In which nostalgia gets in the way of Polonius, and our Gracie continues on her wayward way ...

 

 

 

 

As surely as the sun rises, so the light will disappear up Polonius's bum as he disappears up the bum of the federal government ... and as surely as this Cheshire cat goes about his business, so surely the ABC will cop a serve.

But this day the pond thought Polonius might also serve as a coathanger for other sights this week which amused the pond ... because there are other herpetologists out there, and they have their ear closer to the ground as to what's going down in reptile land.

Cue Bernard Keane at Crikey with this ... paywall protected, but where's the harm in a choice sample about the cage of the reptiles being rattled? Please allow the pond to jump to the end ...

 

...News Corp had decided the petition and its authors had to be destroyed, a campaign that amounted to a front-page “exclusive” dredged up from social media that a far-right troll had added 1000 fake signatures to the Rudd petition. The company then tried to link Rudd to Jeffrey Epstein through the late paedophile’s donations. The Oz also ran an editorial attacking Rudd and Turnbull.
An awful lot of journalistic and editorial time that could have been devoted to, say, lying on behalf of Scott Morrison, supporting Donald Trump’s attempted coup or smearing selected progressive targets was wasted on a petition that was doomed to fail.
But the biggest indication of just how rattled News Corp is was yesterday’s bizarre, cult-like all-staff meeting that amounted to a show-trial in absentia of Rudd and Turnbull. It was conducted by, according to Nine newspapers’ report, Australian company head Michael Miller, Australian editor Michelle Gunn, Telegraph editor Ben English and Sky News head Paul Whittaker.
That this line-up of News Corp royalty was brought together to rail at two former politicians while the world is still going through a pandemic and Australia is emerging from its first recession in 30 years suggests how terrified News Corp is. If the company feels the need to indoctrinate its own staff in an extended Two-Minute Hate of its critics, it’s an outfit deeply unnerved by criticism.
What that gathering looks like is nothing so much as the partyroom meetings political parties have when in Canberra — caucus and the joint partyroom, which are then reported on a no-names basis by party spokespeople. In those meetings, leaders gee up the troops, demonise their opponents and declare all is going well.
Which is entirely apt. As Turnbull correctly identified in his book earlier this year, News Corp is a foreign political party, not a media company.
 

Phew, talk about fun ... and it's only fair to link to that Nine report by Zoe Samios, News Corp editors claim Rudd and Turnbull 'exploited' Murdoch papers during political ascent ...

 

...A recording of the panel was obtained by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and suggests News Corp's editorial leadership in Australia is taking the campaign by Mr Rudd against it seriously.
"The famous saying by the British politician Enoch Powell who said that politicians complaining about the press was a bit like a ship’s captain complaining about the sea, it's a rather futile exercise and criticism comes with the territory," Mr Whittaker, former editor-in-chief of The Australian, said.
"The Australian editorialised for [Rudd] in 2007 and judged that John Howard's time was up and that he’d run out of ideas, essentially. We also strongly endorsed Rudd’s national apology to the Stolen Generation in 2008 and in 2009 we named Kevin Rudd...as The Australian’s Australian of the Year for his leadership at G20 and for his stewardship of the Australian economy during the GFC.
"The point I’m making there is that politicians are very slow to acknowledge the positive and supportive headlines of which there were many in all our papers, but of course they are very quick to complain about any headline they disagree with."
The town hall meeting began with an address by executive chairman Michael Miller and was followed by a video clip of the stoush between Mr Turnbull and Mr Kelly, on Q&A. The panel was moderated by News Corp's head of corporate affairs, Campbell Reid.
Sources familiar with News Corp's operations said it is highly unusual for this kind of defence to take place in front of staff. The commentary was prioritised above other internal topics such as reporting during the coronavirus and measurement platform Verity...

 

What the fuck? Paranoia muchly? If you can't stand the heat, please leave the kitchen ...

