The pond was on high alert, though not necessarily alarmed ...
The Keane one at Crikey had issued this "watch the reptiles" alert yesterday in relation to the mutton Dutton and his barely concealed ambitions...
A bat-signal from the reptiles?
The tree killer edition seemed to bode well for signs and portents, with the brave warrior Mr Potato Head firing a shot across the bow ...
But there seemed to be mixed signals in the digital edition ...
The mutton Dutton was still top of the page, but the dog botherer was also there, insisting that our very own Pinocchio was still kicking goals ...
As always in a crisis, the pond first turned to the bromancer, seemingly celebrating Mr Potato Head's wise words ...
It was a good start, that snap of a ranting dictator, the new emperor, and not afraid to use his power on domestic and foreign enemies. Who wouldn't turn to a saviour of the mutton Dutton kind when confronted by such a fearsome, terrifying sight?
Hmmm, an historic speech, disciplined, balanced, unanswerable in its logic, nearly pitch-perfect in tone, and not his fault that there's a glaring gap ...
Need the pond say more? Surely we have a winner ...
And so to the fine print, and here the pond should warn that the bromancer was on song and shrieked at some great length ...
Ah, those wretched tanks. The pond should have known there'd be a few flies in the bromancer's ointment, and it seems that the mutton Dutton failed to give the right response ...
Still, with a bit of bromancer coaching, might he not make the grade?
There you go ... we now have a new dating system. BD and AD, and while we're at the moment in the "before Dutton" phase, how long before the anointed one, the new messiah helps us to AD? A new awareness ...
At this point, the pond should note that the reptiles inserted a click video featuring words from the new messiah, and while the pond has neutered it, still the key point in the chyron is worth noting ...
Would you like to know more? Sorry, the pond has much more bromancer business to follow ...
At this point the pond was deeply shocked. Fancy withholding strategic information from Australia's top general!
How on earth could the bromancer conduct an asymmetrical war without full details? Surely the first stage of any military strategy is to publish details of state of readiness and strength in a national paper of the reptile kind? How else to handle national security? Why the bromancer is still rounding up his resources for his war on China by Xmas, and they're not to the Field Marshall's satisfaction ...
Ah, it's a completely unacceptable mess ... but the mess belongs to? The Morrison government!
Surely with a new messiah in the shape of a potato, and the bromancer as the country's top Generalfeldmarschall, things could improve ...
At the end of it all, the pond was uncertain as to what the entrails were telling it ...
Sure there was a final contemptuous flick of the hair at the Morrison government, but there was also a surly, curly tone to that talk of delivering great speeches but not delivering the goods required for the bromancer to start the war with China, and possibly world war three, by Xmas ...
Even worse for the Keane thesis, the dog botherer seemed not to have heard the news, and was busy providing fortifications for the old guard ...
The pond was immediately forced into a defensive posture, feeling the need to apologise at the get go. The pond does whatever it can to avoid leaking more Leak into the mainstream, this being a wretched example of an apple that fell very close to a weirdly warped tree ...
But there it is, and the pond soiled, and no chance to deploy an infallible Pope or an immortal Rowe in response, because we must get on with it ...
Oh wait, there is one infallible Rowe to be found here, which offers some comedy in relation to the bromancer, and should get the dog botherer going ...
That's better, the pond needed that, because there's another long and tedious read in the making ...
It goes without saying that a natural born liar would naturally defend another natural born liar ... the dog botherer after all served time with both Lord Downer and Malware, before infesting Sky News after dark ... but the pond suspects all that righteous talk of the hideousness of personal attacks will soon fly out the window with a personal attack ...
There you go, it takes a really good hater to deliver that talk about the haters hating ... and in the process deliver a really good hating of the Tingle and Ramsey ... look, there's even a snap of the hateful couple, while Mark Latham's name is invoked ...
Clearly the attacks on SloMo have got under the dog botherer's skin, and there's every sign that they're working, but the pond was still waiting for a classic reptile sign that the dog botherer knew how to hate, and sure enough it finally came ...
Oh how the reptiles love to hate, how they love their punching bags ... and how they love that snap.
In fact, they loved it so much, that it featured at the top of another story ... and what do you know, for the dog botherer illustration, they clipped out the reference to the much feared and loathed comrade Dan ... a lovely punching bag for the reptiles' personal attacks ...
More of that anon, perhaps in the pond's Sunday meditation ... because for the moment, the pond must wrap up the hater delivering a jolly good hating ...
Yep, the reptiles are in a right royal pickle. It would take the pond all day to unpick all the scares in that final gobbet of the DBScare campaign, and unfortunately there's still a labour of Hercules to go ...
All the pond can note is that it seems that the reptiles, or at least the dog botherer, are going to stick by their Pinocchio, and the mutton Dutton will have to wait his turn ...
The pond sometimes wonders why it keeps on climbing the "Ned" Everest, but the simplest answer is because it's there ...
The pond could dress it up as a grand labour ... but it's all just in a day's work ...
