In which the pond makes a post-truth visit to DD, and no, it isn't David Dennison ...

The reptiles have been wildly excited about google dropping a few crumbs from the table, and yet the pond found it hard to share the excitement.

It's not necessary to be a post-modern, post-ironic, post-relativist seeker of comedy to understand that "truth" in a headline can be a peculiar thing.

After all, the Murdochians played a key role in helping elect a congenital liar to the US Presidency, for whom truth is singularly unknowable and remarkably irrelevant.

Politifact has assembled nine pages of lies, but truth to tell, where would comedians be without a chance to make jokes about the Japanese dropping bowling balls on bonnets (you can keep your hoods in the hood, cuz). And there are dozens of other sites and articles dedicated to the same pursuit.

At one point American reptiles were a tad genteel and sensitive about calling the liar a congenital liar, but we're long past that, and anyway it doesn't make any difference.

The same remarkable capacity to play catch with the truth can be found in Fox News, and sadly, it has to be said, amongst the reptiles in the herpetarium known as the lizard of Oz.

So the pond flinches when it comes across this sort this sort of headline, which in its own philosophical way, is a brazen lie.

Truth to triumph?

Now there's a lie.

Don't get the pond started on what "truth" means … we could have committees discussing the shape of camels for years to come … or the pond might start wondering if DD is referring to Darren Davidson or David Dennison ...

Don't get the pond wrong. As a site that recycles reptile opinion and news, the pond is a haven for lies, distortions, untruths, misrepresentations, phoniness and fake news.

The pond is as guilty as hell. What we have here is a mud-stained dress-wearer commenting on other mud-stained dress wearers and noting how needy they sound. US$300 million? Remind the pond of google's profit in the current financial year? US$65 billion?

By golly, talk about crumbs from the table. And how peculiar that the initiative is with the Fairfaxians and others, home, the reptiles regularly assure the pond, of all the fake news to be found down under, with a vile, lefty, greenie, cardigan wearing sort of ABC tinge.

But what's this?

A longtime Fox News commentator on Tuesday let the network have it in a scathing letter to colleagues announcing his departure. In an email to Fox News staff, first obtained by BuzzFeed News, strategic analyst Ret. Lt. Col. Ralph Peters claimed he decided not to renew his contract earlier this month because of how “ashamed” he is of Fox. Peters attributed his decision to Fox’s defense of President Trump amid alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 presidential election, declaring that the network was increasingly “wittingly harming our system of government for profit.” “Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers,” he wrote in the email. “Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.” He continued: “Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”

Not that the pond has much sympathy for Ralph ...

“When prime-time hosts—who have never served our country in any capacity—dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller—all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of ‘deep-state’ machinations—I cannot be part of the same organization, even at a remove,” Peters wrote. Perhaps ironically, Peters has never been known as one of the network’s moderate or even left-leaning contributors. In the past, Peters has used his Fox News airtime to bash Muslims and advance extremely hawkish national-security policies. He was infamously suspended by Fox News for two weeks in late 2015 after he described President Obama as “a total pussy” on-air. And yet he had become increasingly critical of Fox News and the network’s viewers under the Trump administration. 

… even when he's adopting the pond's favourite strategy and dropped a few coins in the swear jar …

During an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson last year, Peters compared the primetime anchor to a Nazi apologist for defending Putin’s actions in Syria. “You sound like Charles Lindbergh in 1938, saying, ‘Hitler hasn’t attacked us,’” Peters said. (here)

And there you have it in one. The truth genie got out of the bottle long ago, and blather about publishers funding quality journalism gets the pond as close to a Gulley Jimson's horse's mouth doing a horse laugh as it needs ...

Start paying for Fox News? Home of the reptiles who helped give the world a congenital liar in the presidency?

Well the pond is no friend of Facebook, and uses blogger because it's free, but damned if it can see why Tucker Carlson needs a funding boost. Can't he afford a tiki torch on his own dime?

Don't get the pond started on the truth. The notion that Fox News and the Murdochians have any connection with it is only good for another round of jokes on late-ight American television ...

Never mind, let's keep the jokes and the death penalties flowing ...

Now if only that one was true …