In which the pond wastes Sunday with a Trumpian Marxist troll ...

Actually the pond is well over the Donald, and the multiple absurdities that have been revealed and are ongoing... but it did enjoy this bit of green screen, to be found via Twitter here ...

Green screen has contributed to the ruination of modern American cinema, facilitating as it does the endless stream of crappy Marvel comic movies, and McLaren was reddited for her pains ...

... which naturally led to the joke of using orange to green-screen the Donald ...

The pond also enjoyed the sketch that Colbert built out of yet another Donald good one ...

O yes, there's plenty of comedy on a daily basis, as Americans and even Fox realise that they're fucked and even Shep Smith had to come out and read a denial ...

Judge Andrew Napolitano commented on the morning show Fox and Friends that he has sources who say British intelligence that was involved in surveillance at Trump Tower. Fox News cannot confirm Judge Napolitano’s commentary. Fox News knows of no evidence of any kind that the now-President of the United States was surveilled at any time, in any way, full stop.

Full stop? There's a joke in there somewhere ...

And as for the poor, the helpless and the weak who voted for the Donald and are now being grandly fucked over by him and the GOP ... well, the pond finds it hard not to laugh, though the smile might vanish when the Donald brings on the next great protectionist white nationalist recession, or perhaps depression, and the planet goes to climate science hell ...

Still, the thought of all the Trump-voting oldies being deprived of Meals on Wheels and carking it in solitude ... is there a better example of cosmic karma as a rich satanic joke?

There is in fact, simply too much grand black cosmic comedy to hand, and it makes Brendan O'Neill's attempts at a laugh more Three Stooges than sophisticated slapstick of the Buster Keaton kind ...

The pond always thought that of all the imported members of the reptile commentariat, O'Neill was the dumbest fuckwit of them all ...

Here he is, still lost in a time warp, back in the golden past of convention days, with nary a thought about what the Donald and the GOP have been up to, tarring the leftists in the usual way, just as P. J. O'Rourke pops up in a reptile book review, apparently revealing himself to be a tantie-mounting leftist ...

Now the pond could make hay with this breach of The Times' paywall ...

But what's interesting is the reptile comments section. Many were convinced that O'Rourke was a leftist, and he certainly was a deviant and Trump denialist, and his book was tripe and so was he ...

It reached a certain level of peak irony with this exchange ...

Now the fact that someone was stupid enough to scribble this sort of comment and see it as a justification for stupidity elicited the expected response ...

Indeed, indeed. Malcolm Roberts has a couple of degrees, so does the pond, though it's Roberts' wiki that records he wrongly sought a $30,000 tax deduction for the costs of his MBA ... Greg Hunt here for the link ...

If you're dumb enough to think a university degree makes you smart, you're beyond the valley of the dumb.

But that's a detour down a sidetrack. The real question is this. How did the reptile comments section turn into a morass of the deluded and the Trumpian delusional? 

The reptiles fancy themselves as being an upmarket broadsheet with an intelligent readership, yet the comments section reads like a bucket filled with swill of the basest herd tripe ...

How did it happen, where did it go wrong?

Well, it's simple enough. After weeks of exposure to the scribbling of Brendan O'Neill, there's no form of vaccination available in the world that would prevent a reader from descending into a childish thought bubble of endless moronic stupidity ...

While the search for the vaxx goes on, the pond notes the way that O'Neill started off as an alleged Marxist, and then ended up a high Tory with religious tendencies, while still pretending to be a Marxist ...

Anybody who behaves as a professional simplistic simpleton contrarian is going to produce endless trolling absurdities ...

You know, like explain how as an atheist you love to defend the Catholic church,  while contending that you're still in the progressive vanguard ...

A secular-humanist to the core, he sees himself “coming from a very Enlightenment kind of radical humanist tradition, so we’re huge fans of Kant, Spinoza … All those great progressive ideas, the idea of equality, racial equality, sexual equality and moral autonomy.” (here at the Catholic Weekly).

He is, to borrow Peter Tatchell's description, a "smug shite", and a delusional, contradictory shite at that ... and reading any O'Neill column helps explain why the Oz readership is now lost in the jungle of confused ideas, somewhere off in Spectator territory ...

Now there's no point in responding to any of this. Commentary or argument is just a way of feeding the troll ...

As soon as a chattering member of the Oz chattering class talks of chattering-class tantrums, the game should be over.

That sort of cliché is just the troll stirring the pot, and there's a lot more stirring to follow ...

All this for a man who, in another context, said ...

A secular-humanist to the core, he sees himself “coming from a very Enlightenment kind of radical humanist tradition, so we’re huge fans of Kant, Spinoza … All those great progressive ideas, the idea of equality, racial equality, sexual equality and moral autonomy.” 

By golly, that rolling of Kant and Spinoza in their graves generated a modest earthquake.

So what of the reality, for example the Trump budget which takes from the poor on a massive scale, and gives to the military and the rich on a massive scale?

Where's the idea of equality then?

There's none of that in O'Neill, no serious, substantial analysis, but why would there be?

It's wrong to read O'Neill and expect any commentary of any substance of any kind on any subject ...

That's not the art of the troll. The art of the troll is to abuse the liberal elites, the political class, the chattering class, and all the other clichés that the mindless troll uses as a stick to prod at bears for the delight of watching them dance...

There's more analysis of the Trump and GOP budget and health 'reforms', though the cartoonists tended to go for the obvious and the pictorial.

That's still better than O'Neill, operating under the delusion that somehow the health 'reforms' and the proposed budget somehow treats the political citizens of America seriously ...

Tell that to the Trump-voting oldie hanging out for a meal ...

Well they'll find out, and by the looks of it, a lot sooner than they expected ...

More Bolling here, and while the pond is at it, that St Patrick's day Colbert a few days late ...