In which the reptiles offer loyalty to the Trumpists ...

The pond is human, and all too often it fails, and on some days it lacks the strength to carry on ...

Rowan Dean?

That's a bridge too far for the pond.

It realises Dean is just trying to make a living as the simpering village idiot cavorting for the amusement of fundamentalists, but the pond must draw a line somewhere, and Dean is it.

In much the same way as there's no point in doing anything about little Timmie Bleagh, always willing to mock people with no scientific credentials for making sweeping statements about climate change ... as if he had some better credentials after starting life as a cadet on the Truth ...

Ah good old Truth, long gone, but never forgotten, home of science and scientific reporting ...

And what about that other splash by Chris Smith raising alarums about forgetting Gallipoli?

The ink has barely gone dry on Australia Day mourning, fretting and worrying, and already the reptiles are lathering up about Gallipoli!!?

Fuck the pond dead, but do it gently and with skill, are we going to spend 365 days a year in a fever pitch of white nationalist fervour, in deep angst about Oz day and Gallipoli, as if every day should be spent celebrating the many ways they don't like it up 'em?

And so the pond looked around and discovered the reptiles of Oz had discovered the road to peace in the middle east ...

Uh huh. The pond only went there, because it gave the pond a chance to note the blow-back some fundamentalist Xians of the Pence kind are experiencing in the United States.

Michael Steele, relieved of GOP duties, delivered a fine blast at the talk of mulligans here ...

And over at WaPo, Michael Gerson let loose a fine spray, The Trump evangelicals have lost their gag reflex ...

Gerson can sometimes be spotted pinch hitting for David Brooks on PBS in the Shields and Brooks sessions, and what a relief that is, because the pond has yet to discover a single reason for David Brooks to exist ...

Gerson can be reliably expected to have a go at the evangelicals of the Pence school, but this time he cranked it up to a fine level ...

The level of cynicism here is startling. Some Christian leaders are surrendering the idea that character matters in public life in direct exchange for political benefits to Christians themselves. It is a political maneuver indistinguishable from those performed by business or union lobbyists every day. Only seedier. You scratch my back, I’ll wink at dehumanization and Stormy Daniels. The gag reflex is entirely gone. 
From a purely political perspective, the Trump evangelicals are out of their depth. When presented with the binary choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, I can understand a certain amount of anguish. But that is not a reason to become sycophants, cheerleaders and enablers. Politics sometimes presents difficult choices. But that is no excuse to be the most easily manipulated group in American politics. 
The problem, however, runs deeper. Trump’s court evangelicals have become active participants in the moral deregulation of our political life. Never mind whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is of good repute. Some evangelicals are busy erasing bright lines and destroying moral landmarks. In the process, they are associating evangelicalism with bigotry, selfishness and deception. They are playing a grubby political game for the highest of stakes: the reputation of their faith.

Of course fundamentalist US Christians with the bizarre beliefs about the second coming have deeply skewed US policy in the middle east, but as the reptiles mentioned it, the pond felt it could mention recent reading in the NY Review of Books, including Raja Shehadeh's review of Gary Fields' book, Enclosure, here ...

It's currently outside the paywall, wherein it's possible to read ...

By 1949, a year after the State of Israel was established, only 13.5 percent of its land was under formal Jewish ownership, either by private individuals or by the state.
In the course of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, some 750,000 Palestinians fled the fighting or were forced off their land. In 1950 Israel passed a law designating those lands as “absentee” territory and through a series of other legal measures reserved it for the use of the Jewish Israeli population. But there remained heavy concentrations of land—in the Galilee, the north of Israel, and the Negev in the south—that was still owned by the Palestinians who stayed in Israel and became Israeli citizens. In these areas, Palestinians still far outnumbered Jewish Israelis in 1950. The new state was confronted with two questions: how to “Judaize” those areas, and how to transfer most of the land there to Jewish Israelis.

And so on, until we arrive at the current enclosed gulags ...

Reading Enclosure brings home the tragedy of such immense and irrevocable destruction. The sad truth is that the creation of gated communities and walled states is spreading well beyond the three regions he discusses and is fast becoming the norm in today’s world. A few years ago, while taking a hike close to my home, I encountered a young settler from Dolev who objected to my presence in the hills where I’ve walked for many years. Challenging my right to hike there, he tried to call the army to evict me from the land. As we waited for them to arrive, he claimed with unflinching conviction that it was he, not I, who “really lives here.”

