In which the pond comes up short and fails its herpetology studies ...

 

The pond apologises, but this day it decided to take a hike from its herpetological studies ...

The digital edition of the lizard Oz explains why ...

Peter's principles? The only principle involved here is the Peter principle, and the pond felt the immediate desire to set off a couple of Wilcox cartoons ...

As for that pompous, portentous old fart pretending that he's the possessor of moral clarity, it was simply too much for the pond to bear ... especially as he broke Godwin's Law and went the Nazi/Hitler route, not to mention a reptile offering of huge snaps of a couple of other historical figures ...

The pond could only note a few lines from the pompous, and this day deeply offensive, bore ...

Confronting them required moral clarity – the moral clarity to distinguish radical evil, which endangers everything that is decent in this world of ours, from ordinary enmity. Instead, the appeasers, by conjuring a moral equivalence between victims and executioners, sowed the confusion that made the cataclysm all the more certain. 

Meanwhile, on another planet ...

The pond headed off to WaPo to read Israeli troops scour Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital for evidence of Hamas presence (paywall) ...

...Commentators in Israel said the military would need to show more evidence to support assertions that al-Shifa has been a Hamas stronghold for more than a decade, something doctors working there have denied.
“We would not let anyone use the hospital for any non-civilian or nonmedical purposes,” said Qudra, the Health Ministry spokesman.
Families of some of the Israelis held hostage by Hamas called for the government to release any evidence that captives may have been held or treated at the hospital. The IDF said that investigation would continue.
While support for the war remains high among the Israeli public, a political fissure appeared to widen Thursday with for calls for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step down.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid for the first time called for Netanyahu’s Likud party to replace him as party chief, which would amount to removing him as prime minister without needing new elections to be held. Opposition parties, Lapid said, would be willing to serve in a government with Likud under different leadership.
“He needs to go now because we can’t afford, in terms of security and society, a prime minister who has lost the public’s confidence,” Lapid said in an interview with an Israeli news station.
Anger at Netanyahu has been high as even some of his supporters blamed him for both the failure to prevent the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. and his long-standing policy of bolstering Hamas in the first place, a strategic attempt to sow division among Palestinian factions.
Polls taken in the weeks after the attack showed two-thirds of Israelis wanted to see Netanyahu replaced. Support for Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s main rival who joined him in October at the head of an emergency war cabinet, has been soaring.

Read that WaPo line again, and try to parse it with the pompous old bore's blather about moral clarity:

Anger at Netanyahu has been high as even some of his supporters blamed him for both the failure to prevent the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. and his long-standing policy of bolstering Hamas in the first place, a strategic attempt to sow division among Palestinian factions.

The doddering delinquent did offer a billy goat butt, couched in the most offensive way imaginable ...

None of that implies the Palestinians have no grievances; but the Germans had their grievances too. It was, for example, undeniable that there were large German majorities in both the Sudetenland and Danzig, the crisis points of 1938 and 1939. When the Nazis demanded those territories, their claims were, much like Hamas’, couched – and this was the pretence – in the respectable language of self-determination. The London Times, in endorsing appeasement, had no difficulty in describing them as “justified by ethics and policy”. 

Then came this deeply offensive billy goat butt ...

No less egregious is the constant pairing of vicious anti-Semitism with the taunts some Muslim women have experienced for wearing hijabs. 
Those taunts are utterly despicable; but an abyss separates their severity from the menaces that have forced the Jewish community to guard creches, schools and synagogues from potentially deadly attack. To pretend otherwise is not merely foolish: by placing murderous rage on a par with ordinary stupidity, it trivialises – and hence excuses – the Jew-hating fury that disgraces our streets.

Then to explain why it's fine to ravage a hospital, send people south and then start making the south even more unsafe, the pompous bore offered this ...

In the end, national unity demands moral direction, not moral equivocation. So too does our ability to face the future, for the unhinging of the nation’s moral compass doesn’t merely extinguish the courage to speak the truth: it erases the courage needed to see it. In a world that is far from being at peace, and where devastating cataclysms are not simply the painful memories of the old but looming threats to the young, that doesn’t just blind – it kills. 

Moral direction from a thug of the Benji Hamas-boosting kind? Sorry, the pond can't go there, all the more so as he thought it was a really cunning move to use Hamas to degut the PA ... now mired in corruption and powerlessness ...

Meanwhile, things got no better down below the fold in the comments section ...

The pond summoned the strength to take a look at the Lynch mob, what with the Lynch mob apparently unaware of the power of the Israel lobby at the lizard Oz ... but faltered. 

There was no way to do gobbets, each line required a response, so the pond just settled for a few quotes ...

A simple and enduring argument, but mostly wrong. The more remarkable feature of US foreign policy is its pro-Arab/Muslim bias. It is the impact of this lobby – not an Israeli one – that needs to be accounted for. 

Given the all-in attitude the US government has offered in recent times, it was such a preposterous line that the pond sent its muesli all over the iPad ...

Then there was this ...

...In the 2000s, George W. Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq wars had as an aim the liberation and democratisation of their peoples. In 2011, Barack Obama made US force complicit in the killing of Muammar Gaddafi, who had been terrorising Libyans for four decades. Hardly an anti-Muslim bias.
In 2012, Waleed Aly beat me up on live radio for making this argument. But it has held in the years since. Despite US wars to liberate Muslims from bad government, in the hope that Israel would be made more secure thereby, Islamist fervour has grown in Western circles.
The huge, angry crowds marching against Israel – in Sydney, London and Washington – after the worst massacre in its history are evidence of the weakness of the Israel lobby. 

