In which the pond sheds a tear for the onion muncher, but stays true ...

Dammit, the pond could feel a tear welling in its eye, and a heartfelt song on its lips ...

Say good-bye, my own true lover, as we sing a lover's song
How it breaks my heart to leave you now the carnival is gone
High above the dawn is waking, Sam the man is breaking,
and my tears are falling rain, 
for the carnival is over, we may never meet again. 
Like a drum my heart was beating, and your kiss was sweet as wine
But the joys of love are fleeting, for Pierrot and Columbine ...

No, never!

This will not stand, the pond will need more than a mere Bolter's unctuous, uxorious farewells before it takes the onion muncher off its banner ...

Who to blame for where we've reached? Well yesterday the oscillating fan was out and about in his usual mendacious, malicious way celebrating the deeds of the assassin ...

Sensing that soon it would be Friday, the pond could feel a poem or perhaps a speech coming on ...

Friends, steak and kidney siders, countrymen, lend me your ears; 

I come to bury the onion muncher, not to praise him. 

The evil that men do lives after them; 

The good is oft interred with their bones; 

So let it be with the onion muncher. The noble Malware 

Hath told you the onion muncher was ambitious: 

If it were so, it was a grievous fault, 

And grievously hath the onion muncher answer'd it. 

Here, under leave of Malware and the rest-- 

For Malware is an honourable man; 

So are they all, all honourable liberal men-- 

Too many women in the cabinet and then were would we be? -

Come I to speak in the onion muncher's political funeral. 

He was my friend, faithful and just to me: 

And he did wonders for the NBN

But Malware says he was ambitious, and much loved copper; 

And Malware is an honourable multinodal man. 

He hath brought many HFC connections home to steak and kidney siders 

Whose monthly ransoms did the general coffers fill: 

Did this in the onion muncher seem ambitious? 

When that the poor have cried about their connectivity, the onion muncher hath wept: 

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: 

Yet Malware says he was ambitious; 

And Malware is an honourable man. 

You all did see that on the Manly corso I thrice presented him a kingly crown, 

Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition? 

Oh sure he handed out a few knighthoods, but not to himself

And if that came later, why he would have had no choice but to accept

Yet Malware says he was ambitious; 

And, sure, he is an honourable man. 

I speak not to disprove what Malware spoke, 

But here I am to speak what I do know. 

You all did love him once, not without cause: 

How many others could eat an onion in such style?

What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him? 

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, readers of the lizard Oz

And men have lost their reason

And let us not speak of women, because Milo has decided they have pricks

Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with the onion muncher 

And I must pause till it come back to me

Or perhaps I'll just jump in and never be heard from again ...

Whatever. Sad.

Okay, the pond is clearly bored, but to resume the main topic, which is the role the reptiles play in the ongoing war between the onion muncher and Malware, with the reptiles still clearly yearning for the beloved onion muncher.

The pond would like to note this day's curiosity, a minor yet in its own way splendid example of the perverse reptile sub-editor's art ...

Nota bene the cawing Crowe's splash for the day ...

See how it's not too subtly skewed to blame it all on Malware?

All roads lead to Caesar's Rome and all recriminations lead to the PM, and it's hardly the fault of the bigoted homophobes still unhappy at having lost?

Now some splashes - of the oscillating fan kind above - are hard to skew, and for a nonce, it would seem hard, even wrong, to do it for the cawing Crowe, because this is what google turns up for the very same story ...

Yes, the main intent was to celebrate some compelling words, but the sub-editor reached into the text and plucked from it an angle designed to maintain the reptile war on Malware ...

You see, that's how the story was headlined ...

And the story itself was pretty much a non-event, bland, head-counting stodge, with a 'rally the ranks' call of the savvy Savva kind:

You see?

The cawing Crowe was actually suggesting caution and a cauterising of the lasting pain, and proposing that perhaps there should be fewer blame games ... 

But he ended with the wise note that this advice might fall on deaf ears ...

And sure enough the deaf-eared Oz sub-editor determined to produce click bait and wring controversy from a majority vote in favour of an opinion confirmed by many, many surveys, including a very expensive postal opinion poll, ended up with a header celebrating recriminations ...

Blake suggested that it was possible to find heaven, the universe, or something very big, in a grain of sand, and the pond thinks it's possible to find the reptile mind set in a single headline.

If the pond may be so bold, just let the whole SSM thing go, reptiles. If that's your demographic, it's not going to do much for your business plan. Young folk don't care and the old fogies are on the way out.