And then there was Sarah Helm's report in the same issue from the gulag, Homeless in Gaza ...


The UN says that Gaza will be uninhabitable by 2020. Sitting on stones by the seafront with Emad, my twenty-five-year-old Palestinian driver, we could see why: raw sewage was pouring out into the water, the electricity cuts having crippled the sewage system. Emad pointed out that the stones we were sitting on carried the names of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. He was sitting on Majdal, where his family came from. He looked up the coast to the swinging cranes of the thriving Israeli port city Ashkelon, built on the spot were Majdal once stood. I was sitting on a stone named Huj, a village just a few miles from Gaza. Many areas and streets in Gaza are named after villages the residents once lived in. A man Emad and I met named Ali Abu Aleish, who lives on Huj Street, produced documents showing that his family owned land that is now part of an estate constructed by Ariel Sharon, the deceased former prime minister of Israel. 
In view of Gazans’ daily struggles, it seems surprising that they have time to think of the past. But it is precisely because of recent wars that memories of 1948 have been strengthened. The bombardment of Gaza in 2014 caused people to feel that a “second Nakba” was occurring. I first heard the phrase soon after that war from an old man named Abu Ibrahim, who was sitting on the pile of rubble that had recently been his home. His family had herded sheep around Beersheba for centuries, and in the war of 1948 they were forced to flee, first living in a tent, then building a house near Gaza’s border, from which they could see their old land. He showed me an urn his mother had carried on her head from Beersheba; the urn had survived the first and second Nakba, he said proudly. 

And so on ... and it was around this time that the pond had perpetrated a classic bait and switch, and peddled a shaggy dog story ...

The pond had ostensibly started off with the lizard Oz and the Trump-Spence plan to introduce peace in the middle east, and a fair and equitable settlement by Xmas, and left out the key ingredient, the rum-sodden raisins and sixpences that make the best Xmas pudding ...

So here it is ... all four pars of fabulous insight ...

Yep, there's the lizard Oz solution. If you're going to be fucked, just lie down and take it, and whatever you do, don't go making outrageous demands, like a supply of KY jelly ...

There was just one comment, and strangely it missed the point entirely ...

There is no peace process John? 

But the lizards had just patiently explained to you how lying down and getting fucked was the best way forward in the current "peace process" ...

Oh yes, Jared Kushner will fix anything ... though it seems as well as getting into bed with Saudi Arabia, stoking the flames in Yemen, and making bogus arms deals, Jared hasn't devoted as much time to the middle east as has been expected, what with all the cuddling up to China noted in The New Yorker here ...

And then there was Nicholas Niarchos' How the U.S. is making the war in Yemen worse, also in The New Yorker, and also for the moment outside the paywall ...

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is also associated with the Saudis. He has flown to the kingdom repeatedly for secret talks. In a relationship fostered by the Emiratis and by the Lebanese-American businessman Thomas Barrack, who is a friend of Trump’s, Kushner has grown close to King Salman’s thirty-two-year-old son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a chief proponent of the war in Yemen. (Gause, the professor at Texas A and M. University, told me, “This is his war, it was his idea, he owns it.”) Kushner negotiated the new arms deal. As initially reported by the Times, he called Marillyn Hewson, the chair of Lockheed Martin, and asked her to lower the price of a radar system. According to a number of current and former government officials and weapons experts, Kushner’s action was irregular. It was also bad dealmaking. “Usually, a U.S. official would be lobbying a foreign government on behalf of U.S. industry, not vice versa,” Andrew Exum told me. “That just struck me as odd.” 

As Riedel and others pointed out, however, the deal isn’t all that it appears to be. Riedel said that the agreement doesn’t actually commit the Saudis to purchasing arms. With falling oil prices, he said, “where is Saudi Arabia going to get a hundred and ten billion dollars these days to buy more weapons?” 

Still, a parsing of Trump’s words is terrifying; when he visited Riyadh, he made no mention of human rights. As the senior State Department official told me, “The Trump Administration has decided to de-link the human-rights dialogue from the security-support dialogue.”

And that's the trouble with shaggy dog stories of the reptile kind, they never end, just as the chances to something other than than reptile nonsense is boundless, and so the pond had better wrap up with another evocative Rowe cartoon, with more evocative Rowe available here ...