In which the dog botherer launches a standard litany and the bromancer launches into the war criminal stratosphere ...

 

The pond began its weekend, as it usually does, by surveying the top of the digital page of the lizard Oz, and seeing which reptile is doing what to whom ...

"Ned" over on the top far right, his preferred perch, predicting a tidal wave? He and King Canute can be put aside for the moment, while elsewhere in the digital edition, it seems the reptiles have suddenly discovered a crisis, a health catastrophe. 

If only Aboriginal people had a voice, a say in it ... oh wait, all they've got is a reptile voice ...

Down below the pond notes that Dame Slap couldn't resist having yet another go at the Lehrmann matter, but this time, instead of nakedly taking one side, she purported to be an objective observer. 

This led to one truly wondrous line ...

Telling her story in the media before she had formalised a police complaint had the effect of unleashing a baying crowd free from the constraint of the rules against pre-trial publicity.

So Dame Slap finally admits that she's a baying hound running with the pack, free of any constraint or sense of the rules of fair play ... and as the matter is before the courts, as the lock-picking lawyer would say, that's all the pond has for you at this time, with the reminder that so long as Dame Slap's lack of self-awareness continues, satire might survive (no matter what you read below)

Down below the reptile abundance continued ...

The Angelic one is back! No matter what she scribbles about she's a firm favourite, but perhaps like Polonius can be held over. 

There's Brendan, imported to do the usual reptile job of supporting a far right fundamentalist theocratic state in its determination to maintain apartheid and gulags, collective punishment and collective displacement ... but the pond is done with that as the killing fields resume.

Over on the far right the oscillating fan has joined the pack of reptiles blathering about ball-dropping ... but truly that's "Ned" and dog botherer turf, and naturally the pond favoured the dog botherer, as the pond always does, for the right amount of Captain Spud worship ...

As is usual these days, the dog botherer in triumphalist mode was accompanied by any number of illustrations ... and it's best to get them all out of the way quickly ....

Then it's on with the triumphalism unencumbered by pictorial distractions...

Does it hurt the dog botherer even a little? He was such a fan of the referendum, and there he was, degutted by Captain Spud, and yet he bounces back like a faithful puppy, licking and slobbering all over his degutter.

It's true Aboriginal people suffered more, but it's remarkable how easily the dog botherer can forgive ... 

No, wait, it's way better than to forgive and forget, it's to immediately resume the role of head coach and bottle washer ... because we must remember the long march of groupthink through the institutions (the long march of groupthink through the lizard Oz is another matter entirely).

And so to an old routine, and an eternal mystery. Given that the dog botherer has spent decades denying climate science, why does he bother?

Sure he slowly came around to accepting there is such a thing, but it's always been in the context of suggesting flood and fire is the usual way, and get used to it, and that Bolter style, a little warming might even be a good thing for those wanting to holyday in Antarctica ...

Back on 14th June 2014, there he was in the 'Tiser, sharing his pearls of wisdom and insight with other crow eaters, under the heading The climate change debate suffers from too much emotion and too little rational analysis ... (just for once there's a link to a News Corp rag - it's the crow eaters, and it was once the pride of North Terrace, what can you do? - but the pond doesn't know if there's a paywall) ...

Inter alia ...

Of course the onion muncher has been, and always will be, a "climate science is crap" sort of guy - he was in London walking that talk with that junkie recently - and covertly the dog botherer is with him, but the canny dog botherer knows that these days, it's much more cunning and devious to take it seriously enough ... enough, that is, so you can troll the greenies by deploring renewables and talking of nuking the country ...

You see? Works every time ... and with a bonus internet joke, and never mind that the onion muncher once ordered Malware to destroy the internet to save Chairman Emeritus Rupert's business model, and Malware loyally attempted to do it, and managed to do a pretty good job at that ...

Next in the litany comes the usual groaning about furriners, and while he's no Dame Groan, the dog botherer knows how to stick to the corporate line ... as well as maintain the war on China, a trick borrowed from comrade Sheridan ...

Apparently the routine smearing of everyone within earshot by Captain Spud and his team is just fair game, but when it comes to their turn, they don't like a bit of cold steel up 'em ...

The pond started out in hight spirits, as it usually does, but it was a relief when this litany came to a final gobbet of moaning and whining ...

The pond is on board of course. That's what happens when you spend years absorbing reptile propaganda ... inevitably it rots your mind, and you slowly lose your marbles, though not to Greece ...

In fact, the pond has only one question of any note. How can Captain Spud join the greats when there's an abiding issue ...

Is it cruel to mock the follicle-challenged? 

Nah, Mussolini never had an issue, and that reminds the pond that Charlie Sykes did a tidy job of observing the always incipient fascism inherent in the United States in Remember When America Loved Mussolini? ...

