Just a standard Tuesday, with a bromancing and a groaning ...

 

A badly wounded BoJo limping slowly, painfully to the exit door, a pitiful figure; the conspirators and their treacherous coup about to enjoy a primetime slot; rumours abounding about the sociopathic Vlad the impaler and the wannabe dictator for life Xi - how could the local reptiles do anything to compete when they're still drying their hankies after the debacle?

Naturally the pond turned to the cracking Crace for a few words on the matter of the Convict, with the pond having to admit that it thought the plotters might not even reach a century but instead falter on a hoodoo number like 87:

...A rather troubled looking Convict emerged shortly after 7pm when the queue had died down. Perhaps it’s finally dawned on him that his whole premiership has long since stopped being a joke. That his options are rapidly running out. That the populist leader is no longer popular and has nothing left to offer anyone. That he has even lost the support of a large number of his most myopic constituency. His MPs. He probably voted twice – once for and once against – just for old times’ sake.

At 9pm on the dot, Brady announced the result. 211 for, 148 against. As expected The Convict had won the vote but lost the leadership. Worse even than the Maybot back in 2018. Johnson would say he was going to hang on – he’s a bad loser – but there was no coming back from this. It may be weeks, it may be months but Boris is toast. And the Tories would spend the time fighting each other to the death. While the country is on its knees. At a standstill. What a legacy. Johnson must be so proud. (Graudian away)

Here, have an infallible Pope to celebrate:

(Sorry about the punchline, but that's how it rolls with the infallible Pope these days ...)

While discussing low comedy, the pond should also commend grundle, grundling away in Crikey  yesterday. 

He's so much better when not making a complete fool of himself over Ukraine, and yesterday he invented an award which took the pond back to the glory days of the Campbell Reid Perpetual Trophy ... (a handsome affair, with a dead fish mounted above the immortal words "carpe verbatim") ...

…the contenders for the Bad-Take Brownlow this time round may have been a little crazier than usual. Both Terry McCrann and Gerard “Gollum” Henderson went with innumerate and logic-chopped arguments that what matters in a preferential system is first-preference votes, and Jacqueline Maley faithfully reproduced the opposition’s pitch about The New Peter Dutton: that we don’t yet know him. (To paraphrase Jason Clare on Tim Wilson on election night, that we don’t like him is not because we don’t know him, it’s because we do.) And on the ABC, Stan Grant, bless, said teal supporters were just like Trump supporters, in that both were angry. Very Hegelian, Stan. 

But of course, the winner on points and on the red carpet has to be Peter Hartcher, who is not only a wonky vote counter and a poor analyst, but is happy to do such twice in two weeks. Readers of the Age/SMH were gobsmacked to see their senior political opinionista, in a piece denying the significance of the teal and Greens result, completely undercount their first preferences by comparing the 2022 running totals on the AEC website with the completed count from 2019. (here, paywall).

One of the great reliefs for the pond is that it doesn't have to deal with being Hartchered, which is down there with being Uhlmanned ...

The pond won't go into all the gruesome details of data being Hartchered, but wanted to make note of the elevation of prattling Polonius into the ranks of the Lord of the Rings, though frankly if the character hadn't been fictional, the Gollum might have taken out a defamation suit ...

And while reporting on its viewing habits outside the lizard Oz, the pond should confess to catching - accidentally mind - the bromancer on the ABC's The Drum last night ... blathering away about the dangers of too much spending, and deficits and so on. 

Was this the very same loon who had proposed to Albo's government that it spend like a drunken sailor on defence ... spend, spend, spend, on all the bromancer's favourite kit? Especially rockets and missiles.

For a moment the pond wondered if the ABC had hired a ringer, an impersonator with a gift for eccentricity and forgetfulness.

Of course nobody on The Drum noted or cared for the contradiction, it was just another cardigan-wearer "both sides" moment, the usual display of tokenism, but it did provide a segue into the bromancer in the lizard Oz this morning ...

Sheesh, more Lord of the Rings?! Really?! And all the more ironic because the bromancer's imagination is routinely captured by odd bits of technology. Except for tanks. Please don't mention tanks ...

There's so much that's condescending, insulting, demeaning and white colonial in that gobbet that the pond doesn't know where to begin ... but it seems that's the way that the bromancer imagines he's being friendly ...

Perhaps when an eccentric calls someone else eccentric, it's just a good will gesture ... and as for that bit about Canberra being a build from scratch vanity project, a model city, a Griffin if you will, the pond said nothing, and moved on to the next gobbet ...

