In which the pond offers Polonius's latest prattle for those with specialist tastes ...

The pond had to hold back reluctantly on Polonius this day. Let's face it, the old stager, the old trouper, isn't the star he once was ...

The reptiles give him a little spot in the tree killer edition, but keep him tucked away in the digital edition, waiting patiently on the reserve bench for a chance to take the field.

Even for an angry elderly white male demographic, Polonius's prattles are a rarefied and arcane taste, for those with a specialist interest.

The reptiles much prefer when Polonius does his Jekyll and Hyde routine and goes feral on a Friday, and then they put him near the top of the page ...

They love it when he gets angry and rages and rails at the ABC, though anyone standing outside the tent might wonder why the man is so obsessed with the broadcaster.

He must watch and listen to so much, it's clearly bad for his mental health, and he toddles around like a man unbalanced and of unsound mind ...

It gets all the more tricky when Polonius rages at fact checking, and then on his senile Saturday outings runs  columns which are frequently riddled with errors or dubious opinions.

This is good news for the likes of Gadfly who can poke a lazy stick at the ancient father and always get a bite, as here ...

Sure that's a musty anecdote, wreathed with age and moss, but that's the way it is with Polonius.

He's the original antiquarian. He yearns for the good old days of Ming the Merciless and picket fences, the times when molestation could proceed apace and it could be thought of as a kind of Spartan introduction to the world of Catholicism ... oh brave and splendid Camelot of the 1950s, worthy of a reptile quoting Tennyson ...

So it was hardly surprising that Ming the Merciless would bob up again in yet another history lesson, as Polonius valiantly battled that fiendish leftist, the French clock man ...

Well yes, Lyons and Menzies were appeasers. No one particularly wanted another world war, and many adopted the Chamberlain delusion. Ming paid a visit to Germany and came back making soothing noises, as in this excerpt from the SMH on 15th November 1938:

That's not a bad dog whistle ...

As for Ming's war service, the pond isn't one for waving the white feather, though some might wish he'd got this sort of post-ironic letter ...

But he did dodge the military, as many in politics did, and his record of appeasing words is much more extensive than Curtin, who had his own difficulties on the left once Stalin did his deal with Hitler ...

There's no need even to go the pig iron Bob routine to see many of Ming's words as craven and short-sighted, if all too human ...

But this clearly gnaws at Polonius's innards and he wants to establish both Chamberlain and Ming as valiant warriors ... as if they had much a choice in the matter, as circumstances swept them down river like corks in the Peel river ...

And there's a classic example of Polonius dissembling and misrepresenting, as if a single document helps get Ming out of jail.

Australia's preparations for war were woeful. It's understandable - nobody wanted or expected another great war, the great depression had made staying alive more important than munitions, and optimists thought peace could be made by concessions.

And there were other reasons, as noted here:

...With a federal bureaucracy already established in Melbourne, the Australian Naval Board and Department of Defence remained there. During the Depression, and as the Second World War began the federal government in Canberra was dominated by the conservative United Australia Party (UAP) usually in coalition with the Country Party. Frustrated from taking government themselves, the ALP remained in the political wilderness in the role of Opposition since the conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917. In 1935 John Curtin was elected leader of the ALP, his leadership uniting the ALP into an effective Opposition that would endure into the early years of the war. 
This arrangement had implications for the Second World War, as the members of the UAP usually trusted in the policy of imperial defence, spending on local defence was seen as a horrible waste in a time of economic hardship, so spending fluctuated throughout the period: in 1927-28 defence spending was 1.04% of the gross expenditure of the national budget, in 1932-33 it was 0.61%, and by 1937-38 it had increased to 1.09%. Defence spending had increased as events revealed war on the horizon, but spending was less than other dominions of the British Commonwealth not in the perilous position Australia was in. Being so far from the mother country, so close to the front line of a Pacific war, and so vast in size meant that already low Australian spending was far from adequate. The war broke this cycle of apathy in spending for defence, the percentage in 1939-40 was 4.9%, by 1942-43 that figure will have attained the dizzying height of 36.8%.

The notion that Curtin inherited much of anything, apart from pig iron being sent to Japan?

In these forlorn circumstances, the pond always likes to recall the singular feat of Pilot Officer J. S. Archer, who managed, in his Wirraway to shoot down a Mitsubishi Zero ... which is a bit like the pond taking out a formula 1 race with its Mazda ...

As for the nonsense about sending troops to the middle east, and kowtowing to the British, the fall of Singapore put the end to all of that, and that's why Curtin ended up running the war effort, and turning to the United States, and bringing the troops back home for the more immediate battles to the north, Brisbane Line and all ...

Talk of decent planning for war is about as laughable as talking about the way people on the ground responded to the bombing of Darwin ...

The entire strategy had been to rely on Singapore, with Britain expected to provide forces to deter Japanese aggression, and the standing army at the start of war was woefully under-equipped, and understaffed, while the air force had ... Wirraways ... and the RAN relied on the RN, and served under it, while because of the cost of ships, scoring most of the pre-war funding ...

All this is clear enough in the historical records, though nobody much likes to talk about it and nobody much likes to contemplate how they might have done it differently, because the charge of war-mongering was possibly even more potent then, thanks to the afterglow of the war to end all wars ...

As a result of the refusal to plan adequately, conscription had to be introduced (compare that to the first world war) and a total war economy devised and put into effect, while chocolate soldiers rushed up to do battle in New Guinea, and luckily didn't melt in the heat ...

Why bother to offer such a series of egregiously misleading historical interpretations, way worse than anything that might be heard on the ABC?

Well it seems that Polonius's hatred for Keating's hatred for Menzies has him scrabbling about desperately trying to mount counter-arguments that only result in historical folly ...

Well no, Ming the Merciless wasn't a good leader at the start of the war, and that's why he got bounced by Billy Hughes and Curtin, and Curtin won in 1943, and Curtin was clearly the better choice, better able to handle the unions, and the troops came back home, and a lucky thing too, and the Yanks turned up, to the consternation of some, and it all worked out so that eventually Ming could inherit a country still in one piece, and these days the pond can drive a Mazda without elderly relatives getting agitated and throwing around charges of treason ...

And so to a little light relief, thanks to Rowe,  showing the Donald doing to truth what Polonius routinely does to history, with more Rowe here ...

And once the pond gets a taste of the Donald, one cartoon is never enough ...