The Bolter has let the onion muncher go, and grieve if you must, but delight in fresh possibilities, new areas for ravaging Malware ...

Sure, Sam the man has bitten the dust, and there'll be some fun playing the game they played in The Man Who Would Be King, but now the banks have given Malware a headache, and he's risen magnificently to the challenge.

Talk about eating humble pie, talk about munching on crow, and smiling all the while with delight at the lavishness of the spread ...

And where are you reptiles? Still sobbing over the delinquent hard right and the long lost onion muncher roaming the Manly corso like a ghostly spirit and talking of recriminations ...

And so to a cartoon which irresistibly reminded the pond that of late the Oreos in the lizard Oz have been in frustratingly short supply ...

Meanwhile ...

In which the pond discreetly tiptoes around the toilet bowl - septic tank if you will - and spends quality Thursday time with the savant Savva ...

The pond wasn't going there with the reptiles of Oz, as yesterday they skirted around the toilet bowl, the visiting septic tank, determined to be titillated by a fuckwit who clearly doesn't have much idea of anatomy when it comes to abuse ...

But then this day the reptiles decided to go the full Milo on the rotating reptile front page splash, and with it came two contrasting stories ...

Yes, the desperate reptiles jumped deep into the toilet bowl ... they are so pathetically, desperately needy, why they'd even retweet far right Islamic bashing from the orange one ...but while running the gushes from the sewer, apparently no one thought what a rich irony it would be to have Matt Lauer turn up in the very same panel, relentlessly rotating so that all might enjoy the farce ...

  

What happens when disgraced narcissist attention-seeking black sheep of the family have nowhere to go?

Why they do a tour down under and the colonial hicks, grateful for their presence, fawn over them ... so it was with the "Lord" of Moncktons, and proving they can sink much lower, so it is with the reptiles gushing like a toilet flush over Milo ...

Meanwhile, the pond is determined to get on with business as usual, and today is savvy Savva day, even if the pernicious, perfidious reptiles decided to run the cawing Crowe beneath her calming call for unity and harmony and peace in the land ...

Actually the SSM recriminations might, in this case, lead directly to the homophobic bigots, who having asked for the opinion of the people in a survey which at vast expense replicated a series of polls, then decided to turn away and blame it all on Malware ...

You'd think with the latest news of Sam the man doing his best for the Communist dictatorship that the reptiles would be thinking of their war on Comrade Bill, but such is the perversity, fear and loathing of Malware that yesterday the reptiles were still giving comfort to the onion muncher and seeking out his opinions ...

Actually there's a fair argument that everything in that befuddled onion munching brain is either an afterthought or a brain fart ... won't someone tell him its over, and just send him the invite to his sister's wedding?

No wonder the savvy Savva stood in the pews and called for a community singalong ...

Singing from the same hymn book? The pond was immediately charmed and beguiled by such an old-fashioned cliché, and rushed off to read William Safire's political dictionary:

And now, brethren, if we can just turn to the relevant page and sing along with the savant Savva, and enjoy the cane toad joke ...

The pond always suspected that Malware had helped introduce the cane toad into Australia, and that other explanations were fraudulent lies - note to Milo, this is something really big to explore in reptile la la land, you could make your name down under with this conspiracy theory - but otherwise what a heartfelt column, with its portrait of the Liberal party as full of panicking weak-kneed wretches rending their clothes, whipping themselves with switches dipped in vinegar, and agrarian socialists intoxicated by the inflaming red impact of hair dye bottles ...

By golly, even the pond couldn't come up with that level of invective for a bunch of jelly backs led by the greatest spineless one of them all ...

As for the strategy, it's an infinitely clever one. Ruin the Labor party and put greenies in their place in parliament ... what could go wrong with that, where's the harm? How much easier it would be for the Liberals to get along with the greenies ...

Oh wait, that's right, Malware introduced the cane toad into Australia and now wants greenies in the house to fix it up ...

And now back to the strategising Savva forced to deal with a bunch of headless chooks, determined to squawk except that somehow they've lost their beaks along with their minds ...

Will the jellyfish listen to Savva's wise words? Can we soon see parliaments full of greenies helping out the Liberal party?

Will everybody just shut up for a bit? Or will the reptiles encourage Milo to yap away like a loon president on far right steroids?

And will anyone take note of Sam the man and his love for the Chinese regime?