...Mussolini also knew how to put on a show.
For many Americans, Mussolini was not merely a violent dictator, he was a celebrity, a precursor of a type that would become familiar over the next century. Shortly after his march on Rome, the Birmingham Age-Herald wrote that Mussolini looked “like a movie star.” Writes Hahn:
The cult of personality that Mussolini nurtured played to an appreciative audience, and he, aware of the cameras and public fascination with feats of daring, drew comparison to the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Lionel Barrymore, and Jack Dempsey. He was a man of action not words, a problem solver, a warrior, and a devoted Italian nationalist.
Mussolini’s rise to fame, writes historian Giorgio Bertellini, “coincided with the full development of Hollywood star culture, which often paid surprising homages to his popularity.”
In February 1927, for instance, Motion Picture Magazine published a photograph of Hollywood’s power couple, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, doing what we would consider today unthinkable: making the Fascist salute. The accompanying caption explained that their gesture was a personal tribute to Il Duce, whom they had met the year before in Rome, and closed with an expression of their admiration: “There’s nothing like going to an authority!”

And the pond loved the accompanying snap ...

Golly, it's hard to see Captain Spud making a success of that model ...

But all that's by way of a digression, because today the bromancer delivered a meisterwerk, and naturally the pond had to feature it ... though it ran on and on ... and it took the bromancer back to his own warrior days when he ran with the NCC pack ...

That's the last snap the pond will show for some time. The bromancer's homage was littered with snaps, but the pond took all of them out, so that the bromancer's keen and astonishing insights could parade in their own bright colours ...

Naturally the pond thought about doing a point counter point. There were any number of chances, of the kind offered by David Klion saying his own farewell in The New Republic yesterday ...

The pond enjoys this sort of game, but fair warning, Klion simply wasn't up to the bromancer, who kept on and on and on ...

The pond offered Klion every chance ...

... but the cunning bromancer was now in short gobbet mode, filling in the spaces between the snaps  ...

So a couple more Klion gobbets would see him done ...

 ....because there were many more short bromancer bits to go ...

There is a benefit in the juxtaposition. It's a reminder of just how weird the bromancer is, when put up against almost any other scribbler ...

Under the relentless pressure, the bromancer occasionally shows signs of weakening ...

But in the end it's Klion who runs out of steam first ...

Meanwhile there were five short gobbets of bromancer to go ...

The pond isn't going to waste precious time actually responding to the bromancer. The pond's position on Kissinger has already been run around the block. He's a war criminal who should have been hauled off to the Hague.

The only good thing to emerge from his career was Tom. Lehrer's line "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize."

But to be fair, the bromancer keeps trying his hand at political satire, albeit of an unconscious kind ...

It goes without saying that the bromancer is still fighting the war in Vietnam. As the old saying goes, you can take the B. A. Santamaria out of the bromancer, but you can't take the bromancer out of his B.A. Santamaria days ...

It's a variant on the great betrayal routine, the "we wuz robbed" line,  which ran rife, with the belief in certain circles that the war was still there to be won ...

Here the pond should turn to the National Review for a special insight ... yes, the pond will go anywhere in search of far right comedy ...

Kissinger’s share of the prize (i.e., half) was worth about $65,000, and he used it to set up a scholarship fund for the children of fallen or missing servicemen. He named the fund after his parents.

His co-laureate turned down the prize on the strange grounds that the Paris Agreement was not being implemented. Kissinger puts it very well when he says that this was “another insolence” on the part of North Vietnam: Its violations had, in fact, turned the agreement into a “farce.”

Around the Western world, reaction to the 1973 award was fierce, scornful, and bitter. Reaction in the Nobel committee itself was not exactly happy. Two of the five members resigned. Representing a fair chunk of establishment opinion, the New York Times said that 1973’s was “the Nobel War Prize.”

What a contemptible man he was. 

Anyone with the slightest sense of grace and self-recognition would have recognised the absurdity and declined the prize, and his counter-part had the grace to do it.

Dress it as "strange" if you will in a National Review way, but talking of North Vietnamese insolence is down there with Dr. Strangelove for comedy, coming from a man full of arrogance and insolence ... and perhaps political satire did die that day, and so the pond must keep waiting for the next Dr Strangelove to come along ...

In the end, the bromancer forgives all, and falls into line with talk of "vast ability", even if that alleged ability was in the pursuit of personal glory and war criminal aims...

The real tragedy? The bromancer won't have the war criminal around to offer guidance as the bromancer conducts his forthcoming war with China ...

And so to a collage of all the snaps that went with the bromancer piece ... all bits of window dressing designed to add to the glory of the war criminal ... showing him keeping all sorts of fancy pants company and attending prestigious moments and events, and how he would have loved it, and so the pond just had to down size it, and run the collection at the very end  ...

The pond would have swopped them all for a single cartoon ...