In which the pond gets distracted from pie in the sky and dinkum Oz coal by Tamworth's heartbreak kid ...

The reptiles were at it again today ...

Uh huh, please, some more of that pie in the sky on the bye and bye ... as noted by one panel in a Wilcox cartoon dedicated to reasonable people wanting to get out of there (here until it moves off the magic faraway tree).

The slow trickle of warm urine down the pond's leg is always a most peculiar pleasure ...

Well there's more of that at billy's blog here ... but the pond must move on, because there's other Trumpian news afoot in reptile land this day ...

Won't someone think of the coal?

Climate change? What's that?

But what's that below the cavernous clean coal Canavan?

Is Barners' love nest getting in the way of a dinkum discussion of dinkum Oz coal, oi, oi, oi ...

Sadly the reptiles were full of it ...

And the Terrorists were still at it too ... with a break out box on the tree killer edition front page, and little Timmie Bleagh wringing his hands, and the Bolter so dismayed he abandoned Barners altogether to do a bit of climate science ...

 

Throw in the savvy Savva pronouncing Barners a dead goose in the medium term on Sunday's Insiders and the Tingle proclaiming him a shell ...

...Perhaps the really grating thing about how Barnaby Joyce has dealt with this whole matter is that he has never seemed prepared to just own it, and too prepared to complain of how he has been treated. 

That has left not just him, but the people who work close to him, and in the government more broadly, under the burden of a plethora of questions about how his private life has affected broader decisions of the government – like last year's reshuffle. These are questions that are never likely to be satisfactorily answered, and therefore compromise and damage not just Joyce but his colleagues. This leaves him a diminished shell of a party leader and more likely to end his political career in the way noted by George Brandis than on a high.  (might be best found through a link here).

Naturally the pond turned to the bouffant one for a final, firm opinion ...

Ah, a history lesson ...

Uh huh ...

... and more Pat here ...

Indeed, indeed.

Hand-wringing little Timmie's old rag - the one that launched him on the world - showed that, even in death, nothing would escape the vigilant dinkum Aussie press ...

... which is why no one was eventually going to ignore the elephant in the room ...

... at least once the by-election was out of the way ...

Jim Cairns showed the dangers of hubris and sheer outright lying, to dismal effect on reputation ...

...the focus on the affair is justified for two reasons: Cairns agrees with several of his former colleagues that the affair "quite distracted him". With the oil price shocks and the end of the postwar capitalist boom around the world, it was not a good time for the Treasurer to be distracted. He was sacked from the Treasury for misleading the House of Representatives over loans negotiations, one of several crises that led to the fall of the Whitlam Government in 1975. On the day of Labor's campaign launch, Cairns was helping launch Morosi's book, Sex, Prejudice and Politics. 

The admission also raises the question of evidence given by Cairns and Morosi in defamation cases brought against media organisations, in which they denied having had a sexual relationship. Journalists might have been reluctant to put the hard word on Cairns and Morosi but Cairns was asked in the NSW Supreme Court in 1982 whether he had ever had an adulterous relationship. He answered: "No, never." 

The jury found that the article contained an imputation that Cairns was "improperly involved with his assistant, Junie Morosi, in a romantic or sexual association . . ." but that it was not defamatory. Cairns and Morosi went to the Court of Appeal, where they lost 2-1. 

However, Morosi won $17,000 in 1977 for defamation claims from The Mirror and $10,000 in 1978 from radio 2GB. (Fairfax back in 2002)

What a forlorn figure he cut trying to sell his books promising a new world outside the Prahran market. The pond used to shuffle by, as many did ...it's one thing to have an affair, it's another to try to shake down the media with a lie ...

And so the final gobbet by the bouffant one, though it seems to the pond that Shanners misses a basic point.

When you shamelessly exploit your traditional family values, and flaunt them righteously in the face of others, the chance of being taken down increases inversely and exponentially according to the amount of irritation you've engendered with your righteousness and hypocrisy ...

There are ways to do it in style, and then there's the Barners' way ...

The pond isn't quite sure of that "publish and be dammed."

In the pond's day, it was publish and be damned, and was frequently accompanied by mention of Harriette Wilson and her generous offer not to mention the Duke of Wellington in her memoirs, if he should happen to be generous with her ... and so the Duke came to be known as having no small talk and looking like a rat-catcher ...

History, Barners, history!

And so to a Rowe for the day, fitting right into traditional ways, with more Rowe here ...