In which prattling Polonius parades his hardly covert love of the Donald ...

Poor reptiles ... if only they could get a Donald bump, in the way that Colbert and the NY Times have got a Donald bump ... subscriptions up, or through the roof, first sweep win cracks 3 million ... and so on ...

Could the pond hesitantly make a suggestion? Poor old prattling Polonius isn't helping the cause ...

This is of course part of Polonius's weasel way with words.

For example, rather than come out and say it in an obvious or blatant way - that he's a fundamentalist Catholic say, of a rather bigoted persuasion, grown more fundamentalist and bigoted over the years - Polonius spends a lot more time attacking the ABC, Fairfax, sometimes the Graudian, for attacking the Catholic church ...

Polonius is adept at moral equivalence, so that whenever the sins of the Catholic Church or the Pellists are mentioned, it's always a good time to drag out Richard Downing or Richard Neville or anybody else to hand who might distract ...

Then the ABC, Fairfax, whomever, can be smited mightily for ignoring the obvious, just so though crime of ignoring Neville, Downing etc, yadda yadda ...

Similarly Polonius never actually comes out and says he's a Trump lover, but he spends an inordinate amount of time expounding on Trump-phobia and identifying Trump-phobics and deploring them and insulting them and getting agitated by them ...

This sometimes reaches levels of peak fatuous stupidity ... as in this little flourish ...

Obama scores sixty mill, and the man blaming him for all his Russian leaks has no reason to be jealous?

The Donald, in classic narcissist style, gets jealous about everything and everybody at the drop of an insulting hat ...

But that little flourish of barely concealed Trumphilia turns up in Media Watch Dog, where the barking mad, howling at the moon, ugly, paranoid, abusive and insulting Hyde side of Polonius slips out of his staid, dull Jekyll persona, and roams the streets, beating media types with a heavy club ...

This Hyde is prone to exaggeration and distortion, and a certain wildness of temperament, the very things that the staid Polonius claims upsets him so ...

There he goes again ... see moral equivalence, as above. This time one of the distractions is Barack Obama and Fox News ...

And then there's the distortion. Bongiorno, as quoted by Polonius, talks of the "seeds of fascism". You don't have to look further than Steve Bannon to see the seeds of alt right fascism, in much the same way that the National Socialists spent much early time preparing for power by attacking the media ...

But of course the dissembling, distracting Polonius immediately leaps to the notion that this as if the United States has already reached Kristallnacht ... when after all, the only things currently being harmed across the country are Jewish cemeteries ... if you don't count the assorted death threats ...

That's how the dissembling Polonius works. It's impossible not to suspect Polonius has a man love thing for the Donald - perhaps it's the small, non-threatening hands - but the only way that Polonius can express it is to attack the enemies of the Donald ...

Now Polonius himself loves a little hyperbole. He just doesn't like the Tingles of the world to have a little fun.

But when it comes to a joking reference to capital punishment, why Polonius is your man ...

Of course you'd never read Dr Jekyll in the lizard Oz scribbling "piss poor" or joking about capital punishment for a good cause, but you might find the odd odious comparison to socialists or commie pinko perverts.

You see, just like Paul Keating, Polonius loves to look to the Soviet Union for analogies and name-calling ...

This being the barking mad, howling at the moon Hyde version of Polonius, the dear prattler goes on to explain that indeed the Trot was a dictator, and so, in his own way, Polonius can manage to compare people, Tingle style, with Russian dictators of the murdering kind ...

So it goes ...

For anyone who wants even more distractions, Sir Richard Evans turned up on that dreadful man Adams' little radio show talking of Trump and the Third Reich here ...

And Evans writing about the media in the Third Reich can be found here ... a sample ...

It is of course a distraction, something that helps keep the pond's Godwin's Law swear jar in good shape.

It's also a way of avoiding noting the way various minorities in the United States are being intimidated and abused and deported, as Republicans attempt to run rough shod over the countryside ...

But of course you'll never find Polonius wringing his hands or writing about any of this sort of stuff, not while he can get agitated about those enemies of the people at work in the media ...

Ah, our very own Otto Dietrich ...

Oops, that'd be another contribution to the swear jar ...

Luckily, the pond doesn't have the time to go into the quisling lackeys and facilitators who have helped, and are helping in this process of Bannonisation and Donaldisation ... with Polonius just an sterling, but irrelevant down under barking at the moon example.

Instead it's time to settle for a Rowe cartoon, and as always, what a fine settling it is, and more fine sessions can be found here ...