In which the pond looks at the art of enabling and assorted reptile enablers ...

 

NBC's notorious hiring of notorious liar and election denialist and full-blown Trumpist Ronna McDaniel (until she got Trumped) caused even Chuck Todd a little distress, as noted in Variety, Chuck Todd Blasts NBC News On-Air Over Ronna McDaniel Hire:

...During the interview, Welker pushed McDaniel on her views on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election as well as former President Trump’s promise to pardon anyone punished for involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Most controversial decisions by TV news outlets are discussed behind the camera, not in front of it. But NBC News has been called out by its journalists in the past. In 2019, MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow delivered a stinging monologue in primetime during her cable program that examined concerns about NBC News’ treatment of Ronan Farrow, who had begun investigating disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein while at NBC News, then took his work to The New Yorker after NBC declined to put his work on air.
NBC News’ decision to hire McDaniel has clearly rankled some staffers, with MSNBC President Rashida Jones issuing calling top producers and anchors Friday, according to a person familiar with the matter, telling them they had no mandate to book McDaniel or to keep her off their programs.
“There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News uncomfortable with this, because many of our professional dealings over the past six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.,” Todd said. He suggested McDaniel’s contributor deal was made in exchange “for access.”

Grifters gotta grift and McDaniel discovered a "new me" in the process - amazing what a contract and cash in the paw will do - but that mention of Farrow and The New Yorker reminded the pond of a review by Adam Gopnik, The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers, The Nazi leader didn’t seize power; he was given it. (paywall). It featured historian Timothy W. Ryback’s new book, “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power”, which focusses entirely on the events of 1932.

The point is the way that enablers and lickspittle lackeys and useless fools helped in the rise of Herr Adolf, with Herr Donald obviously in mind:

..Ryback spends most of his time with two pillars of respectable conservative Germany, General Kurt von Schleicher and the right-wing media magnate Alfred Hugenberg. Utterly contemptuous of Hitler as a lazy buffoon—he didn’t wake up until eleven most mornings and spent much of his time watching and talking about movies—the two men still hated the Communists and even the center-left Social Democrats more than they did anyone on the right, and they spent most of 1932 and 1933 scheming to use Hitler as a stalking horse for their own ambitions.
Schleicher is perhaps first among Ryback’s too-clever-for-their-own-good villains, and the book presents a piercingly novelistic picture of him. Though in some ways a classic Prussian militarist, Schleicher, like so many of the German upper classes, was also a cultivated and cosmopolitan bon vivant, whom the well-connected journalist and diarist Bella Fromm called “a man of almost irresistible charm.” He was a character out of a Jean Renoir film, the regretful Junker caught in modern times. He had no illusions about Hitler (“What am I to do with that psychopath?” he said after hearing about his behavior), but, infinitely ambitious, he thought that Hitler’s call for strongman rule might awaken the German people to the need for a real strongman, i.e., Schleicher. Ryback tells us that Schleicher had a strategy he dubbed the Zähmungsprozess, or “taming process,” which was meant to sideline the radicals of the Nazi Party and bring the movement into mainstream politics. He publicly commended Hitler as a “modest, orderly man who only wants what is best” and who would follow the rule of law. He praised Hitler’s paramilitary troops, too, defending them against press reports of street violence. In fact, as Ryback explains, the game plan was to have the Brown Shirts crush the forces of the left—and then to have the regular German Army crush the Brown Shirts.
Schleicher imagined himself a master manipulator of men and causes. He liked to play with a menagerie of glass animal figurines on his desk, leaving the impression that lesser beings were mere toys to be handled. In June of 1932, he prevailed on Hindenburg to give the Chancellorship to Papen, a weak politician widely viewed as Schleicher’s puppet; Papen, in turn, installed Schleicher as minister of defense. Then they dissolved the Reichstag and held those July elections which, predictably, gave the Nazis a big boost.
Ryback spends many mordant pages tracking Schleicher’s whirling-dervish intrigues, as he tried to realize his fantasy of the Zähmungsprozess. Many of these involved schemes shared with the patriotic and staunchly anti-Nazi General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (familiar to viewers of “Babylon Berlin” as Major General Seegers). Hammerstein was one of the few German officers to fully grasp Hitler’s real nature. At a meeting with Hitler in the spring of 1932, Hammerstein told him bluntly, “Herr Hitler, if you achieve power legally, that would be fine with me. If the circumstances are different, I will use arms.” He later felt reassured when Hindenburg intimated that, if the Nazi paramilitary troops acted, he could order the Army to fire on them.

