In which the pond goes Franco-ing with Polonius, ruins things with the dog botherer, and offers our Gracie as a bonus ...

 

The pond rarely strays past prattling Polonius for its Sunday meditation. 

Sure there are those who send along to the pond links to stories in The Conversation about the angry Sydney Anglicans, as in this outing ...

...being the ones who have the authority to say what is and is not the “truth” of sexuality has become a marker of who is “really” Christian. As Church of England priest and educator Mark Vasey-Saunders puts it, “an issue that had never featured in any evangelical basis of faith came to represent the definitive mark of authentic Christian identity”.
The conflict that has led to the Diocese of the Southern Cross breaking away from the Australian Anglican church isn’t based on ancient teachings, as the new group claim. The ancient meaning of “orthodoxy” had nothing to do with sexuality, but concerned matters related to the nature of God and Christian salvation.
The position of the new denomination is the result of a modern discursive conflict over the “truth” of sex. The fact that sexuality has become central in a way it never has been before helps explain why this group decided it was important enough to leave their former church. It couldn’t be more important, as in this new “orthodoxy” the cost of giving ground is ceasing to be truly Christian at all.

Well yes, but who cares, let them sniff each other's bums, or go up them if it pleases the long absent lord, because Polonius has taken up a subject recently dear to the pond's correspondents ... the fascism inherent in News Corp, Faux Noise, and the variously coloured mandarin mango Mussolini and his cult of rabid proto-fascist clowns ...

Of course Polonius has a little skin of his own in this game. Back in the day, he used to hang around with Franco-loving B. A. Santamaria, and however you cut it, Santamaria made the use of "semi" redundant, he was a full-blown fascist lover.

In later years, Polonius did his best to trip gaily around the point ...

• Since I did not say anything about what Franco and his Nationalists did – there was no reason to talk about Franco’s reliance on Nazi Germany and fascist Italy during the Spanish Civil war.  I also did not talk about the atrocities committed on the Republican side by, among others, communists or mention the fact that the Republican government was supported by the Soviet Union.  You are probably aware that the communists even attacked the anarchists (as George Orwell documented in his book Homage to Catalonia) in addition to the Nationalists.

• For all Franco’s many faults – and for whatever reason – Spain remained neutral during the Second World War of 1939-1945.  Also, as you acknowledge reluctantly, Franco’s Nationalist dictatorship did not move against the Spanish Jews.  European Jews circa 1940 were much safer in Franco’s Spain than in Petain’s France (which collaborated with the Nazis in sending French Jews to the death camps in Eastern Europe).

• In August 1939, the Nazi-Soviet (or Hitler-Stalin) Pact was signed.  Between August 1939 and June 1941 (when Germany declared war on the Soviet Union), members of the Communist Party worldwide – including in Australia – opposed the Allied war effort and supported Nazi Germany.

• If Franco had committed Spain in support of Germany in 1939, then Germany would have conquered Gibraltar and the British naval base there would have been used to devastating effect against Britain.  The same would have occurred if the Republican government had prevailed in the Spanish Civil War – since it would have followed the directions of Josef Stalin in Moscow and supported the Nazi-Soviet Pact.  This would have led to a situation whereby Nazi Germany could have conquered Gibraltar by attacking the British colony through Spain.

• It is true that the late B.A. Santamaria supported the Franco-led Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War – which commenced when Santamaria was 21 years of age.  However, Santamaria never said or wrote anything positive about Franco after the Spanish Civil War.  Moreover, Santamaria never visited Spain and never showed any interest in Franco’s Nationalist government up until the dictator’s death in November 1975.

What a splendid amount of both siderism, what an excellent example of dancing around the point, how skilled the down-playing of Santamaria and the Catholic church and the DLP mob's love of an authoritarian fascist father figure, with perhaps the best being that line about him only being 21 years old (the pond left out Polonius' defence of the lad never signing up for action, but white feather lovers can find that here).

And yet for all that, one of the pond's all-time favourite quotes came when the onion muncher himself launched Polonius's bio of the fascist lover ...

...if his life was the failure he often protested it was, it was a magnificent failure that changed and improved our country and hundreds if not thousands of its leaders.

Of course, he was profoundly right on the big struggle that shaped our times.

