As a way of spicing up its Sunday meditation, the pond had thought of starting off by talking about cults.
The United States is full of cults, so many it would be impossible to enumerate them and growing daily and with conspiracy theories at their side ... in fact Netflix would be nowhere without cults and docs of the Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey kind, while the GOP is deep in Keep mango: lie endlessly and obey an alternative reality.
But then the pond realised that it was going to start off with prattling Polonius and there was simply no way he could serve as an example of a cult.
What a dreary, pedantic old sod he is, and so he's a perfect way to start off a Sunday with a quiet bleating ...
The pond blames the ABC for Polonius's attempt to imitate Mr. Charles Pooter ... Polonius is always listening to the ABC, he can't help it, he's obsessed, and everything he scribbles ends up sounding like a Pooterism of this kind ...
After my work in the City, I like to be at home. What’s the good of a home, if you are never in it? “Home, Sweet Home,” that’s my motto. I am always in of an evening. Our old friend Gowing may drop in without ceremony; so may Cummings, who lives opposite. My dear wife Caroline and I are pleased to see them, if they like to drop in on us. But Carrie and I can manage to pass our evenings together without friends. There is always something to be done: a tin-tack here, a Venetian blind to put straight, a fan to nail up, or part of a carpet to nail down—all of which I can do with my pipe in my mouth; while Carrie is not above putting a button on a shirt, mending a pillow-case, or practising the “Sylvia Gavotte” on our new cottage piano (on the three years’ system), manufactured by W. Bilkson (in small letters), from Collard and Collard (in very large letters).
Every so often, the pond wonders why the few loyal readers remain. Don't they realise that on the weekend they can head off for a dose of Marina Hyde, roughly akin to dripping words in sulphuric acid and watching the sizzle ... look at this opener for her latest ...
Because nothing is too on-the-nose for the current Conservative party, the intro of Chris Pincher’s latest drinking column featured Uncle Monty from Withnail and I. “That lubricious booby”, Pincher called Monty, in an article for the Critic magazine filed some time before he appeared to admit drunkenly groping two younger men on Wednesday night. I wonder what Uncle Chris was saying as he chased them round the Carlton Club? “I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary!”
In reality, the dialogue is likely to have been less iconic than any of that movie’s quotable quotes. The last time Pincher resigned for alleged sexual misconduct – of course there was a last time – he was accused of luring a former Olympic rower back to his home before reappearing in a bathrobe, massaging his victim’s neck and untucking his shirt, while whispering: “You’ll go far in the Conservative party.” Just call him Harvey Winetime.
Speaking of going far in the Conservative party, though, it was AFTER that incident that Pincher was elevated to the position of deputy chief whip, with the whips’ office naturally being the place you’re supposed to go with your concerns about sexual misconduct by MPs and so on. It all does rather raise the question: who whips the whips? Unclear. Some sadist down in Battersea, you’d imagine. But if he or she is off for a week, I don’t think it would be too difficult finding holiday cover. Just walk along any British high street and ask who fancies letting out a bit of their frustration with how they’re ruled.
And then there was this ...
For now, let’s have a look at the resignation letter sent to the PM by Pincher, who inevitably – yet somehow still incredibly – has apparently long been nicknamed Arse Pincher. This missive to the prime minister is some state-of-the-art minimising. “I’ve embarrassed myself and other people” is surely the most twee possible way of saying: “I am alleged to have sexually assaulted two people.” It’s the Live, Laugh, Love of predatory behaviour.
As is the way of these things, it wasn’t long before allies of Pincher were briefing that the Tamworth MP was “vulnerable”...
Tamworth! Is there nothing the mighty name of Tamworth can't do?
But if you insist, the pond will leave the Hyde delivering a good hiding to Tamworthians, and return to Pooter down under ...
Mr Pooter, of course, always had difficulties with his suppliers, and if they'd been around at the time, his broadcasters ...
April 9.—Commenced the morning badly. The butcher, whom we decided not to arrange with, called and blackguarded me in the most uncalled-for manner. He began by abusing me, and saying he did not want my custom. I simply said: “Then what are you making all this fuss about it for?” And he shouted out at the top of his voice, so that all the neighbours could hear: “Pah! go along. Ugh! I could buy up ‘things’ like you by the dozen!”
I shut the door, and was giving Carrie to understand that this disgraceful scene was entirely her fault, when there was a violent kicking at the door, enough to break the panels. It was the blackguard butcher again, who said he had cut his foot over the scraper, and would immediately bring an action against me. Called at Farmerson’s, the ironmonger, on my way to town, and gave him the job of moving the scraper and repairing the bells, thinking it scarcely worth while to trouble the landlord with such a trifling matter.
That sense of pursed lips, of having to deal with blackguard butchers and broadcasters? It is, of course, pure Pooterism, but also pure Polonialism ... see how Ponlonius frowns ...
And perhaps the notion that the government will be able to focus on foreign and domestic policies with the bipartisan help of the mutton Dutton.
The pond thought it was dreaming, or perhaps Polonius was dreaming, but someone should tell somebody that they're dreaming...
And so to the pond dilemma for the day.
