In which the pond seeks NSFW refuge from mugwumps in Dame Slap's swamp ...

Israel!

The pond breathed a sigh of relief and thanked the long absent lord there was a domestic distraction from the circus abroad.

Israel!!

Once again Dame Slap had come to the pond's rescue, though that evocation of mugwumps felt strange to the pond.

It was good that the Dame led off with mugwumps, in the classical, traditional sense of the word, which can be Greg Hunted here,  though it has the fingerprints of Lynton Crosby's fingerprints on Boris Johnson's mugwumping of Jeremy Corbyn (Graudian it here).

The pond's own understanding of 'mugwump' first came about as a result of reading Burrough's The Naked Lunch, at the time a banned book, and one that set the pond's mind reeling ... as in this quote about the alien invaders that infest the story:

For those up to it, there's more from that quote in a blog about banned books here ... but it helps explain why the pond has been circumspect about mugwumps ever since ...

But the google splash for Dame Slap was reassuring ...

Oh that's okay. The good Dame is just embarking on a rich fantasy that she's in the centre-right, as opposed to being off on her own barking mad planet Janet, and no doubt she will give that naughty Malware a good spanking for being a leftie, greenie, hippie of the big spending, high taxing government kind...

The pond can sense stray readers groaning. Still on about the budget and Green nirvana and big spending and high taxing and oh the suffering of the millionaires and the banks ...

It's like petulant Peta on high rotation ... and didn't the reptiles love the latest shoot-out at the Malware OK corral ...

He broke the Liberal Party's heart? Well he certainly broke the hearts of petulant Peta, who should have been sacked by the onion muncher, and the heart of the onion muncher, who didn't have the courage, and the likes of Cory, who decided he needed a new niche heart of complete irrelevance, and he broke the hearts of the lizards of Oz, and the Terrorists and the Bolter, and he broke the NBN, because the onion muncher told him to do it, so he did ...

But worst of all, he broke Dame Slap's heart with his fiendish greenie ways ...

Profligate children! Cut their pocket money! She really does live up to the pond's caricature with the richly complex way she tackles the nation's economy ...

Isn't there a little more to be said about the economy than simplistic, mindless, simpleton quoting of St Milton?

As for petulant Peta v. Malware, the reptiles couldn't get enough of it, and put it on high rotation and endless repeat ...

Of course all this overlooks the splendid work of petulant Peta and the onion muncher while in power ... a tremendous set of policy initiatives that stopped BBQs in their tracks ...

Will those glory days ever return? How can we possibly hope to match up to the US under the Donald?

Never mind, there's just the space for a final gobbet of Dame Slap in tears at the greenie threat...

Hang on, hang on ...

The mugwumps, in their non-Burroughs sense, were Republican activists who bolted from the Republican party to support Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland in the US presidential election of 1884. They were supposed to be sanctimonious and holier-than-thou ...

If we're to have any historical relevance, domestic mugwumps would be those who turned their backs on the Liberal party, and raced to join Comrade Bill or the greenies ...

Dame Slap's mugwumps, it would seem, are ranting, raving, right-wing ratbags of the Dame Slap, Cory Bernardi kind. They've got nothing to do with the centre of Australian politics ...

If anything, because they're operating in reverse, they should be called wumpmugs ...

And speaking of Israel, intelligence, the US, wumpmugs, life, pain, bread, circuses and the whole damn thing, the pond turns once again to the Pope for a closer, with more papal encyclicals here ...