Pace NBC's enabling, naturally the 1932 media are featured:

...Ryback’s gift for detail joins with a nice feeling for the black comedy of the period. He makes much sport of the attempts by foreign journalists resident in Germany, particularly the New York Times’ Frederick T. Birchall, to normalize the Nazi ascent—with Birchall continually assuring his readers that Hitler, an out-of-his-depth simpleton, was not the threat he seemed to be, and that the other conservatives were far more potent in their political maneuvering. When Papen made a speech denying that Hitler’s paramilitary forces represented “the German nation,” Birchall wrote that the speech “contained dynamite enough to change completely the political situation in the Reich.” On another occasion, Birchall wrote that “the Hitlerites” were deluded to think they “hold the best cards”; there was every reason to think that “the big cards, the ones that will really decide the game,” were in the hands of people such as Papen, Hindenburg, and, “above all,” Schleicher.

Still doing it today, with this other mention:

...Second only to Schleicher in Ryback’s accounting of Hitler’s establishment enablers is the media magnate Alfred Hugenberg. The owner of the country’s leading film studio and of the national news service, which supplied some sixteen hundred newspapers, he was far from an admirer. He regarded Hitler as manic and unreliable but found him essential for the furtherance of their common program, and was in and out of political alliance with him during the crucial year.
Hugenberg had begun constructing his media empire in the late nineteen-teens, in response to what he saw as the bias against conservatives in much of the German press, and he shared Hitler’s hatred of democracy and of the Jews. But he thought of himself as a much more sophisticated player, and intended to use his control of modern media in pursuit of what he called a Katastrophenpolitik—a “catastrophe politics” of cultural warfare, in which the strategy, Ryback says, was to “flood the public space with inflammatory news stories, half-truths, rumors, and outright lies.” The aim was to polarize the public, and to crater anything like consensus. Hugenberg gave Hitler money as well as publicity, but Hugenberg had his own political ambitions (somewhat undermined by a personal aura described by his nickname, der Hamster) and his own party, and Hitler was furiously jealous of the spotlight. While giving Hitler support in his media—a support sometimes interrupted by impatience—Hugenberg urged him to act rationally and settle for Nazi positions in the cabinet if he could not have the Chancellorship.

It provided a different opening for the pond, which regrets it can't go into further detail, either regarding the stories of long ago enablers, the NBC's current enabling or The New York Times' fetish for decades-long enabling, because it must turn to the local enablers, the lizards of Oz...

So Dame "Spice Girl" Slap is back to her usual form, and so must be red-carded, while Magnay the magnificent manages to make it all about Harry and Meghan again, while over in the much desired, top of the far right digital edition, the Major ruled the roost.

More on the Major later, best first check below the fold ...

Simplistic Simon still enabling the mutton Dutton, an echo of the enabling at the top of the page, while the Monk should have stayed in cloisters with his feeble attempt to parallel Gaza and Haiti, as a way of justifying ongoing famine, collective punishment and genocide ...

What alternative did the pond have but to turn to the government-funded MRC senior fellow Caterist, doing his standard flood waters in quarries whispering and renewables denying?

