In which the pond discovers assorted frogs on a Friday ...

More Rowe here, but even weirder Donald news here, behind the WSJ paywall. maybe or maybe not…

Donald Trump sometimes traffics in conspiracy theories—recall his innuendo in 2016 about Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination—but his latest accusation against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is ugly even for him. Mr. Trump has been tweeting the suggestion that Mr. Scarborough might have had something to do with the death in 2001 of a young woman who worked in his Florida office when Mr. Scarborough was a GOP Congressman.
“A lot of interest in this story about Psycho Joe Scarborough. So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the so-called investigator? Read story!” Mr. Trump tweeted Saturday while retweeting a dubious account of the case.
He kept it going Tuesday with new tweets: “The opening of a Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough was not a Donald Trump original thought, this has been going on for years, long before I joined the chorus. . . . So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I won’t bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?” Nasty stuff, and from the Oval Office to more than 80 million Twitter followers.
There’s no evidence of foul play, or an affair with the woman, and the local coroner ruled that the woman fainted from an undiagnosed heart condition and died of head trauma. Some on the web are positing a conspiracy because the coroner had left a previous job under a cloud, but the parents and husband of the young woman accepted the coroner’s findings and want the case to stay closed.
Mr. Trump always hits back at critics, and Mr. Scarborough has called the President mentally ill, among other things. But suggesting that the talk-show host is implicated in the woman’s death isn’t political hardball. It’s a smear. Mr. Trump rightly denounces the lies spread about him in the Steele dossier, yet here he is trafficking in the same sort of trash.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, had it right when he tweeted on the weekend: “Completely unfounded conspiracy. Just stop. Stop spreading it, stop creating paranoia. It will destroy us.”
We don’t write this with any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop. Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.

Why now? Why for Morning Joe? Why even bother to begin? Why not have started when the pussy grabbing began? 

So many lies, so much sociopathic lunacy, and now the WSJ has a mild regret, and Hannity begs people to wear masks as the Donald mocks reporters who do?

Weird times, and the pond felt the urgent need to get back to normalcy, and a dose of the local reptiles, only to find the cult master wasted on trivia …

Another BAPH state blatherer, carrying on about tourists? Not a word of it, remember the reptile line about those wicked folk in Queensland and WA.

For this they assign the cult master? Enough already … come on down Henry, let's get real and litty …

50 years? Joh? By golly there might even be a chance to re-fight the Vietnam war …

Now from the get go, the pond should admit it really has no interest in the matter, and doesn't give much of a toss, and way back when, always disliked student activists, political or religious, of whatever stripe, whenever they harassed the pond at uni. 

But once our hole in the bucket man takes an interest in a case, the pond is always in …because he's certain to wander off on some moor, and therein the pond and Holmes will find some boggy interest ...

Yes, yes, all that, the pond embraces Charlie and whimsical eccentricity and all that, but what about 'Nam? We started with student protests, surely we must point out that these students were wrong, and 'Nam was lost by the deep state?

Say what? It wasn't the deep state, it was the bloody tykes and other Xians that ruined the war effort? The pond almost fainted. Where was the cult master, why was he off on duty in Tasmania, when he could have been portraying fiendish activist tykes stabbing a dagger into the heart of the wear effort ...

Speaking of barbarians, and blatantly ignoring the horrors of what the United States did to Vietnam and ordinary civilians, perhaps the pond might call on the infallible Pope for help?

And what news from another front?

Sorry, there's freedom to speak, and then there's the freedom to ignore the bushfire Royal Commission, and so on and on blathers good old Henry ...

Good old Henry does realise that he's a minion working for the Chairman who helped give the world the Donald, doesn't he? It seems odd to be trotting out Mill and Goethe, given where the pond started this day with the WSJ, but that's our Henry … assiduously helping out, and aiding the Murdochians, and in his own way helping them achieve what Joh also achieved, which was to appoint a rogue senator, destroy his enemies, be routinely, profoundly corrupt, and escape prosecution by dodgy means, and be celebrated by certain sections of the media for his dirty deeds …

It's a funny sort of day, no doubt about it, because for filler, the pond must now turn to a man for whom the pond has genuine contempt, perhaps with a dose of fear and loathing as well …

Oh fiddle de dee, the pond saw today's bellicose Trump coming, so your point is? You intellectual gnat, you tick on the side of the bovine ABC?

Now there's a prime dose of Switzer bullshit. The lizard Oz was never a ping-pong table, it was always gung ho, and token efforts at balance were a bit like Fox News inviting on a Democrat only if there was a decent supply of skewers to hand. 

Do these loons think that the past is forgotten, that misdeeds and follies can be batted under the table? Does Switzer even remember that Miranda the Devine in those days scribbled for his alleged "anti-war competitors", and was as proud a white feather warrior as Dame Slap?

That's just one of many reasons the pond can't stand Switzer, though his sucking up to the ABC is perhaps the most odious example of his desperate desire to be relevant.

Anyhoo, anyone with enough stomach can get a dose of Mearsheimer here, scribbled as that rough beast the Donald slouched towards Washington, without having it refracted and diluted through the mindless morass called Switzer … and as you might expect, it's all "American First" stuff, and making peace with Vlad (done deal) and embarking on the war with China (not quite there yet, because after all, Xi is so helpful and transparent) …

Here's what morons of the Switzer school fail to understand. If it's a choice between Xi and the Donald, pardon the pond if it takes neither …

The United States is deeply fucked, perhaps even more deeply than China, and that's saying something. 

There was a very tidy piece on inequality in the States done by Evan Osnos for the New Yorker, which ran online under the header How Greenwich Republicans Learned to Love Trump … currently outside the paywall. It really struck a nerve, at least with locals, and if you can get past the blaze of ads, there's a story about it here …

And that's about the only point Switzer serves, as padding for interesting material, but the pond must return for a final serve of cold war warrior, modern style ...

Today's United States, not withstanding its own limitations and internal weaknesses, shows every sign of wanting to fuck the planet in the most comprehensive way possible … and you don't get away from that with a but billy goat butt "although Donald Trump has been chaotic and incompetent" …

If Trump's environmental vandalism, along with Murdochian climate science denialism, fucks the planet, what then for great power politics and security? 

What then for those who try to hide in the ABC, refugees from Murdochian la la land? Do a Wordsworth?

And so to a little sorbet from the lizard Oz editorialist to wrap things up … and to answer that question about Bob Hawke before the footman delivers a fatal snicker …

Yes, yes, all that, and good padding for a cartoon from the infallible Pope ...

But can we settle that Bob Hawke matter?

At last a definitive answer. It's got nothing to do with Bob. 

But what then could it involve, what with that papal jetty looking a little rickety? 

Rather than the Murdochians, in the throes of economic failure, withering on the regional vine, perhaps the pond should turn to Wilcox for the answer ...