(1) the slaying of the Nemean bromancer, whose skin she thereafter wore; (2) the slaying of the nine-headed dog bothering Hydra of Lerna; (3) the capture of the elusive "Ned" (or stag) of Arcadian reptile la la land …
So it's on with the hunt or the climb or whatever, but rest assured, it will be excessively long and tedious, and there will be no pause for the weak ...
An appeal to a higher order? Even before the blather begins the pond couldn't resist throwing in a cartoon ...
That might be an inspiration to some, but the pond must settle ... this is a long, winding, and tortured road, with the usual "Ned" handwringing and Chicken Little sighing at the sky ...
Of fuck it, full overblown portentous prose ... no doubt ripe for a "Ned" podcast, but the pond felt the need for another cartoon ...
WWJD?
He'd read "Ned" so he could finally understand the folly of all that nonsense he started long ago ... and clearly the reptiles felt the same because they slipped in a stained glass window joke ... back to the days of the cult masters when impostors of the leaking kind were just a dream, or a nightmare ...
Indeed, indeed ...
Okey dokey, time to settle down and do some hard yards, with a bit of bothsiderism, skewed mightily towards SloMo ...
This might suggest he might be a barking mad fundamentalist Xian, with the barking mad reptiles of the Catholic Boys' Daily fully on side ...
Indeed, indeed ...
Sorry, it should have been an educational institution ... but the pond has been shedding tears of blood for the unjust persecution of all those Xians out there, whose only crime is to cast the unrepentant into an eternity of hellfire, and perhaps while in the land of the living, deliver unto them the odd persecution or shunning or shaming or whatever ...
What religion says disability is caused by the devil?
Pardon the pond's French, but what a fuckwit. This, here, in passing, in a paper about the treatment of the disabled in Kenya ...
Yes, everyone knows that disability is caused by God, as a just and righteous punishment for the wicked ... and don't get the pond started on sodomy and such like ... but soon enough the pond will be able to smite and smote mightily, all thanks to the marketing man ...
Phew, the pond was lucky that it only cracked a little right at the end of the journey, and now there's just one short gobbet to go, and they said that cartoons couldn't help the pond get through a scaling of the "Ned" Everest ...
The pond usually likes to give Kudelka a day's grace before referencing the Saturday Paper here ...but this is an extreme emergency, and the pond, having sinned mightily with impure thoughts and deeds and much reading of the reptiles, wants to redeem itself ... wants to celebrate the reptile saviour in action ...
That's going to leave the pond short of cartoons for its Sunday meditation, but as they say, tomorrow is another day ...
The Bro warbles again: "Dutton balanced this with his repeated desire to resume a normal relationship with Beijing if it will accommodate that..." What exactly does the Bro, and the Mutton, mean by a "normal relationship with Beijing" ? Does he, and the Mutt'n, mean the relationship we, and the Americans, had during and after the Korean War, perhaps ? Do they mean the "relationship with China" of the Deng Xiaoping years ? When our PM's tears flowed over how that Son of Heaven served his own people so well in Tiananmen Square ?
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly does the Bro think the Mutt Dutt means by "a normal relationship with Beijing". And what do they think Xi might mean by it ?
And what on Earth can the Bro mean by :"a new defence platform" ? And how would any defence platform whatsoever - except maybe a forest of hypersonic long range missiles capable of plastering Beijing even without nuclear warheads - deter China. And what would China's response be if we had them - or tried to use them. Do these clowns even begin to grasp the difference between 1.4 billion with a huge military capability and 25.6 million with basically no military capability at all ? And how long and at what cost it would take Australia to develop one ?
Sheesh, there you go again GB, trying to introduce a touch of the real world into the conversation. That's not in the reptile spirit. You really need to join them in a land above the Faraway tree, like the Land of Believe-What-You Want, or perhaps the Land of Dreams or Spells or Topsy-Turvy...
Delete"The Land of Believe-What-You Want". Yeah, reckon you might have an irrefutable, and certainly a non-refudiatable, point there DP. Yep, they entered that Faraway Land when too young to understand, and then never departed from it.
DeleteAnd they didn't ever even have to make anything up, it was all fed to them gratuitously, and still is.
The Bro again: "And if we have so little confidence in Australian shipbuilding we won't even build an aid vessel here ..." But BG butt, we aren't going to build the aid vessel here because it would take at least a decade and occupy shipyards that we're keeping available for "...the idea that we're going to build nuclear submarines and power our defence force on the back of our manufacturing industry ..." Get with it, Bro; as a long term resident in "The Land of Believe-What-You Want", you must know that first you have to find something impossible to believe in.
ReplyDeleteDoggy Bov: "Remember how John Howard was the devil incarnate ? Anti-Asian, anti-Aboriginal and anti-immigrant according to Labor - he won in a landslide." No, no, Doggy B, Howard not only was annihilated in a landslide, he personally lost his own 'safe Liberal' seat. Remember ? No, I guess living in "The Land of Believe-What-You Want" means you never have to remember anything.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you don't remember it, then, why, it never really happened, did it.
