In which the pond returns to the usual suspects for a cartoon-led Sunday meditation and recovery session ...

 

Regrets? The pond has a few, perhaps too many to mention. The pond regrets that yesterday when it mentioned the Killer in passing ...

... that it didn't honour Killer with a Klassic Kartoon ...

The pond regrets that it can't spend quality time with Charlie Sykes at Ron DeSantis: Real Man of Political Genius ...

...As chance would have it, the debate will take place the same week that his main rival for the GOP nomination will be arrested, fingerprinted, and have his mugshot taken — after his fourth criminal indictment.
His strategy?
Defend Donald Trump.

The pond regrets that there's nothing in the lizard Oz that provides an easy segue to a story in The Graudian, Vice blocked an article criticising Saudia Arabia. This is why we published it instead. 

There's even less reason to provide a direct link to the story, Saudi LGBTQ refugees live in fear of being kidnapped, but there, it's done, another regime led by a sociopath celebrated ...

The pond regrets it has even less reason to link to a Daily Beast story, Layoffs Gut Project Veritas: ‘What the F*ck Happened Here?’, outside the paywall here. This was a baying mob, designed to produce sting videos of the most reprehensible kind, suddenly whining about power-drunk tyrants and layoffs ...

The pond also regrets that it's always forced to choose between reptiles ...

Garrulous Gemma made an astonishingly bold claim on the pond's attention by suggesting a link between gender identity and a hatred of Israel ... but the pond could only showcase that bit of her meandering mendacity ...

For a moment, the pond wondered if gruesome Gemma had more than her tongue in her cheek when she mentioned gender identity and anti-Semitism, but decided even this weird 'sensa huma' was beyond her. 

Meanwhile, the exceedingly corrupt and cynically far right Netanyahu wanders off, unnoticed by garrulous Gemma ...

The pond also regrets that it's been constantly red carding the likes of Dame Slap and petulant Peta. The pond knew that Dame Slap most likely couldn't resist mentioning the Lehrmann matter for the umpteenth time, but the pond decided to give it a go, and instantly regretted the choice ...

The pond regrets that it immediately went searching for a word to describe women hating women, but it seems that "misogynist" covers the entire field.

The pond regrets that its search turned up some pop psychology, and even worse that the pond was beguiled by Berit Brogaard's 12 Ways to Spot a Female Misogynist ...

But at last it became clear, as the pond scurried through the examples, and landed on this ...

The Misogynistic She-Devil

1. The She-Devil sees herself as superior to other women, and at least on a level with, if not above, the top alpha males she encounters. In her view, other women are manipulative, dishonest, irrational, incompetent or unintelligent, but somehow she is exempted. She might possess some stereotypical feminine virtues like beauty and slenderness. But she perceives herself as instantiating the stereotypical masculine virtues of intelligence, the strength of character and rationality, and her behavior is more manly than that of her male coworkers, classmates or friends. Don't be surprised if she can outdrink all of them.

2. She is in constant competition with other women and would rather kick a woman off the career ladder or out of school than help her progress. But she masterfully escapes detection and punishment for her bad behavior. As you wait for the elevator with your box of memorabilia and your withering office plant, your rival is one step further up the career ladder, her triumphant laughter hanging in the air.

3. She is host to dark personality traits. Her firm belief that she is superior to other women points most strongly to narcissism. But narcissistic traits are also routinely present in borderline personalities and psychopaths. In the general population, dark traits tend to be subclinical, which means that they are not associated with the level of dysfunction seen in clinical cases. But mixing high functionality with sinister character traits is more likely to give you a Molotov cocktail than a Cosmopolitan.

It seemed pretty clear cut, and the pond found it completely impossible to read on without thinking of that she devil narcissism ...

It all fits, and that talk in the pop psychology study of shafting rivals reminded the pond that in recent years, Dame Slap has become an expert recipient of leaks ...

There was this yarn, for example ...

The pond would like to have run the full story, but with the deepest regret, it stumbled across Kieran Pender's story in The Saturday Paper, The climate case that has the Morrison government scrambling (seemingly outside the paywall), with the lede The leaking by the Morrison government of court submissions shows its antagonistic attitude towards the judiciary, particularly in cases related to climate change. 

Of course Dame Slap has become a conduit for leaks, notably in the Lehrmann matter, but wherever else she can skew and distort ... and at the heart of it is that aforementioned she devil misogyny ...

Of course you could never suggest that Dame Slap was interested in collegiality and kindness. Take her classic rant, which the pond likes to revive every so often, and which survives at the WSJ ...

