In which Dame Slap forgets her MAGA cap and the dog botherer witters but fails to tweet ...

Weird or what?

That one at the top of the reptile page this day kept the pond rolling jaffas down the aisle for half an hour or more.

The pond firmly believes in the feminist cause of reclaiming the word "slut", but sometimes when sluts behave in a sluttish way, you just have to call them sluts. Especially when they take advertising money for something that cuts across their core belief system. What of dear sweet true blue dinkum coal? Take the money and run ...

And what was BP thinking? That somehow advertising about 'advancing a low carbon future' in climate denialist central would be a keen selling point?

Never mind, luckily the pond has other fish to fry, naturally using clean dinkum pure true blue Oz coal gas, and this day it's day old Dame Slap - though if you notice a certain dullness and glazed aspect to the fish eye, you should be seeking fresher food …

Hang on, hang on, that's as weird as BP advertising  in climate denialist central.

The MAGA cap-donning, 'climate science is a conspiracy to establish world government', weird as all get out Dame Slap is having a go at Hanson?

When really she should should have written a confessional,  something like "Maybe the problem is me and all the other ratbags paid to shout at the moon by News Corp" … but okay, do go on …

Hang on, hang on, Hanson was originally selected as a Liberal, and when she was disavowed, that didn't stop little Johnny from getting on the bandwagon.

Remember Tampa and all that and all that followed, remember the Hansonite "we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come"?

Why it's just like all those hardcore fundamentalists recently dragooned into the Victorian Liberal party, and now producing high comedy on a daily basis, the fellow travelling and the forelock tugging to far right loonery … what a nice couple they make ...

 

Mmm, best to keep yes closed when fellow travelling, but do go on …

Hang on, hang on, there's a clear and urgent need for fresh thinking on the centre-right?

And a MAGA cap wearer is the one to lecture us about it, when all the reptiles are terrified that certain dinosaurs are about to fall? It took considerable courage on the part of the pond to dig this one up, and then to run it in close up, so the full horror could be appreciated …

 

Oh dear, but do go on …

Mistakes? Surely some mistakes must be forgivable, seeing as how the reptiles still love their onion muncher?

  

Yes, best look at the ceiling when caught in a compromising situation, but do go ahead and do a BP.

By this time the pond was feeling decidedly weird and hadn't been helped by reading a story in the Graudian 'Quite frightening': the far-right fringe of the election campaign is mobilising …

The evidence included this …

On Easter Saturday, in a small room at the Club Burwood RSL, the Liberal Democrats’ NSW branch held a members’ “meet and greet”. The guest speaker was Dia Beltran, a YouTuber who regularly offers a platform to far-right figures Blair Cottrell, Neil Erikson and Anning.
Beltran was introduced as a “moderate conservative” but her speech to the Liberal Democratic party faithful veered into the conspiracy of “cultural Marxism”, a supposed coordinated plot to undermine traditional western values, but which cloaks oppressive ideology as a defence of freedom.
Beltran, who finished by urging the crowd of classical liberals to “stand up and fight for your culture”, was received with warm applause.

That's the frightening far right fringe?

Hang on, hang on, there wouldn't be a day go by that somewhere in the lizard Oz someone isn't carrying on about "cultural Marxism" and Gramsci's long march through the institutions and "classical liberals" and all the rest of the rabid paranoid hysteria that makes up the far right … and suddenly Dame Slap has discovered a Hanson lurking under her bed?

How rich it is, to see all this in a reptile rag that has been at the heart of all sorts of "it's OK to be white", cherish the Ramsay centre, we must save Western Civilisation, the Islamic hordes are coming, is it time for another assault on Waleed Aly or Yassmin Abdel-Magie nonsense that's littered the rag over the years, not to mention being climate denialist central, and the home of much anti-SSM sentiment, and MAGA-cap donning bizarreness and the ruination of the NBN and …

Well to be fair, there are other loons who've gone the same path …

 

Peas in a pod really …

And speaking of a pea in a pod, is there a better example that the body snatchers at some point lurked in the cellar of the dog botherer and achieved a remarkable transformation than what turned up yesterday?

 

Yet here we are, and the reptiles gave the piece a couple of brandings, but by far the best was that one about confounding the "so-called elites".

If ever anyone was in search of an example of the mindlessly moronic way the reptiles have with words, "so-called elites" is top-notch. Are they remotely aware that one of the dictionary definitions is "used to express one's view that such a name or term is inappropriate", as in "she could trust him more than any of her so-called friends", or "she could find more sense in a gnat than in a so-called dog botherer" …

Oh well maybe that logic's fuzzy, but is it as fuzzy as the dog botherer in premature triumphalist mood … when all the pond could think of all the way through was that this must be some sort of sketch for a sequel to the Python's Black Knight skit ...

