In which the pond visits Dame Slap's planet in company with the WSJ ...

The pond has no need of tawdry marketing gimmicks, or pathetic giveaway offers of the steak-knives kind (*conditions apply) ...

Learn more? * Conditions apply ...

Besides, the pond has already gone down that road, with the meme of worlds colliding ...

But what need of a gimmick or a tablet when this amazing gaggle of super heroes are at the top of the digital edition page?

Oh okay, Wesley's no bromancer - could anyone ever match the bromancer? - but they sing the same song from the reptile sheet, and harmonisation is very important in reptile la la land ...

And there was Tess with an earth-shattering conspiracy to destroy the west, perpetrated by the head of the whore of Babylon ...

Talk about cup runneth over ... and that's long before contemplating the Devine putting her inimitable racist talent to work ...

Yes, it's all the fault of the pesky blacks. Why if the Devine sees one walking down the street, her natural instinct is to shoot first and ask questions later ...

So many choices, so little time, but even though the pond is long over the Donald - who cares if the Republicans kill the mugs who voted for them via a broken health system, that's the way the Darwin awards work - the pond simply couldn't abandon Dame Slap, who this day returned to her own planet, wherefrom she sent off an important missive ...

Of course it was the google splash that gave the game away ... that talk of the "liberal media in a frenzy".

Now the pond hadn't thought of the WSJ as part of the liberal media, but no doubt Dame Slap was right, because the editorial board was in a frenzy ... and everywhere it was making a splash ...

Uh huh. So on Dame Janet's planet, the Murdochians are now part of the liberal media, in a frenzy about the Donald ...

They're not the only ones ... with the Donald's favourite Fox judge on the turn, and Craig Unger doing a lengthy piece for the New Republic under the header ...

Trump’s Russian Laundromat 
How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.

It's a ripper read - so deeply corruptly New York - so new Gangs of New York vulgarian - and it reinforces the pond's notion that the golden rule should still apply ...

But the New Republic has certain tendencies, and so the pond thought it more poignant to do a Burroughs cut and paste between the Dame and that bastion of liberal journalism, the WSJ ...

Of course the joy of doing a Burroughs is the way the pond doesn't have to labour over Dame Slap's deluded examination of the tea leaves ... better just to crank that bastion of the frenzied liberal media into gear ...

This is, of course, all water off a duck's back to someone as remote from reality as Dame Slap, happily berating the media for being fools, while completely incapable of observing the mote in her own eye ...

Uh huh. Could there be a better segue than to cut to the fools at the WSJ, propelled into intergalactic irrelevance by the planet Janet dweller, with a joke about the way no one can hear them scream?

Radical transparency?! Oh okay, pace Craig Unger, maybe they are barking mad, but are they as mad as Dame Slap suggesting that the WSJ is somehow in the thick of left-liberal politics?

What's perhaps most astonishing is the way that American politics has become reality television, or even worse, the sort of carnival hucksterism that is fake wrestling, with staged events and simple-minded good v. evil - or if you will, the crash-bang tedium of yet another Marvel comic on the big screen ...

No scrub that, what's most astonishing is the way that allegedly conservative commentators, ostensibly determined to preserve the best of Western civilisation and routinely blathering on about Xianity, just love the complete corruption and betrayal of everything they ever supposedly cared about ...

Clowns to the left, clowns to the right, and it isn't Francis dancing on the grave of the west, it's Dame Slap, doing an Ann Coulter ... because that's what narcissists must do these days, have a preening meltdown and Twitter storm over a little leg room (the NY Daily News with just one part of that epic saga here).

In this context, anything the WSJ says about normal political behaviour can be mocked by the Dame Slap nihilist anarchists ...

None of this matters to Dame Slap, who is still deep inside the Donald bubble, with her hands firmly over her ears ...

The WSJ is just another useful idiot, because when you have no standards, you carry no conservative moral compass, everything becomes grist to the nihilist anarchist mill (or circus if you will) ...

What's both compelling and totally insane about this is the way that Dame Slap seems to think this bungling circus of corrupt nepotic clowns in any way resembles a harmonious skilled band of the SSO kind, let alone casting the Donald as some kind of inspirational George Solti tackling the Götterdämmerung (so many choices, though the pond has a soft spot for Solti - do a Greg Hunt and deliver your Gramophone verdict).

Speaking of Wagner, the pond is reminded of the confused and chaotic response of the media back in the 1930s. There were plenty of Lord and Lady Haw Haws then, mocking the media, and marvelling at the brazen skill of certain upstarts ...

It didn't end well, indeed it ended in tears ...

Now the pond understands that, living alone on her private planet, Dame Slap is disconnected from reality and easily persuaded to howl at anything that comes into sight ... but it also helps explain why the reptiles feel the need to offer a Samsung tablet to get punters on board.

Trick or treat works for Halloween, and presumably it still works for anyone incapable of googling up alternatives to Dame Slap's bizarre view of the universe ...

And speaking of bizarre views, that's just the right pivot for an unnerving Rowe cartoon, with more alarming Rowes available here ...