In which the bromancer does a Biggles with the Donald, and the savvy Savva takes a tram ride with Gladys ...

And so it begins … the none too subtle undermining of Joe - as if Joe himself wasn't an expert in the art - by the chairman's minions, though why they should want to replicate Fox News down under is a deep mystery that only the bromancer himself might be able to explain.

Usually the pond would begin its Thursday with a dose of undiluted 'Scotty from marketing' hate from the savvy Savva, but as always, like the Donald himself, the bromancer must have the first word … even if the headline is a nonsense, since the Donald has been attempting to strafe, bomb and blitzkrieg Joe and his son in assorted Ukraine ways for years, even unto the point of getting himself impeached for his efforts … but do go on ...

See how the bromancer cunningly slips in the hope. With a quick "if", then it's even more quickly on to "he is all but unbeatable." It's a cunning ploy. Amidst assorted attempts at a kind of pretend rationality, the core message "he is all but unbeatable" lodges in the brain like a reality sanitizer ...

Okay, okay, of course the pond only went with the bromancer because of the chance of running a few cartoons …

Oh and the chance to address those ABC workers who have been lingering and loitering on this site. 

Please, this is not a leftist site, cardigan wearers, this is a site dedicated to the mighty reptiles. Look on their works, and despair … because now the bromancer will show how to slip in praise while apparently damning the Donald for his very messy ways ...

Did you see it? You have to get past that little note about the "insane hostility to Scott Morrison" and never mind all the bumbling mis-steps that SloMo made over the summer, but eventually you will land on "The economy is Trump's biggest achievement. The economy is real. The Trump jobs boom is real. The rebirth of US manufacturing is real. The recent blue-collar wages boom is real."

The pond has absolutely no idea what a sentence like "The economy is real" actually means. Even Don Watson might find himself stumped trying to explain it, because it's a ripper, a bromancer corker …

The pond realises its failure to understand is entirely its own fault, even though lurking in the pond's brain is the notion that whenever the bromancer talks about reality, it's an alternative one …

And so to a little mini-assault on Joe for his speech patterns, because, you know, the Donald is impeccable in his … and then comes another little bromancer ripper ...

Did you spot it? The humble confession: "Before the last election, I thought Trump personally unfit to be president, but in office he has been overall better than I expected…"  

Which begs the question. What the fuck was he expecting?

Sure, the bromancer tries to soften it by referencing the demented Ronnie Raygun, but can there be any doubt that the bromancer is rooting for the Donald …. after all, he is "very smart."

Why he's a very stable genius, and that's a fact, and he knows everything about everything, he absorbed it all from his uncle, and that's a fact too, and what's happening right at the moment is further proof …

And so to the savvy Savva, though there's such implausibility in her header that the pond had to pause and take a deep breath …

Follow Gladys's lead?

Here the pond must pause for a few anecdotes involving Melburnians. 

Every so often, the pond is in company with a Melburnian who turns up in Sydney, and every time they see Gladys's trams (light rail if you will) they burst into hysterical laughter.

The pond finds this a trifle disconcerting, but then on the way to the airport, or on a drive out Parramatta way, the Melburnian puts on a discombobulated air …

You see, once upon a time, Melburnians thought that their drive to the airport was the only attempt to replicate Los Angeles in Australia. No one else had managed such a bizarre reaction to the failure to provide decent public transport to an airport …

But now on any drive almost anywhere in the inner west, the visitors see strange monolithic, heartbreakingly ugly buildings in the street, or the mountains of the moon, and the cloverleafs, and roads soaring over everything, ready to destroy the inner west, and they realise that Gladys has devised an even greater marvel than anything Jeff Kennett might have imagined in his wildest dreams … and surely Jeff was a very wild dreamer, and getting crazier by the day ...

In due course, it will be the death of King street in Newtown, so it seems that what the savvy Savva is saying is that SloMo should follow Gladys's lead, and do for country what Gladys has done for King and inner west, and the most laughable attempt at over-budget light rail the world has seen ...

Oh please, can we just get to the bit about SloMo being a disaster? We don't need the Gladys build-up as a preamble, let's just get into the usual SloMo bashing … 

Please, whatever you do, don't go into paranoid mode and hold up Gladys as a most excellent politician, put under dire threat by the Sauron-like demonic forces emanating from Canberra ...

Well so much for listening to the pond, but perhaps that line about "Morrison's friends might be few" will at last prompt the savvy Savva to indulge in a little SloMo bashing … the infallible Pope can't be relied upon these days to do it alone, and these days the pond has to dip into the archive for an infallible hit ...

But enough of papal pleasures, because there's still a gobbet of Savva to go… and in it, she offers all kinds of free advice.

Say what? She actually wants SloMo to address the nation, in a kind of FDR or Churchillian way? What, like this?

Never mind, keep calm, SloMo is in charge, but he must listen to the voices emanating from the Sky and lodging in his brain like a Thetan transmission ...

Ten minutes of unfiltered SloMo? Oh, is it possible to imagine a more cunning plot, cleverly devised to make the populace calmly accept that the mi mi mi Corona might be the only sensible solution to hand?

Well as usual the immortal Rowe has the answer to this, with more answers here …

And the pond probably shouldn't have left this Toles to the end, but it does put a capper on the bromancer's wily ways ...