Indeed, indeed, complete indifference is all the go ... though the pond does wonder why  we got those F-IIIs. 

Oh that's right, the impending war with Indonesia back in the days of Ming the merciless ... but during the glory days of the coalition, the relationship was on a sound footing ...

Naturally back then the reptiles were on hand to help Lord Downer in his hour of need ...

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has slammed a cartoon published in The Weekend Australian as tasteless and offensive, declaring the government did not condone it in any way.

The cartoon depicts the Indonesian president as a dog sexually dominating a Papuan and is an apparent tit-for-tat response to a cartoon in an Indonesian newspaper this week depicting Mr Downer and Prime Minister John Howard as copulating dingoes.

In the Australian cartoon, by prominent artist and cartoonist Bill Leak, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono appears as a dominant dog, tail wagging as he mounts a Papuan with bone in nose, saying: "Don't take this the wrong way..."

The caption reads: "No Offence Intended".

The Indonesian effort was headlined The adventure of two dingo (sic) and showed the prime minister as the dominant dog, shaking his tail while telling the foreign minister: "I want Papua!! Alex! Try to make it happen!" (Downer slams new cartoon)

Good days, and no offence intended, you loopy loons and your eccentric desire to move away from a sinking city ...

...and how kind of the dog botherer not to mention Papua ... not even in his final gobbet ... because all hands are needed on deck if we're going to have the bromancer's war with China by Xmas ...

Ah yes, the pond's favourite saying, much has been done, but much remains to be done ... though in this case, there's only a serve of Dame Groan to go ...

Early in the morning, the Groaning was at the top of the digital page ma ...

It will be noted that, with the election lost and the tears shed, the reptiles have turned to old staples of the Mafia crime kind, though that juxtaposition of a yarn about the Mafia ruling sat very nicely next to that natural born villain clutching his pate... 

The pond wasn't convinced that the Groaner deserved top spot and went looking for alternatives ...

Nope, no contenders.  There was bleating from Tony Maher about energy workers, but the two lizard Oz editorials showed that once again the reptiles were short on contributors ...

Sure there was the bouffant one blathering about gas, but no one can do gas like a Groaner inhaling a dose of nitrous oxide for a funny voice ...

Hmm, the standard fracking is a good thing routine, but the pond must first congratulate the reptiles for starting off with a snap showing those windmills from hell, ruining everything ... and the pond understands that whatever has been said, or will be said, there need be no mention of climate science, except perhaps as a disagreeable theology inclined to worship those dark, Satanic mills ...

Really? That's the best the Groaner can do with her groaning? She really should pay attention to visionaries of the Colin Barnett kind, given an airing by the cardigan-wearers ...

...Mr Barnett said Australia should commission a gas pipeline between WA and South Australia's Moomba gas fields to bolster domestic supply.

"We need to do what other countries around the world have done and that is build a trans-Australian gas pipeline," he told the ABC.

"It would be a big project and expensive project, but it is one that would pay for itself and could be done quite easily by private enterprise. Most continents around the world have trans-continental pipelines - the Americas, Europe and so on."

He estimated such a pipeline would cost about $6 billion but said Mr Albanese could embrace it as a "big nation-building project" funded by Australian superannuation funds.

"It's not such a complicated project," Mr Barnett said.

"There are no mountain ranges in the way, no real barriers, and a pipeline would go from the north-west coast of Western Australia, across the Nullarbor and into the Moomba gas field area in South Australia and then distributed more widely through the east coast through existing pipelines." (ABC here)

A splendid vision, and trust the ABC to deliver it. It goes without saying that there are mockers and sceptics ...

Tim Buckley, energy transition analyst and director of Clean Energy Finance, said despite “platitudes to decarbonisation” companies were not taking divestment risk seriously.

But he said that would change over the next few years as governments and regulatory authorities begin to crack down on “greenwash” and large investors grow serious about pulling their money out of fossil fuel production.

“You can’t keep investing half a trillion bucks in gas pipelines and think that in any way that aligns with the Paris targets,” Buckley said.

“When you build a gas pipeline you build it for 50 years, we’ve got a climate emergency which we need to act on in eight years. How can you build an asset like that when you have to change by 2050?”

Pshaw, that's why we need a good gas-fired groaning ...

Phew, thank the long absent lord there's still a role for coal, and sssh, as promised, no mention of climate science ... just the usual fiery blast of white hot groaning gas, directed straight at renewables ...

To butcher a saying, a planet to fuck, and coal not up to the job, so bring on the gas for a bloody good gassing ...

And so to the immortal Rowe for the day, stuck back with the bromancer ...