In which the pond suggests a few alternatives to enduring the dog botherer ...

Whenever the pond thinks of the dog botherer, it also remembers Liam Kenny's In Defence Of The Chaser's False Depiction  Of My Dad Having Sex With Dog ...

And sometimes the pond is given to reflect at the needlessly cruel way that it trawls through the gutter when it might be referring passing stray readers to interesting writing.

Who knew the details of Steve Bannon's bankruptcies, failed marriage, custody arguments, and failed attempts at Hollywood mogulism - the frequent fate of deal-makers with only talent for the deal, and not much talent at that - before reading Connie Bruck's A Hollywood Story: What, exactly, did Steve Bannon do in the movie industry, in The New Yorker? Lousy ideological documentaries, the disaster known as The Indian Runner, biospheres and other eccentricities ...

It's currently outside the paywall, which is why the pond has linked to it, and there are many worse ways to spend time.

Please, at this point, reconsider before proceeding further.

Here there be only tedium, a vale of tears and the mindless mediocrity of the dog botherer attempting a down under version of Bannon, which, coming from Adelaidia, is as silly as it is deeply irrelevant.

Consider that in the same issue, it's possible to read Joshua Rothman's portrait of the confused Rod Dreher in The Seeker, Rod Dreher's Monastic Vision.

In a different way, but ultimately with similar destiny as the Catholic Bannon, Dreher is a narcissist yearner, wanting to return to father, family, community, womb, and never likely to get back to any of them ... and yet he makes a crust out his introspection, without ever daring to commit to the cloisters he yearns for. (Also outside the paywall).

Rothman's portrait is sympathetic, but all the more devastating as a result ...

And then in the same issue it was possible to read Louis Menand's Rereading Norman Podhoretz's "Making It", also luckily outside the paywall at the moment. Podhoretz was another narcissist of the conservative kind who was transformed by failure ("Making It" actually resulted in "Losing It") into a different kind of failure ...

Given these options, and many more on the intertubes, the pond often wonders how it became its melancholy duty to observe the gibbering of the reptiles, there being no bigger gibberer than the dog botherer ...

As usual, while meandering with the wandering dog botherer, it's worth turning to the comments section to see where the dog whistling is really aimed, and how well it has hit its intended mark ...

Weird or what?

The point of course is to normalise right wind extremism, and to discount it, a tradition stretching a long way back, though this example comes at some cost to the pond's Godwin's Law swear jar ...

And so on.

What's wonderful in this form of apologetics is the way that the Donald can do business with Saudi Arabia and make it the very first port of call in his overseas travels ...in much the same way that Chairman Rupert has had many dealings with the home of fundamentalist Wahhabism ...

There's an abundance of stories easily googled about this phenomenon ...

... but instead the pond is left with the dog botherer's nonsensical posturing about countries such as Saudi Arabia ...

Yes, it's more mindless fuckwitted blather about the unequalled gains and privileges of Western civilisation ... aka the right to bomb the shit out of other countries and be extremely pleased at the result ...

There are there are dark moments in an issue like Iraq because some of the terrible things that have happened but I’ve never had any doubts and I’ve never seen Alexander have any doubts about the fact that this was the right thing to do and needed to be done and needs to be seen through and one now because I suppose he has a context and those in our office we have we have a good understanding of the context of this and we always think about the consequences of not doing anything and that’s what’s often missing from debate. People think that if we don’t have you know if we all ran away from Iraq then it wouldn’t be there. Well the question is what would be there? What would be the issue you’re dealing with there and is that worse than what we’ve got now? (much more drivel here).

You really don't get that many chances to get it right, especially when the consequences of getting it wrong are so dire ...

Yet there's the dog botherer ably assisting in fucking up an entire country, and so in consequence an entire region, yet somehow maintaining his righteousness, and without a hint of apology for his hideous legacy ...

The colonial mentality seems to be alive and well in Adelaidia ...

By the time the last gobbet came round, the pond was shrieking for it to stop, for the pain to go away ...

The sad thing is that the First Dog cartoon below hasn't got old ... 

But it's even sadder if the pond's attempt at a bait and switch has failed, and there were readers who made it this far ...

So much suffering.

Still, on the bright side, the pond doesn't live in the dog botherer's Iraq ...

Meanwhile, and at risk to the pond's business plan, brood about this.

There's good and interesting writing, reporting and analysis out there ... somewhere else ... far away from the reptiles of Oz and the dog botherer, who uses defamation laws to silence the sort of satirical comments even his own son defends ... 

So much for 18C and so much for never saying sorry ...

But at least First Dog found it in his heart to say sorry for the dog botherer, and sorry for all the many sins the reptiles commit each day ... (fresher First Dog can be found here).