Of course the WSJ version is stripped down. There's no reference to the likes of Alan Jones or Dame Slap's daughters, as in the original ... as found at the WM here ...

Instead the WSJ ended with a classic bit of pandering, of the kind that only a narcissist in her prime could manage ...

Thank you America? Narcissists know how to don the MAGA hat, but should the pond go there?

No, better to have a cartoon-led recovery ...

Sorry, Sunday is where the pond likes to have a cartoon-led recovery day, and it was badly needed, because in her final gobbet, naturally Dame Slap returned to the Lehrmann matter, as Tamworth dogs returned to their vomit after being affected by the noon day sun ...

Did the pond learn anything? Well perhaps there is a place for pop psychology in the universe ...

She is host to dark personality traits. Her firm belief that she is superior to other women points most strongly to narcissism. But narcissistic traits are also routinely present in borderline personalities and psychopaths. In the general population, dark traits tend to be subclinical, which means that they are not associated with the level of dysfunction seen in clinical cases. But mixing high functionality with sinister character traits is more likely to give you a Molotov cocktail than a Cosmopolitan.

The pond regrets that topping up of the lizard Oz Molotov cocktail, but even more deeply regrets that its bonus is the traditional reading of prattling Polonius, flogging a long favourite 'Nam hobby horse ... and naturally, inevitably, it's all the fault of the ABC ...

Is it possible to out pedant a pedant? If we're talking about a drawdown of forces, there was this ...

Billy, with the koala bear looks and the split skirts wife, just finished what Gorton had started, because forelock tugging to American decisions was the way to go ... and he did it in such a half-arsed way that there will still troops to withdraw when Gough arrived on the scene ...

After the Whitlam Government was elected on 5 December 1972, it decided to withdraw the last of the Australian troops from South Vietnam. So the AAAGV was disbanded on 17 December 1972. The last veterans of the AAAGV, including the AATTV, left South Vietnam in two RAAF C-130 aircraft on 18 December. (link as above)

So indeed the Whitlam government did withdraw the last of the Australian troops in Vietnam ...but weasel-word Polonius has a way out of that one ... 

Never mind, the pond had promised a cartoon-led recovery, and as the United States has been mentioned, that's more than enough of an excuse ...

Now back to the Polonial prattle, and whadday know, there's the aforementioned weasel words suddenly land ...

Suddenly 'troops' have become 'advisers' ... because that's how Polonius does his history, and that's how you can deprive Gough ... never mind that they were army troops, they were just a bunch of training advisers  ...

Indeed, indeed ... though the pond does recall that there were a lot of white feathers out and about back in the day ... by the likes of lickspittle war mongers and followers of Ming the Merciless ... and yes fellow traveller Polonius was big on the war ...

But enough unpleasantness ... this is cartoon-led recovery day ...

And so to the final gobbet ... and it finds Polonius in defiant mood, and as an expert peddler of fake history, you can rely on him to recognise the art ...

Never give up, never admit you're wrong, never admit it was a futile and stupid war. Never wonder at the damage done to the United States, and to Vietnam, and to countries such as Cambodia, caught up as collateral damage.

At least Robert McNamara had the grace to have a conscience, instead of  a meal of mealy-mouthed platitudes and authoritarian Lee Kuan Yew as a reference ... Smithsonian here ...

Vietnam was a war the Americans couldn’t win and Robert McNamara couldn’t make peace with.

In April 1964, a U.S. Senator described Vietnam as “McNamara’s War.” Robert McNamara himself, in the middle of his tenure as defense secretary, embraced the moniker, wrote Tim Weiner for the New York Times on the occasion of McNamara’s death in 2009. “I am pleased to be identified with it,” he said, “and do whatever I can to win it.”

Less than four years later, he sat in front of the yellow backdrop of a newscast and announced his resignation, on this day in 1967. “No one of my predecessors has served so long. I myself did not plan to. I have done so because of my feeling of obligation to the President and to the nation,” he says. A beat passes.  “Although I have felt for some time that there would be benefits from the appointment of a fresh person.”

8,500 miles away, the war would ultimately cost 58,000 American lives and more than three million Vietnamese ones, to say nothing of its long-term impacts on the country where it was fought. The Vietnamese people and American veterans continue to endure the effects of Agent Orange exposure today.

McNamara wrote in a 1995 memoir that his own behavior in shaping the war was “wrong, terribly wrong,” but, to many—including then-editor of the Times Howell Raines—that confession was too little, too late.

“His regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers,” Raines wrote in an editorial.  “The ghosts of those unlived lives circle close around Mr. McNamara.”

