In which the reptiles of Oz bring back the coyote and the onion muncher ...

At first the pond thought that Crikey was being unfair, evoking Looney Tunes, the coyote, and crazed, maddening fanaticism, even if there's something reassuringly familiar and comfortable for the pond in talk of greybeard loons ...

The series here, paywall affected, but surely someone like the savvy Savva isn't so much the fanatic as the dedicated, the devoted and the eternally loyal, the sort of person you might see standing at Malware's cake stand trying to peddle week-old lamingtons ...

But then came today and the pond realised that "fanatic" and references to the delusional coyote were probably understating the dire state of the lizards of Oz ...

Look, there, notice the placement of the coyote himself, an epically failed politician ... (and note also the attempt to drag an ALP senator into the citizenship fiasco when the reptiles had a guaranteed Liberal senator at the heart of the citizenship fiasco for their lead, if they'd wanted...)

And look at the loon who's the top of the digital 'opinionista' list this day ...

The image of the pond's old dog digging an old bone out of the dirt and sitting down for a good chew was irresistible, though truth to tell, we probably need the pungent sight of a corpse being exhumed to catch the full stench of what's going down here...

One of the signs of crazed fanaticism is not just the elevation of the onion muncher to the top of the heap, but the assigning of attendant lords to bow and scrape and pay due heed and attention to his delusions ... it's like a re-enactment of the madness of King Tony on a weekly basis ... though the onion muncher's delusions don't even have the excuses available to the suffering King George III.

This time it was poor Shanners who drew the short straw ... and what an unhappy pumpkin he was...

This splash promised much ...but then it turned from "Conservatives look for a leader" into a meaningless toddle down a path of wonder ...

And since there's absolutely no point looking to the irretrievably damaged onion muncher for leadership, the result was a short, very damp squib ...

Yet there was more to come because it was poor Shanners who'd drawn the short straw to write up the onion muncher's speech.

You see, whenever the crazed fanatics really get rumbling, the crusade requires not just that the fearless leader is given space, but that a lickspittle lackey must be assigned to repeat what the fearless leader has just said ...

Poor Shanners. How the bouffant one is made to suffer.

It's not often that the pond has a sneaking sympathy for servile lackeys, but what must it be like to turn up day after day and serve as a hack copyist for the onion muncher, faithfully transcribing pathetic, natteringly negative, stupidly defiant rhetoric?

There goes a massively stupid man, indecent in his intolerance, doing his bit for Cory and his mob.

Will he still head over and join Cory and the fundie Xians?

Who cares, he's already done a fine DLP job on the Liberal party ... and yet poor Shanners must type out his words all over again, even as the reptiles run the original onion muncher piece ...

But they can't stop, can they, and nor can the pond, because we've gone through all this, and that incompetent dropkick loser, the onion muncher himself, has yet to speak ... and speak at interminable length he must ...

In part because marriage has preoccupied the national debate?

But that was a debate you created, you goose, that was the poisoned chalice you set up ...

Oh okay, there's no point arguing with a dropkick loser who has, in his nattering negativity, made himself irrelevant, a voice braying in the wilderness, a seer only to malcontents and reptiles, and really requiring a different movie to portray his political condition ...

Luckily the final gobbet is small. No doubt his speech was much longer, but this is as much of the stench as the reptiles could stand as they dragged the suppurating corpse from its tomb, the festering thing returning from the dead to announce a triumph, a snatching of victory from the possible jaws of defeat ...

There's something deeply weird in that reference "As this newspaper's Paul Kelly points out" ...

Few in New York would understand that reference to "this newspaper" or to "Ned" Kelly ... yet it brings home how deeply entwined the reptiles and the onion muncher are in their shared delusions. What a rump of right wing coyote looney tunes they make ...

And as for the result being easier to accept, what an epic horse laugh. The fanatics will never accept the result, and will yearn for the onion muncher and the fanatical coyotes will encourage them in their delusion ...

And speaking of which, here's a couple of readings for some light comedy relief.

The first came in the New York Times, in full here ...

