In which the pond discovers a high price for abiding with petulant Peta ...

Talk about being dudded, talk about a cheap, click-baiting, trolling way to sell a yarn ...

There was the pond thinking that the yarn might have something to do with Godwin Grech, and so it hunted it out.

Maybe the reptiles had a change of heart, maybe the pond got to it too late, but when the pond did a word search of the whole story, the only mention of GG turned up in the comments section.

It was actually all about the coup, and a much more appropriate heading would have been "A high price to pay for petulant Peta" ...

The yarn is too long for the pond, which can just about cope with the lengthy blather of a nattering "Ned". He emerges as Shakespearian up against Williams' account of the intricacies of Liberals back stabbing and front stabbing and smirking with delight as the blood gushes, Shining style, out of the lifts and all over the floor of parliament house ...

So much hate, so much bile, so many corpses, and so much time brooding over them.

What's interesting is the way that while the yarn purports to be about Malware's coup, there's an unhealthy obsession with Petulant Peta and her onion munching boss ...

If ever anybody wanted to understand why democracy has its flaws, this "analysis" would stand as a perfect example, because it's so clearly obsessed with the one who lost, and shows remarkably little interest in the policy deeds  of the one who won ...

Relax, there will be absolutely no mentions of of Godwin Grech in these gobbets ... instead, here's the first taster as the night of the long knives begin its business ...

What's interesting here? The description of the onion muncher as a man wearing night-vision goggles in daylight ...

The bat-like onion muncher and his petulant Peta return time and again to the yarn, stumbling around like clowns in the dark...

Paranoia, anger, conspiracy, and cake. How could we ever guess? How would we ever suspect, given the way that there's been absolutely no undermining, white anting, sniping or wrecking ever since ...

And along the way there's a copious dumping on the onion muncher and his Tonto ... (no Donald style implications intended or inferred, the reference is meant to conjure up hero and sidekick, because, you know, an ambling cowboy walk requires cultivation) ...

But let's not stop there, with the leaking and the mindless loyalty, let's carry on with the bashing ... too delicious given that the pond only dallied with petulant Peta this very morning ... even if it's just dragging over old coals to see if there's any heat left in them ...

Now let us ignore the way the night vision goggled onion muncher, bat-like in his blindness, and unable to see it coming, was hearing drums and phoning around. Nobody said anything about his sonic bat hearing ... even if the distracted bat was adding to his many disasters, and compounding his knightly follies ...

Locked himself away? Oh some might yearn for Godwin Grech, but a night goggled bat locked in his room scribbling furiously about Santamaria and the Catholic church will do for many. And look, prattling Polonius gets an honourable mention as yet another distraction.

How to maintain the rage?

Oh that's hardly a fair question. Who would go anywhere with Arthur, except to pick up a decent clean unit in his car yard, driven only by a fifty year old maiden to the water board to pick up her weekly cheque? Or was that to church to repent sins? (Cash only mind, or Terry might be forced to have a word).

And so to a more extended gobbet, and once again the onion muncher is revealed to be a clumsy crash-tackling loon of the first water, incapable of the most elementary political manoeuvring. Given his complete ineptitude as a policy-maker, why is the pond surprised?

And so to the conclusion, still onion muncher obsessed, and really here is where the pond must pick a bone ...

Well no, he hasn't gone altogether.

He hangs around, infesting the castle like Hamlet's dad, or getting in the way of the banquet like Banquo's ghost ...

He's been a right royal nuisance of a kind Macbeth knew all about ... and petulant Peta has a platform on Sky and in Murdochian tabloids to carry out his revenge-laden agenda. Oh payback is a pitiless thing ...

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time, 
Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal; 
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd 
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been, 
That, when the brains were out, the man would die, 
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, 
And push us from our stools: this is more strange 
Than such a murder is.
Avaunt! and quit my sight! let the earth hide thee! 
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; 
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes 
Which thou dost glare with! 
What man dare, I dare: 
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,  
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger; 
Take any shape but that of an onion munching fiend, and my firm nerves 
Shall never tremble: or be alive again, 
And dare me to the desert with thy sword; 
If trembling I inhabit then, protest me 
The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow! 
Hence grotesque onion munching spectre
Unreal mockery, hence!

Or some such thing. The pond apologises to Bill for running it altogether, but here's the thing. 

Williams insists that he's gone, and yet within the past month, the reptiles have upped their onion-muncher worship to a new level, and the pond has barely coped with the flood of stories ...

On and on and on and on, with Shanners seeing him as the head of a horde of born-again conservatives ...

And that's before we even mention again petulant Peta railing all the time at Malware and demanding his departure.

And that's why the onion muncher stays defiantly in the pond's banner. He's not gone, he's just flying in a ghostly way using his sonic radar ...

Williams might pronounce him gone, but this ghost refuses to leave the stage and he keeps rattling away, on radio, in print and anywhere else he can find someone silly enough to stop and listen to him. 

Sure he's suffered a temporary eclipse with the SSM farce, and everyone with an ounce of sense regards him as a tedious irrelevant, hopelessly embittered and useless, and possibly an example of former Chairman Rudd cranked up to eleven ... but still he endures.

Cartoonists return to him over and over again, in the way of the returning Rowe, with many more happy Rowe returns here ...

There is only one greater gift to comedians and cartoonists at the moment ... and merry Xmas to his huge band of followers ...