‘When the bullets of the communists hit the statue of Jesus outside the Cathedral of Valladolid, for some it was just lead striking brass,’ he famously told the great Melbourne University Spanish Civil War debate; ‘but for me they were piercing the heart of Christ the King.’ (here)

That'd be the fascist lover's fascist, Franco, defending the heart of Christ ... and we've all seen the snaps ...

And with full fascist salute ...

So it's no wonder that it all feels a little uncomfortable for Polonius ...

1943, and that's about it? 

What a handy get out of jail card for Franco fellow-travellers, but it reminded the pond of a piece by William Saletan in The Bulwark, “Semi-Fascism”: The Shoe Fits Republicans’ hypocritical reaction to President Biden’s use of the F-word.

Follow the link for the full piece ... these are just a few samples ...

...Consider Rep. Jim Jordan, who will chair the House Judiciary Committee if Republicans retake the House this fall. Jordan says Biden is dividing America by “calling Republicans ‘semi-fascists.’” But three years ago, when Trump committed an openly authoritarian act, Jordan endorsed it.

In January 2019, the House of Representatives, which had a new Democratic majority, refused to fund a border wall demanded by Trump. So the president declared a national emergency to build the wall, seizing from Congress its constitutional authority over appropriations. No president had ever claimed such emergency powers to override the will of Congress. But Jordan stood with Trump. “We tried for 35 days . . . to get the Democrats to do what everyone knows needs to happen,” said Jordan. “I support the national emergency declaration 100 percent.”

You could argue that confiscating money for the wall was only semi-authoritarian. To be fully authoritarian, you might say, a leader would have to use illegal means not just to exercise power, but to seize power or stay in power. But Trump and his henchmen meet that standard, too.

Take the case of Rep. Andy Biggs, who led the conservative House Freedom Caucus during Trump’s presidency. Biggs now accuses Biden of “demonizing people and making them villains” by invoking the F-word. But after the 2020 election, Biggs, Jordan, and several other congressional Republicans directly participated in Trump’s attempted coup.

In December 2020—more than a month after Biden had won the presidency, and several days after the Electoral College had certified the results—Biggs made an incendiary video for a “Stop the Steal” rally in Arizona. He urged Trump’s supporters to “keep fighting” so Trump could stay in power. Biggs also participated in a subsequent White House meeting in which Trump unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, another apologist for the January 6th perpetrators, says Biden’s talk of fascism is ridiculous because “Democrats are the fascists.” But in 2018 and 2019, Greene repeatedly endorsed calls for political violence. She “liked” Facebook posts saying that FBI agents “need to be hung for treason” and suggesting a “bullet to the head” of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi...

...The dictionary definition of fascism doesn’t just talk about autocracy. It also includes ethnic nationalism. But by this standard, too, Trump and many of his propagandists are semi-fascist. Kayleigh McEnany, who served as Trump’s White House press secretary, calls Biden’s reference to fascism a baseless “message of hatred.” But in the summer of 2016, Trump, the de facto Republican presidential nominee, declared a federal judge unfit to preside over a fraud case against Trump University because “he’s a Mexican.” And McEnany defended this attack...

...Trump’s cult includes many other components common to previous fascist movements—paranoia, fantastic lies, anti-intellectualism, a mythologized national past, selective appeals to law and order, and propaganda about enemies of the state. When Sen. Lindsey Graham went on TV Sunday to warn that “there literally will be riots in the street” if Trump is prosecuted for breaking national security laws by hiding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—Graham repeated the line twice, to make it clear that he was serious—that’s another page from the fascist playbook: invocation of mob violence to protect the movement’s leader.

But the clearest illustration of the MAGA elite’s descent into fascism might be its embrace of a like-minded leader from another country: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

As Cathy Young, Charles Sykes, David Baer, and other writers have explained in The Bulwark, Orbán is an increasingly authoritarian ethnonationalist. In a speech on July 23, he warned, “There is a world in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” Orbán called this a “mixed-race world” and concluded, “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become peoples of mixed-race.”

Orbán’s speech was so grotesque that one of his own advisers resigned, calling the speech “a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.” But a week later, Orbán was welcomed as the keynote speaker at a Dallas meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which reveres Trump and is one of his favorite venues. Two days after that, Trump spoke to the same gathering. The two aspiring autocrats were warmly applauded.