The counternarrative was particularly pronounced in the outlets controlled by Mr. Murdoch — who has close ties to the president’s family — and his news and entertainment companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp. 
On Saturday, the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro called for the jailing of Mrs. Clinton, saying, “It’s time to shut it down, turn the tables and lock her up.” 
She alleged that “the Obamas and the Clintons” had “built the Trump-Russia connection,” pointing to a report in The Washington Post that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee had helped finance research by Fusion GPS, which produced a dossier describing ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. She did not mention a report in The New York Times that a conservative media organization, The Free Beacon, hired Fusion GPS to research Mr. Trump and other Republicans. 
The most salacious findings in the dossier, based on information collected from sources inside and outside the Kremlin by a Fusion GPS contractor, the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, remain uncorroborated. 
Also on Saturday, The New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin called for Mr. Mueller’s resignation, citing Fusion GPS as well as Mr. Mueller’s previous job as an F.B.I. director under President Barack Obama, given that, in Mr. Goodwin’s view, so much of the investigative focus must now fall on Mr. Obama’s administration. 
Foreshadowing Mr. Goodwin’s dubious argument was an editorial in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which declared that Mr. Mueller “lacks the critical distance” to look into the allegation that “Democrats paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a U.S. presidential candidate.” The editorial also questioned whether the dossier had triggered the F.B.I. inquiry into Mr. Trump’s campaign. 
But the investigation began in July last year, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time, told Congress in March, not long after Fusion GPS’s financing passed from Republican to Democratic sources. 
And while skepticism is a virtue in all journalistic endeavors, there is no evidence to support the assertion that the Democrats hired Fusion GPS with the purpose of getting Russians to spread “wild allegations” about Mr. Trump. 
As John Sipher, a former Central Intelligence Agency chief of station, pointed out, intelligence tends to come from sources within foreign governments. 
“Reaching out to Russians and Americans to try to collect information on what might have happened and then pass that information to sources in good faith, that’s different from trying to conspire with Russia to get stolen emails from the United States,” Mr. Sipher told me. The collective coverage from The Journal editorial page, The New York Post and Fox News — not including the straight-ahead coverage by the likes of Shepard Smith and Bret Baier — was testament to the Murdoch empire’s ability to make its own journalistic weather. 
Between the promotion of alternative narratives and the way the social media platforms have been so slow in describing their inadvertent hosting of the Russian effort, there’s a striking lack of national unity over what appears to have been a foreign incursion in an American election. So you have to wonder how the country will ever come together to do something about it.

The ability to make its own journalistic weather ...

Put it another way, the coyote and his ACME products can be found everywhere in the Murdochian empire ... and with the delusions generating the same capacity for harm ...

Fortunately, there came an epic smackdown in The New Yorker, in full here, conducted by Troy Patterson in a warm welcome to Laura Ingraham as part of the Fox pantheon ... ...

Her prologue—a soliloquy parallel to the Talking Points Memo of “The O’Reilly Factor” or the Wørd of “The Colbert Report”—was called the Angle, and it was obtuse. The inaugural theme of the Angle was “What is America?” Ingraham connected this query with a Frank Sinatra lyric. She botched the title of the Sinatra song that the lyric comes from, though—it’s not called “What Is America to Me?” Nonetheless, the screen lit up with a handful of photographs of Ol’ Blue Eyes taken in the slow-dancing-with-Nancy Reagan phase of his career. For the record, Ingraham was quoting a song called “The House I Live In,” which Sinatra performed in a 1945 short film that was created to shame anti-Semitism. One enjoys breaking it to her that the lyricist, who also wrote Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” happened to have adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, after they were executed as Soviet spies. “We hope that ‘The House I Live In’ will serve to remind all Americans that patriotism is not limited to the right wing,” the boys once wrote… 

And there was also this ...

Lost in the fog of the Civil War is the fact that Ingraham posed Kelly quite a number of stupid questions. When she wondered, “What do you pray for?,” he began, like a pageant contestant, “World peace.” When she asked what his ideal Halloween costume would be, he told her that he’d like to dress up as a Marine Corps sergeant—an answer with a special flavor of condescension when coming from a retired Marine Corps general. At one point, right after the Robert E. Lee bit, she laughingly wondered who might rise up to serve as the self-loathing élite’s choice of an acceptable figure worthy of public statuary. Kelly said, “We can find some cult hero. . . . Andy Warhol or something like that,” and I suppose that this was one of his better answers in the interview. Any number of the artist’s statements speak eloquently toward the civic life of the Republic. Not quite at random, I opened “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” to page 26: “When I got my first TV set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people.”

Hey, Troy, can the pond borrow your razor some time? 

The pond only ran those gobbets so it could feel better about the onion-muncher worshipping lizards of Oz ...

And so to a Pope cartoon, with more papish pleasures here ...