Shewing what kind of Polonial history this is, what it is like, and what it is not like ...

Last night, the pond went out to indulge in a tradition even older than Don's Party. 

Being a non-drinker, the pond is never the life of this sort of get together, but the pond thought it might be able to sup deeply on the tears of the reptiles, or failing that, sip a little water, so that it might have plenty of fluid to shed copious tears for the country and the planet …

So the pond isn't up to speed as to what happened, but innocence is bliss, and when in search of a place holder, there's always good old prattling Polonius.

You see, Polonius was too canny on the Saturday to indulge in second-guessing or predict the result, or nail his colours to the mast, or in any way get down and dirty 

Instead he preferred to indulge in a reliable reptile sport, Muslim-bashing. We've been there many times in many ways before …

But as the reptiles drove Yassmin Abdel-Magied out of the country with a ferocious crusading jihad even a fundamentalist Islamic might admire, there's now only one reliable tall poppy to turn to …

Actually the pond thinks prattling Polonius meant "linking rise of intolerance to Christchurch is a cheap shot", but the pond is always grateful for low reptile comedy …

What's excellent and interesting is the way that our Polonius doubles down on nationalism (hint, if you're white, you can take that as white nationalism) and digs up Waleed Aly to get himself out of indulging in any speculations on the election result.

It was back on 19th March 2019 that Christopher Warren thought that the reptiles had overplayed their hand …

From that moment on Friday when Waleed Aly joined the dots leading from the murders in Christchurch back through white supremacy to business-as-usual Australian political dog-whistling, the outrage machine in media and politics has been scrambling for cover.
Desperate for diversion, leaping from denial to threats and back again, looking for some footing that will somehow lead them back to where they thought the world was a week ago.
No-one has been more wedged than Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Just last week, he was busy looking forward to a greatest hits revival, with a Tampa election redux.
Then, in his blistering statement on Friday night’s episode of The Project, Aly demonstrated the enduring power of white hot anger delivered with ice-cold journalistic steel. His intervention set the parameters of debate for change, and journalists — particularly journalists of colour who are rarely given a voice — are seizing this moment to push reset.
By the weekend, Morrison was denying an eight-year-old SMH story noted by Aly, headed “Morrison sees votes in anti-Muslim strategy.” The PM’s staff were on the phone demanding retractions and threatening defamation. (The story’s author, Lenore Taylor, stands by the story.)
Peter Dutton attempted the standard diversion of  “let’s not politicise tragedy”, with a desperate lunge for moral equivalency between white supremacist Anning and Green senators. It was left to Dutton-voting Matthias Cormann to clean up that particular mess by asserting the unique awfulness of Anning.
News Corp has been no more sure-footed. Just last week, they were all hot and bothered about the great threat to freedom of speech in commercial activist group Sleeping Giants’ targeting of Sky News advertisers. Then, New Matilda re-upped a February report from the One Path Network documenting the repeated anti-Islam stories — many front-paged — in News Corp’s papers. The report broke out close to 3,000 examples over 12 months by masthead, by page and by columnist...
News has blamed social media. But a separate report over the weekend demonstrated how the power of media outrage has been amplified — not diminished — by social media. Social media tracking company News Whip found outrage bastion Fox News is a strong leader in engagement on Facebook, and clear front-runner on pages with the most “angry” reactions from users.
Seven went back to its long-failed strategy of “exposing racism” through an on-air “debate” between Sunrise presenter David Koch and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson. The channel, and Sunrise in particular, have done much to succour One Nation, including through paid appearances by Hanson.
The ABC has picked the weekend’s pivot most successfully — notwithstanding its role over the past year in providing platforms to the white supremacist right with a “what’s wrong with this?” insouciance. Monday night’s episode of The Drum was given over to a panel of Muslim women.
But there’s a long way to go if these baby steps are to be transformed into a new, diverse range of truth-seeking media voices that reflect the sort of tolerant society that everyone has been lauding over the weekend.
The challenge is that there’s money in outrage as a deliberate business model to engage through bias confirmation. But it’s not journalism. It’s a vector for right-wing talking points. It employs a rhetoric that simply uses the semiotics of journalism to create a pretence of truth. Last week Crikey reported on how this works to mainstream climate denialism...

