In which, with baited breath, the dog botherer is hired as media adviser and nattering "Ned" develops a baited energy policy ...

As anyone who's watched the opening scene of Prevenge will realise - as the anti-heroine visits a weird shop to acquire a strange pet for son and sees strange reptilian and arachnid shapes - some people have an unseemly fear of scaly, creepy crawly folk ...

And it's true that reptiles are difficult pets, always complaining, whining and moaning, always lathering up a climate of fear, always querulous, truculent, difficult and perverse ...

But this produces rich irony for those in search of bounteous irony harvests, none more so than that on offer at the Terror today. 

It seems the reptiles have realised that bunging on a do about the onion muncher on a daily basis might have put Malware in a precarious position ... so this day they reverted to old form, and remembered the real demon in the reptile midst, Comrade Bill ...

Oh, they've got a new DT app, but what if the pond knows how to get delirium tremens already?

Do they have the first clue that by foretelling the ascendancy of Comrade Bill, they build expectations that it will in due course become so?

As it turned out, the reptiles felt the need to scribble a furious editorial, though the Devine was singularly useless, turning to harp yet again about gender ....

Yes, after routinely doing their level best to demonise Malware, the reptiles realise they might have gone too far and Comrade Bill looms like some gigantic lizard wreaking havoc on Tokyo... or perhaps telepathically controlled, as Anne Hathaway discovered in the US indie Colossal ...

Around this point the pond can feel some flinching from the reptiles, as if in that UK indie ...

... but the fun of the fair has begun, and remember they're behind the glass, and there's no need to go into the back room to see the special collection ... the irony feast is right up the front ...

Yes, the reptiles at lizard Oz lead with John Stone casting a goolie  (speak Tamworth!) and demanding Malware go ... and bizarrely the dog botherer decided in response to become media adviser, as if that would help ...

Oh dear, right from the get go, the pond was immediately distracted. Putting inverted commas around 'baited' doesn't make it true, or just, or so ...

Shall I bend low and in a bondman's key, 
With bated breath and whispering humbleness, 
Say this; “Fair sir, you spit on me in Wednesday last's column; 
You spurn'd me such a Saturday column; another time 
You call'd me dog; and for these courtesies 
From a common crapulent dog botherer
I'll lend you thus much moneys
Or listen to what you scribble”?

Well anyone interested can look up "bated" breath here, or here, where the old joke gets trotted out again ...

Baited breath is a common misspelling of bated breath. Bait is a substance used as a lure to capture fish or other prey, therefore, someone with baited breath would probably have a terrible case of halitosis.

Do the hipsters who saved greyhounds from the rubbish tip of life clean their nice doggies' teeth? Who knows, it's on with the cunning pun of baited breath to listen to the dog botherer ...

Oh fuck. It might well be that Malware is doomed. This might well explain the sense of fear and fright afoot in the Terror:

That's it? That's the best the dog botherer has got? The pond only had to glide over to the other side of the digital page to harvest the rich crop of irony ...

There was Dame Slap off in the United States blathering on about the left devouring its own, while down below,  Dan Kelly's relative "Joe" was faithfully recording the onion muncher devouring his own and refusing to be silenced, while "Ned" Kelly himself devoted all his attention to the feuding, fussing and infighting, or if you will, the wrecking, sniping, white-anting and undermining ... and at the end of the process, wondered why there was no energy policy ... without producing the first clue as to what might constitute a sensible and reasonable set of energy policies ... assuming the vast bulk of climate science is correct in its predictions ...

Now the pond realises that anyone who entered the pet shop with the pond is a glutton for punishment, and this looks like more than the usual or reasonable punishment expected at a reptile feast ...

It was that line about a long-run energy policy, 'which incredibly he still lacks' that made the pond sit up. This from nattering "Ned", a climate denialist in the middle of a flock of climate denialists, talking about lacking an energy policy?

This from a party which has flirted with denialism (if flirting is a discreet term for a wild all night orgy of fucking) since the days that the onion muncher toppled Malware as opposition leader on the basis of climate science denialism ...

Oh it was too rich, too much for a koala to bear ...

What was that Dame Slap column heading? The left devoured its own?

This is in the end the harvest the reptiles have reaped, having sown the wind of climate denialism, having cultivated a zephyr of solar and wind outrage into a howling cyclone for so long ...

The more that the likes of nattering "Ned" report with solemnity that the onion muncher represents a rational set of policy alternatives, the more Malware will suffer.

Ye ancient cats and dog-bothering greyhounds, it was Concetta Fierravanti-Wells herself who pointed out the rank hypocrisy of the onion muncher when in and out of power ...

Senator Fierravanti-Wells pointed to "categoric" comments Mr Abbott made in 2015 when he announced the "pledge" to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2030. In September 2015, Mr Abbott said: "Unlike some other countries which make these pledges and don't deliver, Australia does deliver when we make a pledge." 

Senator Fierravanti-Wells said those comments showed Mr Abbott's "total about face" for his comments last week. 

To say that it's aspirational and not binding now is in direct contradiction, I think, to what then-Prime Minister Abbott said," she said. 

"If Tony didn't think that commitment to the Paris Agreement was such a good thing, well 2015 was the time to have that discussion, 2015 was the time to say that rather than give the sort of iron-clad commitment he made on behalf of Australia in an international environment." (ABC here).

But that's to expect coherence, consistency and decency in a maddened bull intent on revenge, and the wrecking of the china shop, as he's done in the past to great effect.

And yet all the onion muncher is doing is peddling yet again the climate denialism that the reptiles have peddled for years ...

And now, climate denialist nattering "Ned" keeps serving his cause ...

The real make or break should be the development of a sustainable set of policies in the matter of energy. 

But the reptiles and the onion muncher have for years conspired to make this impossible, and meanwhile, the dog botherer explains how to put lipstick on the pig and sell it to the public, while the government's house is divided, the Daily Terror is in a state of hysteria, the Devine is lost in the gender wars, and Dame Slap is forced to head off to the United States to scribble about a minor fuss in a minor college ...

Yep, Malware is fucked, and we discover once again how the right devours its own, the centre, and anything else around ...

Well thankfully Moir was on hand to celebrate the work of the wrecker - fancy Goya using him as a model - with more Moir here ... and what a nice avatar he has ...