In which the pond celebrates the return of the crusading Oreo from the wilderness ...

Trust the Bolter to focus on matters of high state and significant policy issues confronting France? Tap on paint can maestro, sure can ... if you consider cougars are the most important challenge to date that French masculinity and hapless angry French white men of the elderly Dutch kind have faced ...

It did make the pond wonder where's the focus on the Bolter's marriage. After all, consider the state of mind of any woman who might have married the Bolter, and then worse, stayed married to him ...

What's that you say, a low blow? Well when you get into the gutter with the Bolter, suddenly any remark seems possible ...

Speaking of the gutter, is it just the pond, or are the crusading, trolling ways of the reptiles getting more and more desperate?

The Tonne of Creys was all over the place. As well as bashing the pesky, damned furriners, he was there in the opinion section ...

Speaking of paranoids in full possession of the facts, the pond was also pleased to see that the reptiles were still in a dither over the NBN ...

That's how it works. Spend years demonising fibre, the NBN, overhead wires, and the whole damn thing, and celebrating copper and FTTN, and then you can spend years bemoaning how the country ended up with a second-rate, half-arsed, confusingly chaotic, multiple choice system which will cost a motza to upgrade ...

Well done reptiles, well  played, you useless languid fuckers on your hot rocks of self-interest ...

But enough of the preliminaries, because today is Oreo day. Last week the pond bemoaned the way the Oreo had failed to mention even once, or in passing, the fight to save western civilisation, and with deep regret had marked the Oreo down savagely.

But let's face it, no matter how weird the formula or the taste, the Oreo is always a temptation ...

This week, the judges have urged clemency and asked the pond consider that the fight on behalf of Catholics is indeed a fight to save the teaching of Latin schools, and therefore the entirety of dark ages western civilisation, and the pond is deeply sympathetic to the notion, having once hic'd, huiused, huiced and hoc'd.

Clearly the reptiles at the Catholic Boys' Daily also felt the power of the argument, and put the Oreo at the top of the digital opinion section ...

The Oreo is at one with the rest of the reptiles in celebrating the big fight ...

And so on and on, and on and on, even though Malware at one point converted to Catholicism, allegedly of the old fashioned "noblesse oblige" kind (well so they say in Andrew West's report here).

On the other hand, the deviant shows dangerous secularist/leftist leanings of the most shabby kind: 

On many social issues, Turnbull is of the permissive left. He is a well-known supporter of state-sanctioned same-sex marriage and voted for the “morning after” abortion drug RU-486 in 2006. He once told the ABC: “Australians want to be free. They want to have independence… We [the Liberal Party] err on the side of respecting individual judgement and individual choices.” This philosophy – libertarianism – is more or less the opposite of the Vatican’s. And of many Protestant churches also. The former Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, wrote in his 2008 book The Future of Jesus: “I think that Jesus would dispute all of Malcolm Turnbull’s positions.” 
However on a few social issues – such as the discouragement of divorce – he talks like a Christian conservative. He published a learned paper in 2003 entitled “Is the West Dying Out? family, fertility and survival”. B.A. Santamaria himself would have approved. (Trust the Melbourne Anglicans to spot the deviant here).

Jesus would disapprove, but B.A. is on side?

Well the pond knows who's the better and more respected arbiter of Xian values, and there's no way it's that damned leftie socialist Jesus. If B. A. approves, it shows that the Catechumenate process produced a truly Catholic winner ...

But enough of theological teasing, the pond is always chomping at the bit to get the full, ripe, rich, taste of the Oreo on the teeth on a Monday ...

Oops, not that one, this one ...

Now far be it for the pond to mention the Tonne of Creys furiously scribbling about damned furriners scoring welfare. Here we must shed tears with the Oreo for the damned furriners wanting a healthy subsidy in support of their addiction to a foreign cult ...

Of course this Oreo talk of sound Xian moral values is a tad suspect ... can the whore of Rome (or is the whore of Babylon, the pond is always confusing its whores) ever teach sound Xian moral values, or does this ancient rock of Peter heresy pave the road to hell, as any decent evangelical can explain ...

Whatever, the pond appreciates that a religious education is vitally important, so that lives can be spent about which end the egg should be cut (please, no centrists suggesting the middle rather than the big or little end).

So to another slice of the Oreo. Well if you can do butterbeer and root beer float, surely you can do key lime pie?

Too weird? Clearly you have much to learn about the weird... have some reptile-flavoured Oreo instead ...

And there you have it, a splendid return to form, with the Oreo talking of Queer, with a capitalised, splendidly homophobic form of homophobia, with excellent talk of anti-Western and anti-Xian values, and that damned Malware jumping to the left ... because there are no Xians on the left ... certainly not that pinko pervert hooker-loving socialist leftie Jesus blathering about camels and the rich ...

Turnbull has described himself as “a very imperfect Catholic”. Frankly, much of his stated philosophy is hard to reconcile with the social and moral teachings of his church. 
 In general, he is of the “dry” right on economics – a disciple of lower taxes and the capitalist free market. He castigated the Rudd Government’s fiscal stimulus measures during the GFC in 2008-09, and never criticized the basic unfairness of the Abbott Government’s hated 2014 budget (as opposed to the inept attempts to “sell” it). (See also his 2009 Menzies Lecture, an ode to getting government “out of the hair and pockets” of business; compare Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate, a scathing indictment of plutocracy.)

No wonder the pond is routinely confused ...

As prime minister, Turnbull will be hamstrung politically if he is inclined to follow his church’s teachings on issues such as the treatment of asylum-seekers. Since 2001, the Coalition’s hardline policies have been quite at odds with the Vatican’s pronouncements. And yet… there are grounds for optimism. 
For a start, Turnbull has promised a return to collegiate cabinet government. In his John Monash Oration of 2013, he said: “There is a great deal of truth in that passage from Proverbs 11 which is set into a mosaic in the entrance to the Victorian Parliament. ‘Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety’. And there is also wisdom.” 
More generally, Turnbull is a thoughtful, rational ecumenicist. He seems less likely than his predecessor to be spoiling for a part in the Americans’ next foreign war, to curtail precious civil liberties, or to dog-whistle on issues of race. He has a fine record on issues of religious pluralism, having often spoken up for (among others) Muslims and Jews. On the millennial issue of climate change, he recently said that “everyone will give great weight to Pope Francis’ encyclical [Laudato si]”. It is a call to action.  (as before, all here).

A call to action!?

Around this point, the pond had two choices. It could join with the Oreo and demand that a breakaway political party be formed ... let's call it the Democratic Liberal Party ... as a way of taking a stand against this dangerous NBN-wrecking leftie radically dry thoughtful ecumenicist, or it could have a cup of tea ...

The pond decided on a cup of tea ... though not before being reminded of why it liked Rowe's cartoons for the AFR. 

The rogue insists on showing his pencil markings while adding the colour, and he never resists an opportunity to be cruel, with more cruel Rowe here ... This one he called "Always the barmaid?", though, pace the Bolter, it might have been called "cruelly shafted by a cougar lover" ...