the Devine lite ...

And so to today's double bunger, the first purporting to be reporting, and the second Miranda the Devine lite squawking ...

What's interesting is the way the two blur, intersect, and offer the same illustrations.

First the reporting, which naturally features a pond favourite, the urbane Urban, who has carved a career out of demonising Safe Schools and other signs of the gay ...

Actually Coopers has copped a stream of abuse from the Oz commentariat, for being craven lickspittles who capitulated to the hideous gay Waffen SSM agenda ... you know, because gays are just Nazi stormtroopers in disguise ...

What's that? Will Godwin pop up in the discussion yet again?

Well not at first.

Gently Bentley, first the reptiles offer a summary of the truly benign and astonishingly insightful discussion ...

The question is, where's parliament?

Now it goes without saying that the two MPs could have had their debate, sans clinking bottles, in parliament, perhaps even debating an actual bill, and perhaps passing said bill, or maybe not, legalising SSM, or maybe not, as opposed to putting on a circus for ostensible benefit of the Bible Society and Coopers, though lordy lordy, did that go wrong.... because you know, there are some actual people living actual lives outside the parliamentary bubble, and they tend to have actual feelings ...

But where's the Godwin's Law bit coming? Please, be patient ...

And there it is. The man who blathers about modest, respectful debate, conjures up a beerless future and blathers about totalitarian twitterati ...

And so it's back to two parliamentarians, who might have been part of a useful debate in parliament, bemused that a commercial exercise on behalf of the Bible Society and Coopers, might have aroused a little indignation ... at least until they had to pulp the cans ...

Because you know, parliament itself isn't a a respectable platform for holding a respectful, sensible debate ...

It culminated with more of the usual, and a link to the debate on vimeo, which the pond immediately boycotted, because it doesn't think much of vimeo as a platform, and because who in their right minds would want to listen to Freedom Boy and the pastie Hastie yammering on for longer than a nanosecond ...

Yes, at the very end, the reptiles finish their piece, ostensibly a news report, with advice that Australian Marriage Equality had "refused to condemn the campaign against the company."

Suddenly we're in the territory of a reptile thought crime?

Might that refusal to condemn happen to reflect the notion that, at this moment in time, people are still allowed to protest, to indulge in boycotts and to otherwise freely express their opinions?

Well being a glutton for punishment, it was time to move on to Miranda the Devine lite ...

Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.

How is it possible to have a joke, or a sensible debate, or anything, if the opening gambit is to blather on about people fighting and dying, and by implication Gallipoli, Anzac Day, the RSL and the whole goddamn thing ...

It reminds the pond of that little known Godwin's Law codicil ...

“As a reptile discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving miltiarism, jingoism, the war, or the dead in the trenches approaches one.” There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned saluting the flag and dying for freedom has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

Never mind, once Miranda the Devine lite gets flowing, she really knows how to bung it on ... and naturally there's another plug for that show on vimeo ...

Now around this point, the pond kept wondering why vimeo was the natural home for this debate, rather than the federal parliament, with the two MPs belonging to the governing party that might, at any time, bung on a debate in the house of reps.

None of this troubled Miranda the Devine lite, who just wanted a couple of blokes to share a beer ... because maybe drinking in the HR would be unseemly, and shift the tone from light to meaningful and useful ...

It was of course wrong to expect Miranda the Devine lite to show a grain of common sense or understanding. 

Instead, at the very end of her last gobbet, she too went the "totalitarian twitterati" gambit with the very same picture, because we can never have enough sensible, respectable discussions without immediately invoking fascism ...

Actually, that Devine lite blather about the debate not even being held reminded the pond that there was a place where the debate might be held, without benefit of beers.

By the end of Miranda the Devine lite's piece, the pond began to understand why there had been a little anger and heat at the end of it all. 

When the Devine lite concluded that Coopers had done nothing wrong, she seemed to be saying that commercial fuckwittery and a capacity for sticking feet into it - you know, peddling beers to the hip, then finding an exquisite way to insult the hip demographic - isn't doing wrong. 

It suddenly became clear to the pond why the reptiles of Oz have such an uphill battle to market their own brand of tree-killing stupidity ...

There's only so much tolerance and generosity that can be extended to dumb, dim-witted fuckwits, before exasperation takes hold ...

But the lite Devine does help explain why the two MPs, the Bible Society and Coopers just didn't have a clue ... frivolous, indulgent, indulged well-off people having a beer at the expense of the emotional lives at others ...

Images of Nero fiddling began to take hold of the pond ...

Well it makes a change from talking of Gallipoli and the Somme and the fallen and freedom dying and steel legs pumping and all the rest of it ...

Or MPs having a verbal wank with free beer, when they might be doing a real job ...

More Tandberg here ...