Who knows, but David Rowe is standing by with the fireworks, so that we can all enjoy the celebrations, with more Rowe here ...

In which the pond does its Devine duty ...

The pond approached this day's Devine reading with a heavy heart and much reluctance, but in the end felt compelled to do its Devine duty ...

Whenever the matter of men arises like a priapic force of nature, the Devine routinely goes barking mad ...

Even the google headers were confused ...

At the moment of course liberals of The New Yorker kind are doing their best to grope - or should that be cope? - with the reality that sexual abuse isn't a party political matter of left or right, but something that turns up across an offensively broad spectrum, as here, which ended this way ...

Well yes, though that last line should probably read "The Democratic Party should be better than that", because it surely hasn't been in the past. The pond can remember having discussions about power imbalance when slick Willy was in his prime...

But that's the engaging thing about liberals, they do hand-wringing and they acknowledge issues.

The Devine? Well there's the Devine right to howl at the moon to consider first ...

Where to start? Well clearly the Devine is an avid NY Times reader, and so rushed off here to be shocked and outraged.

Sadly, lost in the Devine's confusion is the reference to perhaps one of the most famous of ancient Greek plays and what Freud made of it, though the piece itself makes it clear enough ...

Acknowledging the brutality of male libido is not, of course, some kind of excuse. Sigmund Freud recognized the id, and knew it as “a chaos, a caldron full of seething excitations.” But the point of Freud was not that boys will be boys. Rather the opposite: The idea of the Oedipus complex contained an implicit case for the requirements of strenuous repression: If you let boys be boys, they will murder their fathers and sleep with their mothers.

Well yes, these notions have been swirling around for thousands of years, and with no solution, especially when there are Devines always hanging about handing out white feathers ...

Perhaps there's no point in expecting the Devine to take matters calmly when she's intent on jumping the shark and nuking the fridge, and somehow leaping from Harvey, slick Willy, Don Burke, the Alabama judge and lots more caught up in the recent fuss, so that she can bizarrely conclude that innocent little boys are being demonised ...

Of late the comments section for Devine pieces has shown a notable tendency not to toe the Devine line, as with this pair ...

And Swaggie was there to enjoy the irony ...

Now this would be more than enough irony for the pond's irony meter for the day.

Splash on the vitriole and move along there little doggies ...

But the pond is a glutton for punishment. Is it any wonder that some have noted a masochistic streak and suggested a role as Christ in a Filipino re-enactment of the crucifixion?

You see,  many political dinosaurs have, of late, been running around like headless chooks, tortured at the way that One Nation ruined things for that peculiar fowl, the Queensland LNP, in the recent state election ... as the count keeps winding on and on ...

Poor George of the deep north has been howling for a bank royal commission and demanding that Malware veer sharp right and become One Nation lite to stop the rot ...

It's been a total nightmare for the hapless LNP, having banked on a sure thing win, and then found themselves coming up short ...

So how does the Devine handle it? Well by flipping it over like a short order cook ...

Yes, suddenly a slim win in Queensland is the stuff of Labor nightmares, when the real Labor nightmare was the good chance that they might have gone down the gurgler ... and they still might have to wear the egg of doing a deal ...

This must be some sort of taste thing, because the pond never had much time for eggs easy over, not when there's a succulent yolk to be enjoyed ...

Dump the whole sorry mess?

How about fix the whole sorry mess, and dump Malware and the onion muncher?

But no, the Devine has hooked her wagon to the Malware horse, and by golly she's going to flog it ...

And there you have it. The nightmare for Labor turns out to have been a perfect storm for the right side of politics, with silly Matt Canavan doing his T-Rex impersonation, and the Devine sounding more like Humpty Dumpty every day ...

'There’s a nightmare for you!’ 

‘I don’t know what you mean by “nightmare,”’ Alice said. 

The Devine smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down nightmare for the Labor party!”’ 

‘But “nightmare for the Labor party” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down perfect storm for the right side of politics,”’ Alice objected. 

‘When I use words,’ the Devine said in rather a scornful and haughty tone, ‘they mean just what I choose them to mean — neither more nor less.’ 

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ 

‘The question is,’ said the Devine, ‘which is to be master — that’s all. And masterful men are the best masters. Let's not have any demonising of innocent little boys, you naughty, spiteful little girl, you and your pepper...’

