In which the pond regresses to Dame Slap in search of rich irony and Russian dolls ...

Where are the reptiles when the pond needs them? Whenever the pond cautiously ventures out into King street these days, it's confronted by a sickening greenie leftie culture, completely unlike the one the reptiles would experience in humble Surry Hills, should they dare to head off to work, rather than take the weakling, spineless option of working from home ...

The pond suspects it's part of a general weakening of the reptile spirit, which reached some sort of nadir with the line-up today ...

Where's the bromancer? Where's that big Shanners suck? Where's Killer Creighton telling grannies to sod off? 

And where's Dame Slap? 

What's that? She abandoned her usual Wednesday slot so she could pinch hit for the reptiles yesterday?

Oh well better a late contemplation of Dame Slap than none at all ...

 

It was of course a standard diatribe about comrade Dan and his minions, but as usual, Dame Slap offered some excellent comedy ...

But before we get started, the pond would like to remind readers who came in late to the story of Dame Slap's early support for the Donald, whose handling of the virus, it goes without saying, has been exemplary, and an inspiration to all Australians, not least Victorians ...

Strangely Dame Slap has maintained an eerie silence about the Donald for a very long time since ...as if by banishing him, her donning of the MAGA cap might also be banished.

But the pond's thesis is that if you make such a monumental fuck-up about the big things, if you show your mindset with your choices, chances are, anything you've got to say about pretty much anything else will be refracted through that fucked-up window ...

The woman who donned the MAGA cap muttering and murmuring that "Twitter is no substitute for democracy"?!

Could a one-time Donald lover (who knows what she thinks now?, she never says) manage a richer distilled essence of irony than that line?

Of course over at Crikey, the wretches were also enjoying the classical comedy ...

 

But enough of Dame Slap failing to match up to Neil Mitchell but it did raise the question of what being a Pericles meant, and naturally the pond couldn't resist checking the chicken livers, or the wiki,  for guidance ... 

Some contemporary scholars call Pericles a populist, a demagogue and a hawk while other scholars admire his charismatic leadership. According to Plutarch, after assuming the leadership of Athens, "he was no longer the same man as before, nor alike submissive to the people and ready to yield and give in to the desires of the multitude as a steersman to the breezes". It is told that when his political opponent, Thucydides, was asked by Sparta's king, Archidamus, whether he or Pericles was the better fighter, Thucydides answered without any hesitation that Pericles was better, because even when he was defeated, he managed to convince the audience that he had won.

Was this code for Dame Slap? A way of saying that Pericles and the Donald were one, and that she still wore the MAGA cap, albeit cunningly disguised in the form of an ancient populist and demagogue?

Who knows, but the pond was still drawn like a moth to the flame by Dame Slap's indignation at Twitter ...

 

 Say that again, with a sprinkling of Donald relish!

"Many are drawn to it, not to glean news or expand their intellectual horizons, but to feel safe in an echo chamber they can dip into every day, even hourly, to inhale the exhaust fumes of views from political fellow travellers"?! (sic)

Oh stop it,  for the love of the goddess of irony, it's too rich, it's too fucking rich. The pond immediately felt the need for a cartoon about the Twitter master, the man worshiped by those who donned the MAGA cap ...

Ah, that feels better, but Dame Slap was far from being done, doing doing over the wretched Mikakos for daring to visit the Twittersphere as opposed to living in the real world of democratic accountability ... 

Oh she did, she really did ...

Oh on and on she goes, extolling Pericles, and even having the cheek to talk of irony, when surely her celebration of serious intellects sits oddly with Dame Slap's very own celebration of the Donald ...

Could it get any richer, could it get any funnier?

Please allow the pond to pre-empt the irony by quoting Dame Slap, before she's even had a chance to say it in print:

"Twitter, a shallow platform that facilitates mindless mob culture, is hardly democracy's finest moment."

Hmm, how does Dame Slap reconcile that with her love of the MAGA cap? The pond suspects that not even the combined skills of the schools of Freud and Jung could manage it, but luckily there's only one gobbet of irony to go, and yes, it starts with that sentence, and where the Donald now fits must remain a mandala-like mystery ...

Indeed, indeed, if only the Victorians had learned to don the MAGA cap, how much better they'd have managed recent events ...

Of course Killer Creighton and the other reptiles have focused on much more important matters than berating the comrades in Victoria, a rational eugenics-based science tidily summarized by Kudelka ...

And so to the bonus the pond pulled out of today's ruck, only because it continues the theme of the Donald ...

 

This is the sort of meaningless rhetorical question useful fools and useless tools ask, because it lulls the senses and provides a false sense of security ...

This is the sort of nonsense the pond has to endure when it strays into cable TV and cops a load of James Carville on MSNBC, The Hill here, a sort of wishful, magical thinking that the Donald will simply go away ...

 

There's more than a few things askew here, especially the Johnson analogy. Johnson exited the race on March 31st, 1968, in a way that was seemly and orderly, relative to the way he'd completely fucked up the Vietnam war, with the able assistance of his generals and Bob.

Here we are, much later in the process, 12th August, and still the Donald has shown no sign of snuffing the candle, and exiting stage right to face assorted criminal charges. So the rest is just more idle speculation, reptile column filler ...

Say what? About the only thing that caught the pond's eye was that reference to the excuses on the mantelpiece "like so many Russian dolls".

Oh no, we're back with those wretched Russian dolls and the insidious greenie leftie culture in King street that the pond must confront with no help from the reptiles ...

On the other hand, they are mates made in heaven, and surely Dame Slap's love of the Donald should extend to his love of Vlad the impaler and Twitter ... or has she realised what a buffoon she was, and is now desperately over-compensating?

Whatever, who knows, and no doubt, who cares, and so the pond will leave it to the immortal Rowe for the final Donald celebration, with more Rowe here, on Twitter of course ...