 

Thanks for that thought Harry. It put the pond in a great mood, and ready to read Polonius's usual ABC bashing, which naturally, as part of a foreign political party, is entirely supportive of the local party of choice ...

 

Please allow the pond to leave aside Polonius's reference to Richard Alston, who was barking mad, and who in due course shuffled on, his war on the ABC as pointless as Don Quixote tilting at windmills, and with pretty much the same result.

That Polonius should then revert to Hawke to suggest some kind of balance against bias is even sillier, because the ABC can reply, as it often does, that if both sides hate it, it must be doing something right in terms of investigating public issues ...

That the coalition has decided to bung on a war with the ABC while also mounting a war with China pretty much sums up the enormous stupidity of the current government ...

But wait, there was more at Crikey ... and this time Guy Rundle had abandoned his attempts to talk about sex to talk about the Bolter, a much more comfortable terrain for him.

The news that the Bolter had shifted to the Mornington Peninsula - an old stomping ground for the pond - produced a tremendous put down ... also paywalled, but why not a taster?

We need all the laughs we can get in these trying times, and for Melburnians Andrew Bolt has done his bit with the announcement that the city has done him in and he’s leaving.
The column in which he announced it was the typical Bolt fantasia for the diminishing but loyal, actual paper-buying readership that he throws red meat to: Melbourne, one of the safest cities in the world, is some sort of Mogadishu East where you take your life in your hands.
We no longer have shared stories, says the columnist for a paper that has killed off its city reporting functions to become a right-wing culture war newsletter. Plus there’s a bonus splash of racism: the overseas-born have twice the rate of COVID, says the son of Dutch-born migrants. They’re bringing disease, they’re…
All the usual farrago, impossible to tell whether its author believes it or whether its the late act of a onetime B-list journo, failed poet and lost soul, offered the chance to play a character — at which point the mask ate the perpetually unhappy face and he became the cultural Jeremiah he was projecting.
Having ground this out for two decades, a sea/tree change was in the offing. Why not turn it into yet another apocalyptic sermon? So there was much hilarity when it was revealed that Andrew Bolt’s move to “the bush” involved decanting himself and fam to… the Mornington Peninsula. True homesteading.
The place is not merely part of greater Melbourne for admin and stats purposes, it’s built up with sprawl halfway down — contiguous, ugly ‘burbia pretty much from Frankston to Dromana. It’s a 50 minute drive from the Melbourne CBD, off-peak. Tens of thousands of people commute daily. The bush? The only grazing is from cheese plates at micro-winery jazz festivals.
Bolt is moving to be with his people, those plain decent folk who enjoy treeless identikit McMansion apartments in Safety Beach (original name: Shark Bay). Well, er, no. Because the chaser to the Morny Peninsula shot is that the Bolts are moving to… Somers.
Let me uh explain Somers to out-of-staters. Nestled in a baylet on the peninsula’s east, it’s an unusually beautiful small village, its attractiveness owing much to the fact that it was laid out by Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony, designed as an anti-industrial retreat where Melbourne’s thin crop of intellectuals might gather. From the 1920s onwards, it has fulfilled that function. Two lefty Melbourne publishers summer there. Labor intellectuals have long favoured it. It has not one, but two, Lacanian psychoanalysts.
Tired of a Melbourne he’s alienated from, Bolt is moving to Fitzroy-by-the-sea. He’s not going to get thumped by anarchists (hip replacements), but he’s basically moving to the second act of a Hannie Rayson play.
But of course, that’s the point isn’t it? It was all a bit of a con. Your reward for 20 years of advocating growth, industry, progress, that Green is a religion, that concerned locals are elite NIMBYS, is to move to the modern equivalent of Le Petit Hameau, Marie Antoinette’s fake dairy farm.
Somers is beautiful because there’s no sprawl, locals having fought tooth and nail against the suburbanisation of this part of the peninsula for decades. It’s peaceful and bucolic because local landowners started retreeing cleared land decades ago, the sort of thing Bolt would have portrayed as anti-human nature worship. It’s villagey, because planning laws restrained the market from putting a shopping strip there.
Bolt is moving to the centre of everything he purports to hate. But then again, the man has earned the right to some time to reflect. For all the manic energy Bolt has put into fighting the culture wars — the blog posts stamped 5am, the dash from office to studio, the tub-thumping appearances at the right’s deathful conferences — he has been unsuccessful in changing the basic progressive direction of the country, and a spectacular failure as far as Victoria goes.
Bolt’s purported deep values — a nativist conservatism, crossing into north-European racism, which sees Christianity as central to a viable civilisation — have been unwound year on year through his entire career as a columnist...

