Even Dame Groan gets distracted by the narcissist snake oil salesman hogging the lizard Oz limelight ...

 

Re-watching the Pakula/Redford/Hoffman show All the President's Men and arriving at the point where the crowd shouted "four more years" for a notorious crook, the pond realised that perhaps the return of the mango Mussolini might in time prove a boon for Hollywood creatives in search of Oscar nominations - unless of course the industry does a 1933 turn, and the creatives have to head for Britain, Europe or New Zealand.

Such talk isn't allowed in these unity days, though the question does arise that if Trump is America's Hitler, as once suggested by J. D. Vance, what does that make Vance? 

America's Joseph Goebbels, or Hermann Göring, or Heinrich Himmler? Minister of propaganda and fervent follower seems the best slot, though he must do something about that beard to fit the image ... (only toothbrush moustaches please) ...

Such jokes aren't allowed these days, which is a pity, given the way that the deeply in the tank Judge Cannon, cued by a line thrown out by the deeply corrupt Justice Thomas, sitting in the deeply partisan and corrupt SCOTUS, has given the mango Mussolini an out, as intended all along. (Watergate features in that LA Times story).

Meanwhile, it's slowly dawning on the Democrats that the doddering, tottering Joe Biden has cost them a place at the post-assassination game, and stories like Mehdi Hasan's piece in the Graudian are starting to emerge: 

Blue Maga: we need to talk about the cult-like turn of the Democratic party, The calls for Joe Biden to step aside have been met with furious accusations of treason, disloyalty, and betrayal. This is bad for the entire country

Naturally the lizard Oz was full of stories of the MAGA Trumpian kind. Just look at the way that the top of the digital edition has gone full MAGA tabloid this morrning:

The pond supposes that it could have written about the way that the Climate crisis is making days longer, study finds.

Or the pond could have noted US journalist Masha Gessen convicted in absentia by Russian court, and reprinted the line “the massacre in Bucha will never be forgotten ... Russian fascists will never be forgiven for this” in the hope that Vlad the Impaler's lackeys would convict Dorothy  Parker in absentia for "spreading false information," aka the truth about the criminal sociopath.

The NY Times offered a prepper moment with Is There a Future in the Doomsday Economy? With Fortitude Ranch, the entrepreneur Drew Miller is betting on franchised timeshares for people who are worried about the end of the world, but sadly it's inside the paywall and outside the pond's herpetological studies. 

On the other hand, now might be the time to go full prepper, assemble the bug out bag and head to the bolt hole.

There's also no way to draw attention to the ongoing genocide, reported in the Graudian, Dozens of Palestinians killed in latest attacks on Gaza City, say officials. Sure the EU tried a knuckle rap regarding the West Bank, far too little, much too late.

The pond had even hoped for some relief from the Trumpian follies with a jolly good Groaning on renewables or migrants, but she too had succumbed.

Never mind, so be it, the pond has never stood in the way of Dame Groan in full groaning.

The pond regrets that it must agree with Dame Groan about the likely return of the mango Mussolini, but at least the professional bankrupt will continue to maintain indifference to the deficit, and with a bit of luck, might bankrupt the US economy, and plunge the world into turmoil, and the resulting depression might ease the strain on global warming, given that the orange Jesus will offer no salvation in this area.

Always look on the bright side ... and always quickly skim through the illustrations and video accompaniment ...

 

The pond had expected the mango Mussolini's attitude to migrants and refugees to give Dame Groan some solace, but she remained bleak ...

When you've lost Dame Groan, something is badly wrong ... but all is not lost, because she still manages to slip in a "woke" reference in the next gobbet ...

Did Dame Groan just fling up her arms in despair? The pond would have thought she'd be wildly excited by the thought of deporting pesky, difficult furriners and building a wall, but she sounds lukewarm about everything.

She does try to retrieve a little hope in the final gobbet, but it's a feeble effort ... as if the MAGA cultists are going to worry about policy matters when there's cult business to attend to ...

Yeah, yeah ... it's as if those first four years reducing policies to a few dot points have been swept under the rug, as if an aging narcissist was suddenly going to be able to change his stripes, when the real business will be letting the crazies loose. 

