In which the pond does matership and merde, thanks to the Terrorists and a meretricious Marcus ...

The Daily Terror is notorious for its notoriously silly front pages and crusades, but that bit about Bennelong and Phillip as a two mates story in need of a history lesson sent the pond scuttling off to the ADB for its short piece about Bennelong ...

If that's what mateship does for you, then mateship is pretty fucked. 

It seems the first way to gain a mate is to capture and imprison them ... and then watch the miseries flow from that first unhappy coupling ...

Okay, that's enough history, and the words that leap out at the pond are "'much broken his spirit'. He reached Sydney in September, and thereafter references to him are scanty, though it is clear that he could no longer find contentment or full acceptance either among his countrymen or the white men..."

References were scanty? And now suddenly he's on the front page of the Terror as a dinkum mate with Phil , amidst Terrorist talk of the PC brigade?

Is this why reading the Terror produces a desire in the pond to vomit?

The reptiles were in a full-blown frenzy this day. 

It wasn't just the Terrorists, the lizards of Oz were on song too, what with the war on Xmas having been such a bummer last year ...

  

A day that unites Australia: PM? 

That's what he said, according to the lizards of Oz ...

Ah, that great old song come together ... how does it go again?

But don't let an Akker Dakker report get anyone agitated.

According to the Terror, the PM and the arm-breaker are as one ...

How does it feel for Malware to be seen standing in the fortifications alongside the arm-breaker?

Well the pond couldn't go there, and so was forced to do a Marcus ... which is to say spend time with a woman who insists on perpetuating caricatures and stereotypes about blondes ...

And there's the rub, with the usual news arc associated with the Donald. 

First there was the real story, and then came a half non-denial, and then the full-blown lying denials ... which means if you're in the business of saying that the Donald was right, why has everyone now gone to such lying trouble to say that he never said it?

The pond is a little sensitive about this, because back in the day, the pond was shoved in to the Irish Catholic camp, at a time when paddies were deemed the niggers of Europe and the niggers of Australia.

Well not quite, because it was allowed that the Irish were a step above the pesky, difficult blacks and the Chinese and all the rest of the Asians, but still, the pond can remember the talk of how the Irish lay down with blacks, and what a terrible thing it was for the country, and so on and so forth ...

The trouble of course with accusing a country of being a shit-hole is that it isn't subtle diplomacy - the Donald hasn't helped the American cause in Africa against the Chinese - and over a short period of time things might change, and one-time shit-hole countries might have a change of direction and manage remarkable feats.

A kindly correspondent sent in this evocation of the changes between the Beijing rail system in 2003 and what is projected to be its situation in 2021 ...(a click might enlarge them a little) ...

  

Beijing remains a smog-laden town, but your average Sydney dweller might sigh a little, as they contemplate George Street and rush off to catch a fast train to the all-hours airport at Badgery's Creek ... somewhere around 2030 following the purchase of land in the 1980s... 

Whatever turns up, it will be long after the pond has gone to catch a hole in the ground ...

And so with a deep sigh and with much regret and a request for deep pity and sympathy for all, the pond reluctantly does a Marcus ...

First let it be said that the Marcus is a wannabe Devine, and routinely fails the challenge. 

The very notion that "logic" should be used in a Marcus posting is absurd ... especially as the opening gambit is to confuse the gulags devised by Australia and attribute them to the local inhabitants, who simply wanted to take Australian cash ...

She is really a prize doofus, and any time the pond strays into her vicinity, it's reminded why it's a great relief it never has anything to do with Sky News ...

Of all the defences of the Donald, this is about the dumbest the pond has read ...

Pardon her French? What's she got against the French? Can't she just say "merde hole" or "trou de merde"?

Dumbfuck ethnic bigot, as if the French have got anything to do with it ...

And then after all that, comes the excuse the pond learned long ago was no excuse at all.

If the pond turned up home and used salty language and was accused of having a potty mouth, the one excuse that never flew was that the pond was just doing what others had done ... say, when Sally or Jill or Mary or whomever had accused Caroline of being a dumbfuck bitch ...

The reply would come back like clockwork. Just because Caroline is a dumbfuck bitch, and Sally or Jill or Mary said it, there's no need and no excuse for you to say it.

You live in a polite conservative family where politeness is everything. Just because Billy stole from the shop and Jimmy castrated the family cat is no excuse for you to go on a shop-lifting and cat-castrating spree... or spay, as the case may be ...

Just because Malware or former Chairman Rudd or "Infrastructure" Bob used salty language is no excuse for the pond, or the Donald ...

Actually, leaving CAPS aside - a sign that the Donald has infected large swathes of twitter with his CAPPISH ways - the real mystery is why it took 38 minutes to correct the error, and why the US federal government, ostensibly in possession of the facts of the matter, didn't help at all, remembering that if North Korea did decide to have a go, the Donald would have a mere 10 minutes to react.

In short, where was the Donald in all this? Well we all know, it's old news, easily googled ...

He was out on the golf course, MAGA, or Making his game great again ...

The upside? 

Why do silly people like Caroline Marcus try to defend the indefensible? Once upon a time, if anyone talked about other countries (rather than gulags) as shitholes, conservatives would have tut-tutted, and clucked. The lying about him saying it just compounds the crime on several levels - first the crime of lying is added to the obscenity, and second the lying indicates that he was being naughty, provocative and childish in the usual way.

It's even worse when the defence suggests that everyone can be a foul-mouthed bigot, so why not the Donald?

Well two can play that game.

Once again the pond is reminded why it never watches Sky News, and would rather have a root canal than subscribe to Foxtel. There, and in saying that, there was really no need for the pond to add, in foul-mouthed Donald way, that if Caroline Marcus works for Sky News, whatever they're offering must be really a sub-standard, truly fucked pile of merde ...

And so to a few Rowe cartoons, as the lad is back, just in time to save the pond's sanity, and ready to address both the matter of the Donald, and Australia Day, and with more Rowe to be found here ...