Look, there's more, but fair dibs, and anyway, it just so happens that the pond's old stomping ground was at Shoreham, a little further along than Somers, but with the same village atmosphere, and a deep contempt for those on the other side ... which is to say the Sorrento side, which is to say the Hannie Rayson Hotel Sorrento side, which was made into a film by Richard Franklin, deaf in his later years, and dumb in his earlier years as a director ...

The pond felt a tremendous surge of nostalgia, as if it had stepped back into Crafers in the Adelaide Hills and discovered that nothing had changed despite the pond's long absence ...

Talk about endless bubbles, which is why Polonius scribbling about the Canberra bubble suddenly seemed uproariously funny ...

 

 

 

 

But, billy goat Polonius butt of endless jokes about pedantry, the pond has, thanks to Crikey, already served up talk of the reptiles gathered in congress inside their own bubble, and the Bolter off to Mornington peninsula to live in a village bubble ...

 

Up against those bubbles, Canberra seems like a teeming pile of diversity ...

 

Oh it's all too rich, and too funny, and soon enough the pond will be wrapping up for the year, and refusing to have anything to do with those dreadful stuck-up Mornington Peninsula types, especially the Sorrento side, but sadly instead of being off with the Bolter in another sort it bullshit, instead the pond will be deep in the heart of Gippsland for its Xmas duties ...

 

As for that alleged public servant or alleged journalist, what sort of bubble does Polonius live in? Of course the ABC caught them at it ...

 

...Morrison now has damaged ministers in his cabinet. The questions about them are questions of character. The ABC’s Four Corners program on Monday night aired opinions and allegations that cannot be unsaid.

Porter denies breaching the code of conduct that bans ministers from having sex with their staff and rejects the ABC's depiction of events. But there are several witnesses to his time at the Public bar in Canberra with a young woman from another office in Parliament House. And the Four Corners claims about his university years, with lawyer Kathleen Foley describing him as sexist and misogynist, will leave a permanent mark.
Porter is one of the government’s most capable ministers. He carries a bigger load than others – as Attorney-General, Industrial Relations Minister and the government leader in the House of Representatives – and is always across his brief.

But voters do not just assess what you do as minister – rightly or wrongly, they judge who you are. Porter has been named for years as a potential prime minister. Right now, that dream looks dead.

Tudge expressed regret about his behaviour soon after Four Corners revealed his affair with his former media adviser, Rachelle Miller. His supporters say the events are several years old – like Morrison, they want to leave the past behind him.

If only there was a statute of limitations on personal hurt.

Miller has lodged two complaints with the Department of Finance. In the first, she claims Tudge bullied and intimidated her while she worked for him – in fact, while she was also in a relationship with him. Tudge says he anticipates an inquiry on this.  (SMH here)

 

In fact, it would have all blown over, and been a distant memory, like the pond's recollections of the Mornington peninusla, if loons like Polonius would let it rest, but they can't, can they ... they have to keep going on and on about it, and so it keeps on coming back, a bit like good old Barners ... so he can't even have a beer in peace, fighting like an aged member of Jimmy Sharman's troupe about two old stagers trying to earn a bit of money in their old age ...

 

Every year the pond's rellies would step up to get their blocks knocked off, and now Polonius can't resist resetting the coconuts on the stick for another hoick ...