Oh dear, the pond has over-dosed on splashes of Devine and quite gone off the rails. It was probably that meme doing the rounds that gave the pond an acid flashback to the Tamworth show, whereat the pond won many plastercast prizes without working out the CBR ...

Thank the long absent lord there's only one gobbet to go ...

What? More left wing than Ben Chifley?

More left wing that the Queenslanders calling for a Royal Commission into the banks? Well it's not nationalising them, but maybe that'll come ... as agrarian socialists do what they must do ...

Is the Devine blind to the charms of the northern cockies? Is agrarian socialism so undervalued these days?

And whatever happened to all that talk of sycophantic Bill?

The Prime Minister had had quite enough of his rotten start to the parliamentary year, and, as he unloaded on the nearest target – Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, who he portrayed as a social climber sucking up to billionaires – Malcolm Turnbull's colleagues couldn't get enough of him. "We have just heard from that great sycophant of billionaires, the Leader of the Opposition," Mr Turnbull began, responding to accusations by Mr Shorten that he was cutting family payments to pay for a $50 billion hand-out to businesses and banks. (Fairfax here).

The most left-wing government in history will somehow be run by that great sycophant of billionaires?

The pond hopes it's around to see it, and meanwhile will wrap up the Devine rant for the day with a cartoon from David Rowe, who is apparently fond of a spot of gardening, with more Rowe here ...

Will there be no end to this demonising of innocent little boys? What next, Australian cartoonists storm the United States in search of prey?

In which the pond joins the reptiles on fury road ...

Oops, how did that poster get into the pond's survey of the lizard Oz headlines for the week?

Never mind, the point is clear enough. The reptiles are in a fury with Malware and are determined to make a fuss.

Any complaint the pond might have with Malware ...

... is small beer up against reptiles and conservatives scorned ...

The stories have been coming thick and fast, too many for the pond to cover ...

You've got a beef and are an antiquated fossil from the deep north?

Call the reptiles and they'll give you a front page run.

Think Malware might be on the cusp of achieving something? Call inn the cawing Crowe to undercut it all ...

And early this day they were still at it, out on the fury road...

Of course when the reptiles talk of "Liberal fury", they actually mean the fundamentalist rump of homophobes, bigots and Catholic nee Daesh lovers that infest the Nationals and the Liberal party ...

There are actually some liberals in the Liberal party pleased to be genuinely liberal for once ... but not your average fundamentalist Oz columnist, of the bouffant Shanners kind ...

Here's the logic. For whatever reason, the government decided to spend a large amount of money on a voluntary postal survey, and got a clear-cut answer. The graceful thing to do would be to enact the legislation and celebrate the moment.

Would your average fundamentalist bigot accept the result and show some grace? Of course not, they'd bung on a do, trot out a specious abundance of nonsense about religious freedom, and then they and the Oz commentariat would maintain the rage, and keep on racing down fury road, and as a result, the roadster upgrade promised so long ago by Pope has emerged not quite as gleaming as promised ...

Ah the tax cuts. Was that cartoon really dated the 2.2.17? Talk about a walk down nostalgia road ...

Never mind, get ready for that promised bout of bouffant one keening, moaning, wailing, hand-wringing and sighing deeply ... 

There is a fourth option?

They never give up, these reptiles, do they...

And all this talk of the banks is a cartoonist's dream ...

Do the reptiles think they're helping?

Not if the bouffant one can help it, as he muddies the water, generates despair, cultivates fear, loathing and confusion, and chaos rents the land ... or at least the government, as strange creatures from the deep north infest the southern psyche...

An imperishable legacy?

Not to the bitter, snarking homophobic rump of bigots, still carping and harping and carrying on ...

Malware is on the cusp of actually achieving something, though he had to get there by the most desperate and devious of means.

Will he be given any acknowledgement or recognition?

Not by the onion muncher or his reptile mates. At the very moment of his likely triumph, this week the reptiles have hit fury road in overdrive and the loons have come out to snark ...

It almost seems like a perverse counter factual alternative history way to generate sympathy for Malware ... but the pond isn't for turning ...

Instead on days like these the pond just feels like settling back and watching the spectacle of reptiles and politicians turning on each other in a gladiatorial frenzy ...of white anting, sniping, undermining, wrecking and back biting, seemingly unaware or uncaring of the comrade Bill that hovers in the bleachers.

And when the dust has settled, the onion muncher and his chosen few and his reptile comrades will have destroyed not just the NBN, but Malware along with it ...

... while the pond will just be enjoying cartoon logic ...