It's been awhile since the pond has spotted the Dick, but no doubt the Dick would be pleased that the reptiles decided to provide a huge accompanying shot of the Dick, lessened in impact because the reptiles filled the Caterist piece with other distractingly huge snaps ...

Once they were out of the way, and the spotted publicity hound Dick had served his purpose, the Caterist could get on with a standard bashing of renewables ...

At some point nuking the country to save the planet will come into play ... but first we have to endure a splash of say it ain't so Saul, because the spotted Dick is the savant of the day ...

And so to a rousing finale, with the Caterist ending with a plea that nuking the country can be done really fast ...

For anyone wondering, every single link in the Caterist piece led to another piece in the hive mind. 

The reptiles never want any of their aging demographic to leave the bubble at any time. Any other rag would have at least provided a link to the ABC fact check ... which ended with this note ...

During a 2023 Senate inquiry into a proposed bill to lift Australia's nuclear energy moratorium, Gillian Hirth, the chief executive officer of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency said: "It can take anywhere from three to five years to do a significant review of regulations in Australia. But then, once you have that framework in place, you are still probably looking at 10 years minimum for development [of nuclear facilities], I would think."

"[I]f the decision were taken today, you would be lucky to have anything in operation for potentially 15 years," she said.

As for the planet in 15 years? Don't you worry about that, but the pond feels inclined to add another link, not because it makes any political points, but because it's there and because the pond will link to almost anything to escape the hive mind ...How long does it take to build a nuclear reactor?, aka how long is a piece of string ...

And so to a dalliance with the frock wearers, in particular a fisher of fools, reminding the pond that it's not for nothing that the lizard Oz is known as the Catholic Boys' (and occasional Woman) Daily ...

The pond was bitterly disappointed that the snap didn't show the full flowing effect of the frock - someone has to stand up for the rights of cross-dressers - as the fisher of fools argued for the right to keep on with the bigotry ...and maintain a fierce hostility to the mixing of threads, while explaining the fiendishness of devouring crabs and oysters, and men loving men and women loving women ...

Incidentally that review of the book about 1932 mentioned the Catholics ...

...Meanwhile, the centrist Catholics—whom Hitler shrewdly recognized as his most formidable potential adversaries—were handicapped in any desire to join with the Democratic Socialists by their fear of the Communists. Though the Communists had previously made various alliances of convenience with the Social Democrats, by 1932 they were tightly controlled by Stalin, who had ordered them to depict the Social Democrats as being as great a threat to the working class as Hitler.

And, when a rumor spread that Hitler had once spat out a Communion Host, it only made him more popular among Catholics, since it called attention to his Catholic upbringing. Indeed, most attempts to highlight Hitler’s personal depravities (including his possibly sexual relationship with his niece Geli, which was no secret in the press of the time; her apparent suicide, less than a year before the election, had been a tabloid scandal) made him more popular. In any case, Hitler was skilled at reassuring the Catholic center, promising to be “the strong protector of Christianity as the basis of our common moral order.”

Ah, yes, the Xian way and a strong moral order. And there was a final irony ...

...Hindenburg, in his mid-eighties and growing weak, became fed up with Schleicher’s Machiavellian stratagems and dispensed with him as Chancellor. Papen, dismissed not long before, was received by the President. He promised that he could form a working majority in the Reichstag by simple means: Hindenburg should go ahead and appoint Hitler Chancellor. Hitler, he explained, had made significant “concessions,” and could be controlled. He would want only the Chancellorship, and not more seats in the cabinet. What could go wrong? “You mean to tell me I have the unpleasant task of appointing this Hitler as the next Chancellor?” Hindenburg reportedly asked. He did. The conservative strategists celebrated their victory. “So, we box Hitler in,” Hugenberg said confidently. Papen crowed, “Within two months, we will have pressed Hitler into a corner so tight that he’ll squeak!”