 

That's not the contemporary reptiles, that's the ancient order of luddite reptiles at work. If only they knew how to go away, to do a Bolter, to retire to the beach and to brood as the waves begin to rise higher, and years of climate science denialism eat away at the sand ...

And so to a little filler, as the pond continues to wonder what has happened to our Gracie, what has gone wrong?

 

 

 

 

The answer to that rhetorical question had to be short. Of course he doesn't have the first clue what he's doing, but to be fair to our Gracie she was reasonably short too ...

 

 

 

Actually it wasn't osmosis, dear Gracie, it was a desperate act of ingratiation, a desire to get on the good side of a barking mad snake oil salesman  ... and it wasn't that long ago, even if the Graudian here felt the need to label it as ancient history ...

A man of titanium? Sheesh, these con artists know how to lay it on thick ... and look at the marshmallow next to the Donald purring with pleasure ...

 

Oh yes, we'll see what happens, and there's certainly been no negative impact on the Australian economy, but is it wrong of the pond to ask, along with the infallible Pope, that now the Donald is on the way out the door like a delinquent dad, who gets custody of the kid?

 

 

Okay, okay, the pond only went with our Gracie because these days she keeps on speaking heresy, and because of the chance to run a few favourite pond cartoonists ...

 

Dear sweet long absent lord, what on earth has she been drinking of late, what planet did she come from? SloMo must define an objective and then follow a plan?

Here's the pond's objective. To have a smile as a terrible year comes to an end. 

The United States is now a failed state, deeply divided, and the daily reports from the killing fields are genuinely harrowing, and even the cavortings of hucksters of the Rudy kind aren't that funny any more, not even when they wheel in new talent of the Melissa Carone kind, not even when Colbert gives it his best shot ...

“During the last four years, we’ve occasionally talked about this administration – you know, when it was appropriate,” Colbert joked on Thursday’s Late Show. “But now that it’s about to be over, the president’s team is leaving it all out on the field after they burned down the stadium.
“I’m not scared about it, or angry about it,” the host continued. “I’m just in awe at the sheer majesty of their stupidity.”
Case in point: former national security adviser and Trump pardon recipient Michael Flynn, who on Tuesday retweeted an ad calling on the president to invoke limited martial law. “Yes, limited, which means tanks will crush dissidents, but only at participating Arby’s,” Colbert joked. “But don’t worry, it’s not a forever coup – Flynn is calling on the president to ‘temporarily suspend the constitution’.”
A temporary “suspension” of the constitution is “like when Hamilton said in the Federalist papers: ‘Are you having trouble with your democracy? Have you tried turning it on and off again?’” Colbert deadpanned.
Flynn isn’t the Trump associate who “takes the crazy cake”, though – that would be Trump’s personal lawyer and “hungover sweet potato” Rudy Giuliani, who appeared at a Michigan house oversight committee hearing on Thursday to make his baseless voter fraud case before state legislators. “He finally got someone official to take him seriously – and he blew it,” Colbert said, referencing an unfortunate moment when Giuliani farted while presenting his case.
“We laugh, but he was just citing the important legal precedent established in the landmark case of Smelt It v Dealt It.”
But Giuliani “wasn’t the only person ruining his case”, Colbert continued, moving to the testimony of election systems contractor Melissa Carone, whose incoherent performance could only be described as “your cousin start[ing] a fight after three mimosas” at Thanksgiving. Carone’s testimony was so unhinged that at one point, even Giuliani tried to shush her.
“It’s a bad sign when Rudy Giuliani thinks you’re going over the top,” said Colbert. “It’s like the Hulk pulling you aside and saying, ‘Hulk think you need anger management. Hulk not like you when you angry.’”

How nice it was of the Graudian to transcribe that routine here, and that's how the pond plans to carry out its objective should it make it into the new year. 

Carry on with the comedy, and remind people that there's more immortal Rowe here, and then celebrate his skills, both as illustrator for the Fin and as a cartoonist ...