There were four worthy contenders - Polonius, the Killer, Dame Slap and the bromancer were out and about this weekend, but only three could make the cut.
Polonius, by lèse-majesté, or droit de seigneur, had been given pole position and place of honour.
But how could the pond walk past the Killer, offering new killer insights ...
Which can only reflect on News Corp, Murdochism, Fox News, and the whole damn tribe of facilitators and enablers who have helped produce a desert...
The pond loves the way that the local Oz scribblers pretend that they and their kissing cousins have had nothing to do with the state of the cult ... and yet the cultists always find a home at Fox News ...
Beast here, paywall, with Laura down there with Hannity as the most barking mad of the howling tribe of wild-eyed dogs roaming the Baskerville moors ... making sure no one steps outside the cult, no one breathes a word of heresy or deviant thinking.
But as usual there were others lining up to defend the indefensible ...
Immediately following the first hour of Tuesday’s last minute bombshell testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to the January 6th Committee, Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier said in no uncertain the revelations about Donald Trump’s actions on that day in 2021 were both “stunning” and “compe
“All of this is firsthand, so it’s from her listening to it,” Baier added. “That’s why it’s so compelling. And that’s perhaps why we had this hearing that popped out of nowhere.”
But just moments later, his fellow anchor Martha MacCallum seemed to undercut that characterization by dismissing the details about Trump’s demonstrably outrageous behavior as “not wholly out of character.”
While MacCallum said that Hutchinson comes across as a “very credible” and seems to have a “great memory” for what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, she wasn’t quite sure that it tells the American people anything new about Trump.
“All of this is obviously riveting, it’s very dramatic, it was clearly a very difficult day for her and for all those who were involved and everybody who witnessed it,” she continued. “But the question is, in terms of the Department of Justice, does it move the ball at all on any legal action that they could pursue?”
When her colleague Sandra Smith recounted the story of Trump throwing his lunch plate against the wall in frustration after the Secret Service refused to let him to join the riots at the Capitol, complete with ketchup dripping down the wall, MacCallum said, “I’m not sure that it really shocks anybody that the president, just knowing what we’ve seen, observing him over the years if he got angry, that he might throw his lunch.”
While it’s a “very dramatic detail,” she said, “I’m not sure that any of this is wholly out of character with the Donald Trump and President Trump that people came to know over the years. And there’s a lot of people out there who obviously share his feelings of frustration over the course of those days.”
“The problem was that they couldn't back it up with anything in the courts and they couldn't back it up with evidence they produced,” she added. “That obviously was probably a source of deep frustration as well. Things were clearly not going his way.”
MacCallum did not say whether or not it was in “character” for Trump to grab the steering wheel from the backseat of his presidential limousine or “lunge towards” his head Secret Service agent’s throat, as Hutchinson also testified on Tuesday. (Beast here, paywall)
Back to Killer and a dawning realisation ... the reptiles finally caught the bus ...
Well yes, even as the Examiner got all kinds of blowback from assorted cultists, and yet it's hard to ignore the splatter on the wall ...
Days after the Secret Service pushed back on the stunning testimony that former President Donald Trump violently freaked out during a Jan. 6 presidential SUV ride, CNN reported on Friday that accounts of Trump lunging at his Secret Service agents have spread around the agency for the past year.
According to two Secret Service sources, stories similar to ex-Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s account—which she testified under oath was told to her by former Trump staffer and current Secret Service official Tony Ornato—circulated among agents in the months following the incident. One source, for instance, relayed that Trump profanely demanded to be driven to the Capitol and even “lunged forward” at one point.
“It was unclear from the conversations I had that he actually made physical contact, but he might have. I don't know,” the source told CNN. “Nobody said Trump assaulted him; they said he tried to lunge over the seat— for what reason, nobody had any idea.”
Another source who spoke to the SUV’s driver, meanwhile, said that while he didn’t hear about any physical altercation, he was told that Trump verbally berated his Secret Service detail after his Jan. 6 speech. According to Hutchinson, Trump yelled at his detail: “I’m the f-ing President. Take me up to the Capitol now!”
While not disputing that Trump demanded agents take him to the Capitol, a Secret Service official said earlier this week that Ornato denied telling Hutchinson the story, and Secret Service agent Bobby Engel—who was in the vehicle—refuted that Trump lunged at an agent or tried to grab the steering wheel.
The agency has also said that Engel and the driver are prepared to testify before the Jan. 6 House committee under oath. The credibility of Engel and Ornato, however, has come under question recently, as they’ve been described as Trump’s “yes men” and at least one former Trump aide has called Ornato a known liar. (Beast, paywall)
It was everywhere, including here ...
Two Secret Service sources told CNN on Friday that they heard about former President Donald Trump lunging at the driver of his presidential SUV on January 6, 2021.
The pair of sources, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, backed up much of former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson's explosive testimony on the altercation in the motorcade vehicle known as "the Beast" after Trump found out he wouldn't be driven to join his supporters at the Capitol.
"He had sort of lunged forward – it was unclear from the conversations I had that he actually made physical contact, but he might have. I don't know," one of the Secret Service sources told CNN. "Nobody said Trump assaulted him; they said he tried to lunge over the seat – for what reason, nobody had any idea."