Oh this really is just too good; Doggy Bov: "Tony Abbott was portrayed as the mad Monk. Dogmatic, misogynistic and mean-spirited they said - he crushed Labor too." Oh yes, and then, after just under a mere 2 years out of his elected three (September 2013 to September 2015), his own party unceremoniously dumped him in favour of - wait for it - Malcolm Turnbull.
ReplyDeleteAnd then guess what: Tony Abbott lost his own safe Liberal seat too. But he wasn't PM by then. so it wasn't quite such an outstanding achievement as Howard's.
John Quiggin making a similar point about the Morrison 'miracle victory' being, in fact, a narrow win
Deletehttps://twitter.com/JohnQuiggin/status/1464389739893510146
And, just to add to the Pond's lexicon - "Betteridge's Law of Headlines" (new to me anyway)
https://twitter.com/JohnQuiggin/status/1462645268025729025
I think it's the bit about the 'sweet & sour' approach that was key, Bef. Quiggin's point about how Labor told people about the 'sweets' is germane - ie, a slow leak with very little presentation or emphasising of benefits as though Shorten et al expected people just to see and be happy about them off their own bat. Ignoring the fact that lots of people here (and more so in the US and UK) regularly vote against their own best interests. Does the term affective polarisation mean anything to you ?
DeleteThe key comment, I reckon, was this: "they [Labor] didn't lose badly. but they should have won. they would like to win as oppose to lose modestly again".
As to the Chinese having "The Warship China Uses To Seize Taiwan?", it is impressive just how quickly the Chinese can build a major naval vessel. Maybe we should go into partnership with China and get them to build some nuclear powered subs for us. We'd have them within a couple of years. But in the meantime, and taking full account of Betteridge, the key point was: "It probably can accommodate dozens of helicopters and landing craft and hundreds of marines."
Hundreds of marines ? Just hundreds ? And that will be enough to conquer Taiwan ? So China will have to build hundreds of Type 075's so that it can get thousands of marines into Taiwan ? Strewth but the Chinese are going to have to buy millions of tonnes of coal and iron to manage that - Australia's prosperity is assured.
I headed off to read about affective polarisation and when I came back there was Polonius - like here's one we prepared earlier.
DeleteLike DK or projection these terms provide a convenient shorthand for things we had already noticed but describe in a more clumsy way. The rights and wrongs, the facts, the science or the public policy don't really matter to this personality type, it's just a crude tribal battle.
Oz has two ships of this general type, any major power would have a few. It's a bit like the kerfuffle over the spy ship - totally unremarkable.
For a sane person's take on Morrison, try Ronni Salt at https://theshot.net.au/general-news/scott-morrison-not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper/
ReplyDeleteThanks, nothing to argue with here.
DeleteI thought this para could just as accurately be about John Howard (with a small caveat regarding the gun legislation)
"He’s the do-nothing Prime Minister who insists on staying in charge, not to lead us to a better Australia, but to drag us into his own shrunken version of the place; a smaller Australia, one that has dried and atrophied itself down to meet his own limited expectations."
Tres triste:
ReplyDeleteStephen Sondheim: master craftsman who reinvented the musical dies aged 91
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/nov/26/stephen-sondheim-composer-lyricist-musical-west-side-story-follies-company
"Scoring his first big hit with West Side Story at 27, the US composer and lyricist raised the art form’s status with moving and funny masterpieces including Follies and Company".
And also 'A Little Night Music' including the immortal 'Send in the Clowns' and the truly wondrous https://youtu.be/aCOiFB-8qqw
Truly, GB, whenever the pond is down, the thought of Krusty rendering that masterpiece fixes everything ... and if it can survive that, it can survive anything, and will endure ...
DeleteAh, you always know just what to say, DP.
DeleteIt's truly getting harder by the day to find anything coherently nonsensical enough in Ned's wiffle-piffle to make any kind of comment about. Gobbet after gobbet and just nothing ...
ReplyDeleteThe nearest I could get today was this: "Momentum for this bill [Religious Discrimination Bill] originated in passage of the same-sex marriage law in 2017 when numerous efforts by conservatives to protect religious freedom were defeated on the floor of parliament by a determined ALP and groups of Liberal progressives."
Gosh, so if it hadn't been for those really awful ALPs and "progressive Liberals" their "religious freedom" to impose their own oppressive, repressive beliefs on others would still apply. Oh what a pity.
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteSome major revelations from Sheridan there,
“The relatively benign problem of Islamist terror and Middle East-based instability.”
“Such deployments, like Iraq and Afghanistan, do not represent existential threats to Australia.”
That’s a quite different slant from just a few short years ago when the then Foreign Editor of The Australian was having conniptions about the fiendish Islamics”
Who was that Foreign Editor Again?
DiddyWrote
You know the thing about the simple of mind, DW; how that can only keep one single idea in their head at a time. China is in, Islam and the Middle East is out.
DeleteIt's unlikely that the bromancer can remember what he wrote yesterday, let alone a month or a year ago, and certainly not what he scribbled as a proud crusader taking on the dangerous Islamics ... though perhaps blowing up the middle east might prove a tad easier than blowing up China ...
Delete