Even if insufficient, Weiner writes that his contrition appeared sincere. McNamara was frank about his career in The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara, and in his autobiography.

“I think the human race needs to think more about killing,” he says in the award-winning documentary’s trailer. “How much evil must we do in order to do good?”

The “lessons” McNamara discusses in the film encompass many of the military events he participated in or witnessed during his career: American firebombing of Japanese cities during the Second World War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and of course Vietnam.

“What I’m doing is thinking through this in hindsight,” he says in the documentary. “... I’m very proud of my accomplishments, and I’m very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I’ve made errors.”

McNamara expressed regret, but never made a formal apology for his central role in stoking the conflict in Vietnam. Nor did he speak out after stepping down, although by 1967, as Raines wrote, he realized the war had to be stopped to avoid “a major national disaster.” His public contrition came at almost a thirty-year remove from when it might have affected the war.

“Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose,” the Times editor wrote “What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late.”

Eight years after that editorial was written, Fog of War premiered. McNamara lived another six after that, dying in his sleep on July 6, 2009, at the age of 93.

There are plenty of other studies of McNamara's failure and regrets ... in The NY Times here he was reported talking about the Domino effect, much beloved by the likes of Polonius ...

Polonius has long peddled a variant of the Domino theory, relying on the thoughts of authoritarian Yew ... (behind the lizard Oz paywall, but available at Polonius's self-publishing institute, from way back in 2016)

...Certainly the Vietnam war was lost by the Saigon government. However, the 521 Australians who fell in the conflict did not die in vain. As Edwards acknowledges, the US-led Vietnam commitment delayed a communist victory by 10 years — much to the benefit of nations such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. This was also to Australia’s advantage.

Long-time Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015) once pointed out that Southeast Asia was better able to withstand a communist victory in Vietnam in 1975 than it would have been a decade earlier when the non-communist nations of Southeast Asia were not so well established. That’s not a myth.

Note how the loss is lumped on to the Saigon government. Note how the dominoes were saved, though Vietnam has had a Communist government since the end of the war, and remarkably southeast Asia isn't in a position to oppose the Chinese government turning the south China sea into a communist lake.

How did Pearls and Irritations turn up in that mix?

How might it all have ended up in an alternative counter-factual universe?

...Ho Chi Minh became a communist in the 1920s and launched a revolution back home in the 1940s after the Japanese occupied French Indochina during World War II. Again, he looked to the US for help.
Agents of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to the CIA — were parachuted into the jungles of North Vietnam in early 1945 to make contact with him; in fact, a US medic helped nurse him back to health from dysentery and malaria.
The initial US intelligence assessment of Ho Chi Minh was that he was more nationalist than communist and was an acceptable partner. So, the US provided him with weapons and training teams to help teach his Viet Minh guerrillas how to fight.
Ho Chi Minh's admiration for the US is most clearly seen in the language he wrote in Vietnam’s own declaration of independence, which he issued on Sept. 2, 1945, just as the Japanese empire was crumbling in defeat. The first line of that declaration is a direct quote from the American version: "All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
It’s likely this was partly sincere, and partly a play for US help in decolonization, based on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's anti-colonial rhetoric.

Talk about missing a counter-factual boat.

As for what McNamara thought about the Domino effect, this was what he had to say ...

...Mr. McNamara says he belatedly concluded that the domino theory enunciated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and subscribed to by his three successors was wrong: The loss of South Vietnam never threatened to undermine the entire American position in Asia or to undercut United States credibility elsewhere.
"On the contrary," he writes, "it is possible we would have improved our credibility by withdrawing from Vietnam and saving our strength for more defensible stands elsewhere."
Others in Government reached similar conclusions but did not share them widely. Mr. McNamara discloses that Richard Helms, at that time the Director of Central Intelligence, sent President Johnson an eyes-only memo in September 1967 that the President showed to no one and that Mr. McNamara only recently read. Based on a detailed agency study, it said that, contrary to what was then established American doctrine, the effects of "an unfavorable outcome in Vietnam" -- a United States defeat or withdrawal -- "would not be permanently damaging to this country's capacity to play its part as a world power working for order and security in many areas."

But you have to hand it to Polonius. He's a stubborn, blinkered, silly old bugger, without the capacity of even a McNamara for some introspection and reflection, and completely incapable of admitting he's been flogging a head horse for decades ...

On the other hand, on the upside, the United States is diligently playing its part as a world power wording for order and security in many areas, and the pond will end its cartoon-led recovery with one celebrating success ...