Might it not be evidence that bombing the shit out of civilians, and attempting ethnic cleansing and collective punishment had  something to do with those marches?

Then the Lynch mob dragged in the modern equivalent of Godwin's Law, which is to say  US identity politics ...

I argued in these pages last week that Australia’s colonisation by US identity politics has made us stupid. Students increasingly navigate a world divided by their teachers into oppressors (Israelis) and oppressed (Palestinians).
Israel, the exclusive home of gender equality, LGBTQI+ rights, and pronoun preferences in the Middle East, has been incapable of countering this depressing pedagogical revolution. Where was an all-powerful Israel lobby, and its world-class universities, in this battle? 

All the pond could do was think of fragile Melbourne uni student minds exposed to Lynch mob thinking. From what the pond could work out, it was much better to be a gay bashing, TG hating fundamentalist Islamic, because then you'd be on side with the Lynch mob, roaming the streets ready to lynch the gays ...

Eventually the Lynch mob came to a rousing conclusion, but all the pond could think was how far the University of Melbourne had fallen ...

...Contra Mearsheimer and Walt’s bestseller, a Zionist/Israel/Jewish lobby has not bent the US public and polity to its will. It has not corrupted congress or whispered in the President’s ear. Instead, the crimes of October 7 have been imbibed by Western elites as a legitimate resistance to Israeli “settler coloniser” oppression.

The more difficulty Israeli spokespeople have had trying to persuade our own ABC journalists of their just cause, the more apparent become the limits of any Israel lobby.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of political science at the University of Melbourne and author of In the Shadow of the Cold War: American foreign policy from George Bush Sr to Donald Trump. 

Okay, it was that talk of 'leets that did it, coming as it did from a wanker sheltering in the cloisters ...

... so the pond failed its unit in hole in the bucket, and Lynch mob, studies ... and all it had to show for its diploma was an infallible Pope cartoon ...

Oh and there was this attempt at balance too ...

But there had to be something, so the pond took a deep breath and turned to Killer's letter from America ...

Say what? Killer's gone soft? And has anyone else noticed that the bro seems to have been MIA in the last week, just when there's been an urgent need to keep up the spirits if we're to have his war with China by Xmas ...

Meanwhile, it seems the Biden gang recognises that Chairman Xi is an offensive dictator doing nasty things at home and abroad, but regime change isn't something that's going to come easy, and it's best to get along with the dictator, in the hope that he doesn't bung on a Taiwan do, and ruin the world the way he's ruined the economy and climate science ... though here we have our own standards to uphold ...

What a detour, but back to Killer for another gobbet ...

China's support for Israel? Never mind, the lizard Oz will fill that gap - send in Henry and the Lynch mob and they'll do the trick - and so to a final gobbet, with the pond feeling unnerved by Killer's mild tone. It was only when the pond got to the last par that the pond could feel that the old Killer spirit was still there ...

Meanwhile, the mango Mussolini and his cult followers, and so the United States, steadily drift towards authoritarianism and a generous dose of fascism ...

As an aside, the pond will note that it read the jerking Jennings in an attempt to find some reptile content this day, but instead came away with this ...

I cannot imagine a previous prime minister – going back to Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, and John Howard, and their successors – who would have arrived at an APEC without an Australian “10-point plan” or similarly titled piece of paper, setting out an agenda for the meeting to address the big economic and strategic problems of the day.

Actually, if the pond might be so bold, the Peter principle is that the PM shouldn't have made the trip at all, let alone have a fatuous ten point PowerPoint presentation in his briefcase...

Strangely, the jerking Jennings decided to do a Killer, using allegedly senile Joe as a demonstration of the right way to do things...

For a contrast in approach, consider President Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping and the detailed White House “read out” of the meeting. What is striking is the precise way that Biden sets out US differences with China even as they identify areas for co-operation.
Beyond agreeing the value of talking and the promise of more talks, we have no similar level of clarity around Australia’s agenda for engaging China.

Was it only a year ago that the bro was urging the lizard Oz readership to prepare for war with China, offering a tremendous level of clarity for engaging with China? 

Actually it as less than a year, because that gobbet above was produced in December ...

Just for the sake of completeness, the pond turned to Will for a final word on the war with China ...

Say what? They're using the Albanese government's favourite word? But shouldn't he have stayed at home, and sulked, like Captain Potato wanted?

Will had no answer ...

Indeed, indeed, and what's remarkable in all this coverage is that apparently the bro's assertive cries for war with China in the lizard Oz never actually happened ... it was all a pond fever dream.

And yet only a year ago you could find him on the Bolter, with the pair preparing for war ...

Australia must help the US fight against China if conflict breaks out, according to The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan.

“If the Americans are fighting in the Pacific and dying to safeguard democracy and we stay out of it, that’s the end of the American alliance,” he told Sky News host Andrew Bolt.

There were the brave armchair warriors preparing the campaign ...

Sorry, the pond didn't have the heart to do a hot link to the armchair warriors in action, but showing them in all their glory meant that the pond had to shrink the snap of jolly Joe ...

Then it was on to a final gobbet from Will, with the pond struggling to recollect, and coming to the conclusion that this was the first time that Will had graced the pond's pages ... but was pleased to see that he was in the grip of the usual reptile ability to deny reality and fail to remember the glorious war mongering bromancer years of yore ...

And as the pond puts it, the reptiles are going to be reptiles, and that's why occasionally the pond fails its herpetology course, but luckily the immortal Rowe is going to be the immortal Rowe ...

They never did manage to make a decent movie out of that book, but the pond was pleased to be reminded of the terrible graphics they used to devise for Australian releases, before the US hegemony took over ...