 

Now there's something wondrous about counting chickens before they hatch … the pond always remembers the odd dud egg that didn't make it back in Tamworth days …

Who knows how the result will play out? A commentator with half an ounce of sense would perhaps be a little cautious, but the pond has always thought of the dog botherer as the dullest reptile knife in the drawer, always a sheep short in the back paddock …

Sometimes it seems that he scribbles this sort of stuff as a form of trolling, so in turn he might be trolled by reptile readers…who apparently pay for the pleasure of being able to troll ...

Yes, the dog botherer imagines that his kind would fly amongst the so-called elites, suggesting that when it comes to dumb reptiles, the dog botherer is dumber than your average bunny …

Actually that reference to "affirmation in the green-Left echo chamber of Twitter" is the real reason that the pond set out on this journey through the low road of dog botherer triumphalism … with the news coming in the form of another reader comment …

Oh it's true, it's true …

And yet in his glory days, the dog botherer was all over the Twitterati, like a plague of mossies, at the top of the google algorithm, ma …

But fear not … because nothing goes away on the full to overflowing intertubes and the dog botherer has been saved for posterity … or at least as long as the Wayback Machine lasts …

What a tragedy it would be if someone attempted to remove it from the Wayback Machine and yet somehow it still survived in some weird form, say here … though why anyone would bother to revisit a tweeting loon temporarily escapes the pond.

You see, the dog botherer is a deeply weird one … and deeply delusional to boot ...

There's no point in arguing with this sort of rampant delusion, when a cartoonist can do the job …

No, it's not to do with who might win, it's to do with the alleged visibility of the right wing mob in the Liberal party, when SloMo has desperately been trying to seem like he's somewhere in the middle, and might even have a connection to the mainstream ...

Yes, they've been kept out of view, but every so often they hoppity-hop hoppy toad into view …

Hmm, why not dip into that Junkee report here (where the hot links live):

...This was a revealing exercise. The first thing it revealed was the breadth and depth of Tony Abbott’s stupidity, which is too often treated as a known quantity these days. Over time, Abbott has become reduced to a figure standing for a set of right-wing values that, depending on your political perspective, makes him either an absolute hero, or a villain to be reviled.

The Warringah debate revealed him to be something else entirely: a guy so focused on winning a specific argument that he’s lost sight of the set of values he’s supposedly championing. He was so set on opposing Steggall that he was willing to oppose common sense, or his own past policies, simply to “win”.

It goes without saying that Abbott said a lot of stupid shit during this debate. He opened by declaring himself the “champion” of the Northern Beaches tunnel, only to falter when Steggall said she supported it too. When Steggall advocated listening to the experts on climate change, Abbott’s response was to say “I think, frankly, that we subcontract out to experts too much already”. While discussing the costs of acting on climate change, he tried to argue that “we can’t save the planet at the expense of our neighbour”, as if working class Australians do not also live on the same planet.

Abbott’s most ridiculous comment, however, was his suggestion that we re-start the Australian car manufacturing industry instead of embracing electric cars. After Steggall expressed her support for electric vehicles, Abbott fell back on a few common responses, arguing that electric vehicles are too expensive for the average Australian, or that they aren’t suitable for Australians who need utes, vans or big cars.

Steggall then asked him what will happen in a few years’ time, when electric cars are cheaper and more available, but Australia doesn’t have the charging networks to support them. Abbott suggested that rather than adapt to the rise of electric cars, Australia could simply start making its own cars again.

This was a ridiculous comment for a few reasons. For one, it was pretty fucking rich coming from the guy who helped kill the Australian car manufacturing industry back when he was Prime Minister, refusing to offer subsidies to save manufacturing jobs. For another, it wasn’t a serious suggestion: Abbott, backed into a corner by Steggall’s suggestion that electric cars might soon become an affordable, widespread and reasonable choice, preferred to suggest a fantasy than acknowledge that maybe, under those conditions, electric cars might be worth supporting.

In short, he proved himself so fixated on beating Steggall that he was willing to throw almost anything under the bus — his values, his former policies, the constituents he claims to represent — to avoid being seen to agree with her...

Phew,  the pond is almost sorry it asked …

Well it's been fun, but it's always better when the last delusional gobbet hovers into view …

Indeed, indeed, and the onion muncher might yet lead the Liberals again, or the mutton Dutton might take his place, and what a glorious thousand year reich will result … with the dog botherer no doubt the new Polonius prowling the corridors and prattling advice to the regime …

And if you believe that, why not tweet your solidarity to the dog botherer?

We keed, we keed,  (no, not "we need, we need" stupid fucking auto-correct, how many errors do you produce on the pond pages?), he will be missed, though it's easy enough from all this to see why the dog botherer left Twitter. With these many sausages missing from the barbie, how easy it would be to troll a chump who carries on like a pork chop …

And so to a Rowe for the day, with a reminder that there's more Rowe here. 

Luckily it has nothing to do with any of the above, except to remind us that things could be worse if the Murdochians had their way, in the way that the Dame Slap MAGA cap wearers have had their way in the USA, and in their Hansonite way, would be happy to see happen here …

And now the pond realises that Bill Maher is not everyone's cup of tea, and Moby is a little long in the tooth, but this one brings together certain cultural tendencies in a giant stew …