This past Monday, CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp stoutly defended Orbán. “We support leaders who reject globalism, socialism, illegal migration and care about defending families, national sovereignty, and traditional values,” Schlapp tweeted.

Then, on Wednesday, Schlapp posted a video of himself rebuking Biden for using the F-word. “It’s the left that are the fascists,” he charged.

Say what you will about the American semi-fascists. They certainly have a sense of humor.

Sorry, William, the one thing you can say about Polonius is that he has absolutely no sense of irony, self-awareness or sensa huma ... but it's fair to say that Tuckyo and Faux Noise and the GOP in the United States love their latter-day Goebbels ... it's the News Corp way, and not dissimilar to the cult of Chairman Rupert ...

And here the pond might add a note about the cult, which is that it's important - as with the angry Sydney Anglicans and the tykes - to have a keen eye and ear alert in the search for the heretics ...

Thus you have a story in the Graudian, Correspondent abruptly leaves CNN after calling Trump a 'demagogue' ... and then there was Psychiatrist who said Trump spread 'shared psychosis' to his followers fails to win back Yale gig ...

Better turn to a few cartoons for lighter moments in the fascist cult ...

The mob mentality is strong in the land, and the cult leader loves his mob, and his mob loves him - so it was in Adolf's day - and it seems that Polonius doesn't mind that much ...

Scribbled like a true Franco lover ... meanwhile ...

But we've been there before, and with a bit of luck, the United States will do a Lindy and go there again and Polonius will be on the sidelines cheering them on ...

And so, as promised yesterday, to the dog botherer ...

Spoiler alert, this is a pretty long effort for the dog botherer, but the pond wanted to start off with a teaser trailer first gobbet to hook the unwary punter.

The bottom line is a simple one. Any notion of a voice is deeply fucked because of the far right wing emotionalism and partisan triumphalism that litters every word the dog botherer scribbles.

Poor old Noel Pearson, he did fling in his lot with a rum bunch, and they don't come any rummier than the dog botherer.

The reptiles are going to do everything to make sure it never happens - Dame Slap has been on an extended jag ravaging the notion - and so have any other number of reptiles, and as soon as the dog botherer scribbles words such as "I have been invested in it for years," the pond realises it's comprehensively fucked, and possibly dead and buried ...

All the rest that follows just adds to that sense of doom and neutered click bait videos...

The dog botherer's enthusiasm can be shattered by a single Shaq attack? And if we're worried about celebrities how did Meghan Markle and a snap of Blanchett get into the text? Isn't that exactly the same as the Shaq turning up to offer a few words? Why resort to flakes while blathering about reasoned, respectful debate?

Yep, he eventually goes there, which is enormously funny because the dog bother has no clue about reason, and even less about respect ...

But of course Cate had to be allowed in so that the dog botherer could take one of his usual, pathetic digs at climate science, and never mind the possibility that Blanchett might have more information to hand than the rabidly ideological dog botherer ...

Poor old Noel. He really did pick the wrong horse to try to cross this river ...

The pond never references the Daily Snail and would never link to it, but it did carry this reminder ...

What fine company he was in: Sophie Mirabella, Don Randall, Dennis Jensen, Alby Schultz, Wilson Tuckey ... and this wretched figure ...

And now he and Noel and the dog botherer are going to bring the bacon home?

The Epoch Times?

The Epoch Times is a far-right international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement. The newspaper, based in New York City, is part of the Epoch Media Group, which also operates New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television. The Epoch Times has websites in 35 countries but is blocked in mainland China.

The Epoch Times opposes the Chinese Communist Party, promotes far-right politicians in Europe, and has championed former President Donald Trump in the U.S.; a 2019 report by NBC News showed it to be the second-largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising after the Trump campaign. The Epoch Media Group's news sites and YouTube channels have spread conspiracy theories such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation,] and false claims of fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election. In 2020, The New York Times called it a "global-scale misinformation machine". The Epoch Times frequently promotes other Falun Gong-affiliated groups, such as the performing arts company Shen Yun.

Fits right in with the lizard Oz and the dog botherer, and sorry Noel, but if you get down with dogs, you rise up with fleas belonging to a cult...

Reasoned, respectful debate? Tell that to a climate scientist somewhere near you ...

And so to the bonus, and the pond found it impossible to resist our Gracie. In recent weeks, the pond has ignored her, but what a joy to discover she's found herself and is agin it ...