There were a lot of hot links in that piece, but anyone interested will need to see if they can read the original at Crikey here…

Of course Warren was wrong from the get go. Prattling Polonius join a scramble for cover? Hell no, Polonius is of an elephantine nature, and never forgives and never forgets, except when senility hits him for a moment and he gets the odd thing wrong …

And so it was way past time for Waleed Aly to catch another caning. Not, mind you, for The Minefield, done in company with the wretchedly pompous and inflated Scott Stephens, thereby driving any sensible listener away from RN at the speed of light, or even sound waves, but for all the usual thought crimes that irritate nationalists of the old colonial Polonial school …

Note how Polonius quaintly uses the legalism "allegedly" in relation to a massacre conducted by a right-wing Australian extremist in New Zealand, when even blind Freddie knows what happened, and then observe with bizarre fascination how Polonius exudes a wondrous condescension towards Aly and his "brilliant career" … it's almost possible to taste the lemon on the Polonial tongue … 

Uh huh, well of course it's right and proper for Polonius to support Australia maintaining its very own gulag. We might be only a middling power, but how can we claim any status in the world if we don't have a gulag or two?

But the thing that will never cross Polonius's pursed lips is that story … though it's freely available in full here …

That attempt at a dog whistle began to seem a little tattered in time, but Taylor stuck to the story here …

But that's the way it goes with dog whistlers … a couple of steps forward, even if occasionally you have to take a step back, or a step sideways, before returning to the slow advance, and the cultivation of a climate, be it a climate of climate denialism, or a climate of Ramsay Centre crusading for White Anglo-Celtic Western Civilisation, a glory completely beyond the realm of differently coloured folk …

But now it's back to Polonius prattling on the matters of gulags, Islamic terror, and, it has to be said, Waleed Aly's treacherous, traitorous - possibly even unAustralian - willingness to talk on some dreadful TV channel somewhere else - perhaps even foreign - about Australia's dirty laundry export to New Zealand ...

There's nothing more guaranteed to send Polonius into a frothing, foaming frenzy that those wretched New Zealanders - with their hideous abuse of the English language and their blather about fush and chups and their boring the world with Tolkein films - and most especially the bizarre notion that it might actually be a reasonable place to live …

You absolutely won't find Polonius acknowledging that perhaps if Australia's intelligence services monitoring of extreme right-wring groups for decades is so bloody wonderful, how on earth did they allow a prime example roam the world without letting the New Zealanders know that letting him in might prove a little tricky?

Ah. but that's to expect Polonius to be reasonable, and even worse, to be logical, and remember, we're really only trying to avoid talk about the election, and Aly and Kiwis are as handy a distraction as any …

And so to Polonius going up himself and the country, and sweeping from mind history, the White Australia policy, treatment of indigenous people, and assorted other forms of racial tension … the kind the HUN made its recent speciality in its bid to dislodge the Andrews government …

  

And so on and endlessly on … 

And let's not forget the valiant work of little Timmie in Lakemba … and much other crusader work by the Terror ...

Perhaps there might be an excuse. Perhaps Australia might be relatively tolerant, perhaps Pauline Hanson rabbiting on about Asians and Islamics is but a dream, perhaps Clive Palmer cockroaching YouTube with ads full of dire warnings about the Chinese coming south is a passing fad… 

Perhaps all this is nothing, and perhaps the racism, white supremacism, white nationalism, hysterical fear mongering, bigotry and hate are actually mainly to be found in the world of the Murdochians …

Perhaps …

After all, as Crikey noted, the local outrage machine has a fine example in the United States, supporting and celebrating that white nationalist dog whistler in chief, the Donald … 

And as further evidence, Polonius's effort is just one in a long line of News Corp attacks on the alien and the other - even bloody Kiwis - dressed up as a form of condescending tolerance ...

In the end, with that last snipe, what a jealous, doddering old bitch he can be, what an intolerant old humbug, what a hater of the other, and the different, and especially the smarter, and how he resents that when Amanpour goes looking for a comment, she's unlikely to turn to an old fart like Polonius, because that sort of get off my lawn nonsense is a dime a dozen in the United States …

Okay, the distraction is done, and to be fair, whatever Polonius says was unlikely to change the result of yesterday's election …defending Western Civilisation is a much bigger reptile project, and this was but one humble Polonial brick in the wall … who knows, perhaps a war with the Persians might be the next bold and brave step ...

As for the election, the pond will check in to check out the reptile response to that matter in due course … however it went, there will be tears ...

Meanwhile, why not a Wilcox cartoon to finish, with more Wilcox here … one which manages to take in a few more religions than Islam …