In which the pond enjoys the Murdochian reality TV show ...

It's typical of the restraint of the mutton Dutton that he refuses to soar to the peaks where his heart naturally dwells ... how soon can we reach nirvana, and achieve proper respect, as in Journalist arrested for asking Trump cabinet member about healthcare bill ...

Surely his modest wish that Fairfax would simply wither up and die is too self-controlled. Why doesn't he let his hair down, abandon the restraint and start locking pesky journos up? There must be a place for them on Manus ...

Meanwhile, thinking of the Donald, as the pond sometimes does, it occurred to the pond what a rich irony it was that the silly Yanks had allowed a cuckoo into the nest, a treacherous Australian who would sell off his citizenship of another country for a mess of American pottage, and then proceed to fuck that country up in mighty and marvellous ways unimaginable at the time ... b

What else, if not the culmination of the Murdochian dream, is the Donald?

What else, if not the fruition of Fox News, the WSJ, and the whole rabid pack of Murdochians?

Sure there were others involved, but Fox was and remains the jewel in the crown, at the heart of the slavering tilt to the rabid right, at least until the next pack of rabid wolves attack it from the right and dislodge it ...

So after ignoring the mutton Dutton - the pond finds that productivity surges in leaps and bounds if it lives without paying attention to the increasingly weird looking mutton - the pond thought it might get an update from the reptiles on matters Donald  ...

Talk about disappointing ...

When the pond heads off to the United States, it looks for the comedy.

It's not as if it's hard to find. Over at sister reptile digital rag, where they hand out the news for free to help the lizards of Oz in their business plan, the focus was on the right angle: White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer 'hid in the bushes' after FBI Director James Comey was fired.

This fired up all the wags on Twitter, some of them to be found by googling up tags celebrating Sean Spicer Bushes ... naturally replete with Simpsons' gifs and other jokes ...

All the serious outlets celebrated the news, as at WaPo here ...

After Spicer spent several minutes hidden in the darkness and among the bushes near these sets, Janet Montesi, an executive assistant in the press office, emerged and told reporters that Spicer would answer some questions, as long as he was not filmed doing so. Spicer then emerged. “Just turn the lights off. Turn the lights off,” he ordered. “We'll take care of this. ... Can you just turn that light off?”

It doesn't get any better than this, and no doubt the logarithms will insist that the pond get all the latest YouTube sketches by comedians and late night TV hosts making like reality show bandits ...

What's Stewart got to offer up against this sort of comedy?

Just layout issues...and a dull repetition of already widely circulated issues and questions ...

Sure it's novel to see nervous reptiles doing a little clucking and tutting, but to what avail?

 

Layout worse than the Graudian?

That's not a selling point. What about some serious comedy?

Spicer got his wish and was soon standing in near darkness between two tall hedges, with more than a dozen reporters closely gathered around him. For 10 minutes, he responded to a flurry of questions, vacillating between light-hearted asides and clear frustration with getting the same questions over and over again.

And then to the punchline ...

With Murray quieted, Spicer continued to explain why there's no need for a special prosecutor. “There is clearly at this point no evidence of a reason to do that,” Spicer said. “You have a system that's working.”

If that's what working is, the pond would hate to see what's fucked ...

Of course hapless Americans have to take all this seriously, and the full to overflowing intertubes copped another downpour, such that it's now quivering like an American dam under climate science stress ...

No doubt when the Donald brings down the world economy and compounds the climate crisis to the point of catastrophe the pound might have regrets about being frivolous ...after all, La Règle du jeu was shortly followed by the second world war, so that in due course Holocaust deniers could lurk in the White house ...

But why not sing along with the band as the Titanic goes down ... and shed a little tear of patriotic pride that a dinkum rat fink played his part as the iceberg ...

Meanwhile, the pond will go on seeking out the late night comedians for the laughs...

This take-down of Paul Ryan is days old ...but in its aging it's hauled on 2.3m. + views...

Ostensibly Meyers is a comedian ... the day that the reptiles manage this sort of feisty analysis might be the day that their failing business model turned around. But how could they turn the ship? It's being run by the treacherous iceberg ...

Quick, run and hide in the bushes ...well, the pond has no idea how Ryan could look in a mirror without the glass shattering ...