And that reminded the pond of yesterday's note from the keen Keane...
...The entire agenda of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News from its establishment in the 1990s has been to stoke that anxiety and resentment and channel it into political action — including ever more aggressive, anti-democratic and violent rhetoric. Should Trump vanish tomorrow, Fox News would continue to stoke and exploit that resentment, and simply transfer its favour to someone else who could effectively exploit it — someone perhaps more presentable, and smarter, than Donald Trump.
The nihilistic sense of white economic and social grievance, fueled by the most powerful media company in the world, won’t be going away any quicker than the far-right judges on the Supreme Court. This crisis has a long way to run. (here, paywall)
And so to the final sorting of the last two contenders, and it was a toss-up, because both Dame Slap and the bromancer are firm pond favourites.
But then the pond caught a whiff of the Dame Slap opener ...
As soon as the pond read that guff about climate science - as if maths and physics have nothing to do with it - and the recycling of Marxists in the long march to take over the institutions, the pond decided to rule out Dame Slap.
Besides, she spent the rest of the piece blaming parents for the state of their spawn, and instead of telling teachers what to do, decided to tell parent what to do ... you know, get a safe, steady job scribbling ideology and theology for the reptiles ...
Perforce it had to be the bromancer, dealing as he always does, as the Brain was constantly explaining to Pinky, how middle aged white men scribbling for the lizard Oz could still be top of the world ma ...
The downside is that the bromancer's piece is unnaturally long, up there with "Ned" for interminable Chicken Little shouting at the sky, and so it was impossible to squeeze in the Dame Slap and stay within the bounds of decency ...
There were snaps, and click bait videos, and much ado ...
There will of course be no mention of the Talibanisation of the United States ...
Instead there will be much agitation in the usual bromancer way, though we might not cop an "it's nuts" ...
Russia is a fraction of the threat? The Ukrainians will be reassured by those soothing words, as the bromancer returns to his favourite theme of war with China by Xmas ...
The pond wishes it could be as sanguine as the bromancer about India, but that country is currently in a world of Hindu fundamentalist, authoritarian pain ...
If Narendra Modi’s first term in office abounded with brazen institutional subversion, his second has been beleaguered by spirited citizenly uprisings. In the weeks leading to the coronavirus pandemic, lest we forget, the prime minister was besieged by a wave of challenges. Protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, erupting months after the BJP’s triumphant re-election in 2019, had spread to every major city by early 2020. Modi, having grown accustomed to spectacles of submission by the public, was rattled by this show of defiance. His government invoked a colonial-era law to ban gatherings of more than four people, intermittently suspended the internet, and mobilised its base by amplifying sectarian messaging. As police truncheons bloodied young protestors in Delhi, Modi lashed out at rootless cosmopolitans and Muslim troublemakers, supposedly identifiable by their clothing.
The script did not yield the intended result. Across the country, Indians of all faiths joined to proclaim their allegiance to secularism—the foundational basis of the republic. Their song was the national anthem, their standard the Indian flag, and their holy book the Indian Constitution. In Delhi, Hindus formed a human chain to protect Muslim worshippers. In Hyderabad, tens of thousands of Muslims recited the preamble to the Indian Constitution: “We, the people of India, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic…”
The pandemic granted Modi a reprieve, but did not extinguish the indignation incubated by his attempts to remake India in accordance with his ideology. If anything it clarified the supreme contradiction of the “New India”: the prime minister has a dominant majority in Parliament and appears invincible at the polls—and yet his reign has provoked the most persistent dissent on the street in memory. The harrowing experience of the lockdowns should not eclipse the fact that 2020 was a year also of the most sustained democratic uproar against a government anywhere in the world. Measured by numbers, the demonstrations against the BJP’s labour laws and farm laws—drawing hundreds of millions of people—were the largest in human history. Laws were railroaded and rubber-stamped through Parliament, which has given up even the pretence of deliberation, but their promulgation was overwhelmed by public backlash... (here for more)
Why is it that the bromancer always glosses over matters when it comes to India?
But then the pond might just as well ask, why is the bromancer?
Yep, Albo's already set up to fail, but when we look back, we'll know that the price of petrol was the only thing that mattered ...
.
.. or perhaps the right to be born and to die ...
So KillerC tells us that: "Republicans trounced Democrats politically in the first half of 2022, as the shock of rising inflaion appeared to shatter already minimal re-election prospects."
ReplyDeleteWell maybe, and maybe not:
Dems are behind right now, but not by much
https://jabberwocking.com/dems-are-behind-right-now-but-not-by-much/
"For some reason I was under the impression that Democrats were way underwater right now, but the difference is actually only three points. FiveThirtyEight has it at two points."
"the pond decided to rule out Dame Slap" Oh I dunno DP, it might have been entertaining to get Slappy's thoughts on what parents should do to educate their kids - like, for instance, introducing them to crazy poms with theories about how the UN is ready to take over the world. And how "There are duds in every profession ..." and especially in the profession of reptilism.
ReplyDelete[Reptilism: Reptilian nature or character; especially underhandedness, baseness.]