“The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction,” Goebbels said as the Nazis rose to power—one of those quotes that sound apocryphal but are not. The ultimate fates of Ryback’s players are varied, and instructive. Schleicher, the conservative who saw right through Hitler’s weakness—who had found a way to entrap him, and then use him against the left—was killed by the S.A. during the Night of the Long Knives, in 1934, when Hitler consolidated his hold over his own movement by murdering his less loyal lieutenants. Strasser and Röhm were murdered then, too. Hitler and Goebbels, of course, died by their own hands in defeat, having left tens of millions of Europeans dead and their country in ruins. But Hugenberg, sidelined during the Third Reich, was exonerated by a denazification court in the years after the war. And Papen, who had ushered Hitler directly into power, was acquitted at Nuremberg; in the nineteen-fifties, he was awarded the highest honorary order of the Catholic Church.

Naturally the man who ushered in Hitler would be honoured by the enabling church, and now back to the fisher of fools, doing his best for the current enablers of hate, fear and loathing ...

That talk of doing the best for migrants (strangely not refugees) will strike a chord with the Major doing his usual Major piece below.

Meanwhile, thank the long absent lord that there are Xians outside the fold, free of the bigotry and the desire to demean women, thereby forcing the fisher of fools to talk of "traditional Xian beliefs", which is to say that in some sections of Xianity the superstitions and bigotries of ancient goat herders are still a potent force ...

The Angelic one would be pleased by the brooding about that ACT hospital, where you might whistle in the dark for anything but deep south style, Texas fried care when it came to a therapeutic abortion ...

Enough already from this frock-wearing fisher for fools, it's on to the Major, last and always least ...

Correspondents have routinely noted to the pond that asylum seekers, refugees and migrants have usually arrived by plane ... you can even enjoy advice on how to do it at Move to Australia ... so the pond won't bother with any of that, it'll just do the Major cold turkey ...

Those concluding remarks in that book review might have some bearing here ...

...Does history have patterns or merely circumstances and unique contingencies? Certainly, the Germany of 1932 was a place unto itself. The truth, that some cycles may recur but inexactly, is best captured in that fine aphorism “History does not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.” Appropriately, no historian is exactly sure who said this: widely credited to Mark Twain, it was more likely first said long after his death.

We see through a glass darkly, as patterns of authoritarian ambition seem to flash before our eyes: the demagogue made strong not by conviction but by being numb to normal human encouragements and admonitions; the aging center left; the media lords who want something like what the demagogue wants but in the end are controlled by him; the political maneuverers who think they can outwit the demagogue; the resistance and sudden surrender. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness. It dies in bright midafternoon light, where politicians fall back on familiarities and make faint offers to authoritarians and say a firm and final no—and then wake up a few days later and say, Well, maybe this time, it might all work out, and look at the other side! Precise circumstances never repeat, yet shapes and patterns so often recur. In history, it’s true, the same thing never happens twice. But the same things do.

Does the Major dwell in the past and want to fight the same battles? 

As if you needed to ask ... it's not that far from the mango Mussollini to Major Major, with the Major a classic enabler and spewer of FUD ... not to mention a regurgitator of the meretricious Merritt ...

Yes, yes, the pond knows that planes are the way to fuel brothels by packing them full of imports, but we must stay with the Major, dwelling in his happy past ...

Now the pond isn't going to blather on about habeas corpus - first kill all the amateur lawyers - but even the pond had an inkling that locking someone up indefinitely without any prospect of relief of any kind might prove a bit too much Guantanamo Bay for Australia's legal system ...

It seems the Major himself might almost begin to realise it, only for the Major to have a sudden fit of the Sharris ... which is way worse than Dame Slap turning Spice Girl ...

Strange that the Major didn't mention events in Moscow and blame it on Ukraine, but there's always another day for the reptile enablers ...

And so, in what's been a light cartoon day for the pond, to note that the immortal Rowe has a devil of a time celebrating the Tasmanian triumph ...

It's always in the detail ... the many ways to peel, dress and present a potato ...