Don't ask what she's agin, she's just agin it ... because the devil is in the cliché ...

And it's true ... as far as the pond can see there's been little increase in productivity in our Gracie when it comes to productivity in relation to the lizard Oz, though perhaps her enterprise bargaining might have been a tad tricky up against a Murdochian monolith. Still, only one column a week means there's plenty of room for more scribbling - just one extra column would represent a 100% productivity surge.

Of course when we're talking real wages, perhaps instead we should be talking real Kudelka ... and tax cuts for the rich rolling up the hill ...

Then our Gracie stepped into tricky turf by getting behind the loons in Macquarie street ...

This is the mob that has been handing out Wagga Wagga largesse for yonks, while devising a completely devious structure to cover its debt.

The NSW government has attempted to cover up how it artificially inflated the state’s budgets by tens of billions of dollars after it shifted the rail network’s costs onto a corporation that still hasn’t been able to properly operate six years after it was launched.

A trove of highly confidential documents and testimony of whistleblowers reveals NSW Treasury pressured accounting giant KPMG to delete or amend aspects of a report commissioned by Transport for NSW that found the plan could end up costing the state’s coffers more than it saved.

Whistleblowers fear the new structure will fragment accountability and could eventually lead to train disasters on the scale of the Waterfall or Glenbrook tragedies, which claimed the lives of 14 passengers.

The corporation, known as the Transport Asset Holding Entity (TAHE), was part of a plan hatched in 2014 to set up a shell corporation to shift billions of dollars of expenses off the state budget and into a new rail body.

NSW Treasury was able to use the corporation, with the approval of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, to inflate the budget to help mask the government slipping into deficit in 2018.

The KPMG report last year caused a deep rift between Treasury and Transport for NSW. On November 17, Transport for NSW secretary Rodd Staples was sacked “for no cause” after 15 years in the department.

Former NSW auditor-general Tony Harris estimates the entity’s reclassification from a government body to a commercial entity meant the government’s operating result has been bolstered by more than $30 billion over the last six years.

“It’s a financial mirage because you are seeing something that isn’t there,” Mr Harris said. “It was designed to avert the prospect of the state losing its AAA credit rating by creating an apparent surplus through an accounting gimmick.” (more here)

If you were a rail worker watching these devious rorting sons of bitches (no offence to bitches intended), why wouldn't you want to shit on them from a great height?

NSW has reached the point where the only solution available to get rid of the current useless mob, and soon enough, if there's a Labor government, the time will come to get rid of them for their rorting ways. 

That's the way it's gone in cockroach land since the days of the Rum Rebellion ...

The only self-harm going down in NSW is the harm induced by having a fundie tyke in charge without the first clue, but as the state has already done that to the nation, it's probably fair dibs ...

Remember how it was back in October 2021, after Glad had encouraged workers to think rorting was just a natural part of the system, and ended up being replaced?

Reading the mind of God is a tricky business. Interpreting it with certainty, then bringing that to a position of power, is even trickier.
Few Australians would think of their nation as anything but inclusive and socially progressive, tolerant on most matters and certainly no haven for religious or ideological fundamentalism. Ask anyone if religion and politics are too closely entwined in 21st-century Australia and they may well shake their head.
Yet, within a day, it is possible that NSW, self-described as the most progressive state in the federation, may have, in Dominic Perrottet, a premier not only living under a cloud for mismanagement of the state’s workers’ compensation scheme, iCare, but who is also a highly conservative Catholic with views that represent the most extreme end of a rigidly male-dominated institutional church. (Nine)

We know how it worked out federally ...

...In Perrottet’s case – and as I write he is not yet premier, despite John Howard’s crusading - an investigation, including by this masthead, found that iCare had underpaid injured workers by up to $80 million and that the scheme had accrued up to $4 billion in debt under his administration as NSW Treasurer. 

On the vital questions of COVID-19 management, he was vocal against a lockdown which many thought anyway too late.

Too young? Too narrow in life experience and perspective? Yes, to those. But most crucially, if this growing representation of highly conservative Christians in positions of great power is to be contained in Australia, NSW needs to do better. Far better.

For far better, but more likely for far worse.

But the pond never likes to end on a sour note, so how about an uplifting cartoon from Wilcox for the closer?