In which the bromancer leads the way on a Monday ...

The pond sometimes feels deep shame, and it's not just ashes in a filing cabinet on a strange journey. What if the ghost of Dorothy Parker dropped by to discover her name had been purloined in the interests of amateur herpetological studies?

But a reptile student must do what a reptile student must do, occasionally leavened with outside reflections, as per this recently in The Atlantic, here if you haven't used up your free clicks ...
  
A powerful tribal identity bonds the president to his supporters. As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. “When groups feel threatened,” Chua writes, “they retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.”
That works both ways. Fear strengthens tribalistic instincts, and tribalistic instincts amplify fear. Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat. In the presence of such an enemy, members of tribal groups look outward rather than inward, at others and never at themselves or their own kind.
The danger of this mindset—in which the means, however unethical, justify the ends of survival—is obvious. And so in this case, Trump supporters will tolerate everything he does, from making hush-money payments to porn stars and engaging in sexually predatory behavior, to inviting America’s adversaries to intervene in our elections, to pressuring American allies to dig up dirt on the president’s opponent, to cozying up to some of the worst dictators in the world, to peddling crazed conspiracy theories, to mishandling a pandemic at the cost of untold lives, to countless other ethical and governing transgressions. Trump is given carte blanche by his supporters because they perceive him as their protector, transforming his ruthlessness from a vice into a virtue.
In my experience, if Trump supporters are asked to turn their gaze away from their perceived opponents, and instead to focus and reflect on him and on his failures, they respond in a couple of consistent ways. Many shift the topic immediately back to Democrats, because offering a vigorous moral defense of Donald Trump isn’t an easy task. It’s like asking people to stare directly into the sun; they might do it for an instant, but then they look away. But if you do succeed in keeping the topic on Trump, they often twist themselves into knots in order to defend him, and in some cases they simply deny reality.
“Motivation conditions cognition,” Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, wisely told me. Very few Trump supporters I know are able to offer an honest appraisal of the man. To do so creates too much cognitive dissonance.


Speaking of cognitive dissonance, what better way to introduce the bromancer, pretending he really is a balanced and sane observer of the world, and that he studies the Donald with the forensic skill of Sherlock Holmes?

Of course what the bromancer didn't start with was the latest astonishing news, perhaps because it would have identified him as a dropkick, a sucker and a loser ...

Yes, Rowe dug a few out of the archive here,  and it seemed as good a way to interrupt the bromancer in mid-moronic flow as any ...

Indeed, indeed. Once upon a time, Ramirez was a completely loyal cartoonist, but of late, even he seems to have had his boundaries tested ...

But back to the bromancer, still pretending he's dealing with something other than a nepotic narcissist snake oil selling con man ...

But the reptiles have been mindlessly pro-Trump, and frequently scribble about TDS and such like,  and it seems right to revert to Peter Wehner's piece in The Atlantic.

Now the pond has cut out a piece of both siderism by Wehner, where he correctly points out that the other tribe cut Bubba Clinton a lot of unseemly rope. The pond takes the point, and has no time for slick Willy, but space is short, and it can be followed in the link above, so let's just cut to remaining bit of the Donald chase ...

...what’s different in this case is that Trump, because of the corruption that seems to pervade every area of his life and his damaged psychological and emotional state, has shown us just how much people will accept in their leaders as a result of “negative partisanship,” the force that binds parties together less in common purpose than in opposition to a shared opponent. As the conservative writer David French has put it, with Donald Trump and his supporters we are seeing “negative partisanship in its near-pure form, and it’s the best way to explain Trump’s current appeal to the Republican party.” His ideology is almost entirely beside the point, according to French: “His identity matters more, and his identity is clear—the Republican champion against the hated Democratic foe.”
I know plenty of Trump supporters, and I know many of them to be people of integrity in important areas of their lives. Indeed, some are friends I cherish. But if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians — I can’t imagine what it would be. And that is a rather depressing thing to admit.
Polarization and political tribalism are not new to America; fear and hatred for our fellow citizens have been increasing for decades. We’ve had plenty of presidents who have failed us, in ways large and small. But this moment is different because Donald Trump is different, and because Donald Trump is president. His relentless assault on truth and the institutions of democracy—his provocations and abuse of power, his psychological instability and his emotional volatility, his delusions and his incompetence—are unlike anything we’ve seen before. He needs to be stopped. And his supporters can’t say, as they did in 2016, that they just didn’t know. Now we know. It’s not too late—it’s never too late—to do the right thing.


Sorry, if you happen to be the bromancer, or the rest of the reptiles it's always too late to scribble the right thing ... 

Well a final cartoon from Rowe will see off that half-based assembly of weak-kneed, apologetic bromancer bullshit ...

And so, it being a Monday, to the dog botherer, and the pond couldn't help but notice this sublime nonsense in the Weekly Beast last Friday, here ...

So how does the dog botherer repay the fermenting Meade? You guessed it, the dog fucker carried on regardless, proudly showing off that enormous ABC chip in his shoulder, an obsession that verges on the sociopathic, and which routinely turns up on a Monday in the lizard Oz, either as the main game or as an aside, an itch that constantly needs scratching, like a dog relentlessly humping a leg in an onanistic way ...

What's so funny about this? Well the doggie botherer is having a go at Adams for being an ABC lifer, but after a short stint in The Age, Adams began writing columns for the lizard Oz in the 1960s, on television and then on other matters, purporting to be a socialist, while doing the socialist thing of acquiring Egyptian artefacts and eventually turning to the life of an upper Hunter squatter, and in short, living the reptile dream ... a lizard Oz lifer, like so many of them are ...

Adams' tenure at the lizard Oz shows the propensity of the Murdochians for a lifetime tenure, if you know how to tug the forelock and bend the knee. That's why this very day that medal-searching odour from the north, the Major Mitchell, is scribbling about China this day - the war never ends - and soon enough, nattering "Ned" will turn up to wring his hands, as he's done for decades ...

Apparently the dog fucker is so stupid that he can't even look at his own Murdochian navel ...
 

Oh if only the fermenting Meade had the foresight to wait until the Monday, and then she might have thought twice ...

Meanwhile, in the interests of completeness, and the dog botherer reverting to Twitter, despite it being a form of alcoholic vice and addiction for him, the pond should note the ongoing habit of the reptiles of breaking up the reptile musings with sundry distractions, including this one ...
 

As the pond uses screen caps, it has done its archival duty - others can google if they want - and now it can get back to the dog botherer spouting even more nonsense ... and if anyone wants to bet that it includes the dog botherer's other expertise, climate science, please, how stupid do you think the pond is?

Do you think the pond came down in the last shower, do you imagine that the pond would be a sucker and a loser and line up for that sort of bet, no matter how long the odds offered?

And there you go, a mention of the dog botherer's other obsession somehow wrangled in ... climate science from a dog fucker keen, not just to fuck dogs, but to fuck the planet entirely ...

And so to the bonus for the day, and the pond regrets that it isn't the Major Mitchell, busy maintaining the war on China - the pond hears it's going splendidly - but the pond simply couldn't give up the chance of seeing a reformed, recovering feminist show her deep love for a manly man ...

It is of course an old saw in romance novels that the heroine can see things in her manly man, and offer him redemption, and a way forward in the world, with her devotion and transforming love, and so it is with the Oreo, as she manages to scribble about the onion muncher's "fine track record."

Sigh. We've all been there ...

But here the pond must pause to note that the reptiles deemed the Oreo so dull that readers once again were in urgent need of distraction, and again the pond was forced to do its archival screen cap duty ... though only mug punters will feel the need to try to enlarge the image by clicking on it ...

The pond can't count the number of times the reptiles have promoted that Sky tweet, as if the UK mob were still in the reptile company, but at least it meant that the Oreo only had to do a par before the next tweet would intrude ...

It figures, of course. When you can't say much about the beloved, best malign the other, as first noted in The Atlantic piece on tribalism above, and the Oreo is tribal and bitchy in a way that evokes not so much a recovering, reformed feminist as Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. ...

Miaow, but it left the Oreo with another short couple of pars ...

Of course the pond cares not a whit or a jot. We've managed to export the onion muncher, perhaps the most successful export in recent Australian history, a bit like passing off aged mutton as exciting young lamb ... but the Oreo is so devoted, so committed, it almost feels charming, like a young 'un in the first flush of heated love, and never mind the age of the 'well past the use-by date' mutton ...

When you realise that the Oreo is in fact, a recovering, reformed feminist there is so much that's amusing in the above passages that the pond simply didn't know where to begin. Instead it performed its archival duty, because at this point the reptiles felt the need to interrupt the Oreo, this time by reproducing  (yet again) the text of a sister being family ... as if she was going to admit that the onion muncher's opposition to gay marriage was in any way homophobic, when really he was just uncomfortable when in the company of poofters, and much preferred the manly ritutals of bum sniffing rugger buggers ...

You can click on it to enlarge if you like, but the pond felt it should just point out that everything it's been saying about the Oreo will shortly come to pass ...

 Oh come on, that's hardly playing fair you say, but look at what the reptiles slipped in as a final distraction ...

Indeed, indeed, thank the long absent lord for a manly man, a firefighter, to set the Oreo ablaze ...

And yet we should rejoice with her, and her recovering, reformed feminist devotion.

Wiser punters amongst us in Australia know how lucky we are to have passed off a dud note on a pack of dumb Poms ... as Kerry Packer noted, you only get the odd Alan Bond come along in a lifetime, and Boris is about as bent Bond as they come ...

Rowe, in his usual immortal way, summed up the matter in his usual way, with a splendid vision of "Yes",  and who can argue with the hirsute "Yes" scrawled on the chest of the Doctor No firefighter that made the Oreo swoon so?