He's not going to shift from telly watching in the morning and sniffing burgers and wings, and suddenly embark on serious, learned discussions of the world trading system. He's an expert serial bankrupt, and he'll stick with what he can do best ...

The bromancer was on hand to try to provide an alternative, uplifting view, thereby ensuring a depressing start to the day...

Inevitably the bromancer would deliberately omit a matter of more than passing concern for some ...

Instead the reptiles offered the usual video distractions ...

 

And there was a cruel snap of Joe suggesting he'd missed out on the fish ...

 

As for the rest of the bromancer's piece, there was an uneasy ambivalence on view ...

Here's the really depressing bit ... the pond has noted it before and will use a 'toon to note it again ...

Meanwhile, the bromancer continued to offer bland vacuities in lieu of insight ...

Oh sheesh, there he goes with his white Xian nationalism again, doing his worst Josh Hawley impression.

For an alternative view, there was David Remnick in The New Yorker a few days ago under the header A Nation Inflamed, After the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, who can heal a country so threatened by menace, violence, and division? (paywall)

...Who is capable of bringing to this terrible moment the kind of moral sense that R.F.K. managed just hours after Dr. King was shot dead outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel? Many elected officials, Republican and Democrat, did issue statements denouncing violence and expressing relief that Trump had survived the attack. Many refrained from exploiting the event for political gain. But not all.

J. D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio and a candidate to be Trump’s running mate, declared on social media that the shooting in Butler was “not just some isolated incident.” He added, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, added more fuel to the atmosphere of conspiracy: “Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”

Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, tied the shooting in Pennsylvania to Trump’s myriad criminal convictions and indictments. “They try to jail him. They try to kill him. It will not work,” he posted on X. “He is indomitable.”

In the coming days, things will not likely get better. In a fevered and divided country, some will try to generalize the person and meaning of Crooks, a twenty-year-old high-school graduate who is both a registered Republican and, reportedly, a fifteen-dollar donor to a liberal voter-turnout group. When more details of his life emerge—and they inevitably will—it may be hard to know what it all means. If it means anything at all.

“For historians violence is a difficult subject, diffuse and hard to cope with,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, in his essay “Reflections on Violence in the United States.” “It is committed by isolated individuals, by small groups, and by large mobs; it is directed against individuals and crowds alike; it is undertaken for a variety of purposes (and at times for no discernible rational purpose at all), and in a variety of ways ranging from assassinations and murders to lynchings, duels, brawls, feuds, and riots; it stems from criminal intent and from political idealism, from antagonisms that are entirely personal and from antagonisms of large social consequence.”

What must be said, contrary to the rhetoric of Vance, Scott, and Abbott, is that Trump has, to say the least, done little to calm or to unify the country he once led and is campaigning to lead again. Unfortunately, it is hard to recall a public voice in living memory who has done more to arouse the lowest passions that so often percolate within individuals and the greater society. Even as one expresses genuine relief that Trump escaped a worse fate on Saturday (and sympathy for the family of the spectator at the rally who was killed), it is legitimate to describe what Trump and his rhetoric have meant to the country. He began his political career with statements like “When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18, @BarackObama was Barry Soweto.” And he went on from there, year after year. After Obama attended a public viewing for Antonin Scalia, but not the funeral, Trump asked, “I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of Justice Scalia if it were held in a Mosque?” With dizzying frequency, he trafficked in the demagogic language of dehumanization, of “scum” and “vermin” and “animals” and “enemies of the people.” And then there was “Lock her up!” and “Stand back and stand by.” In 2016, he deployed familiar bigoted tropes, declaring that “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.” Over and over, he has glorified brutality, whether it was the desirability of police throwing “thugs” into “the back of a paddy wagon” or a congressional candidate body-slamming a reporter because he dared to ask about health-care policy. (“Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my type,” Trump said.) When he heard that MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi had been hit by a rubber bullet during a demonstration in the wake of the death of George Floyd, he called it “a beautiful sight.”

Trump has always dismissed the idea that he has contributed to the division and inflammation of the country’s state of mind. When asked if his language was divisive, he replied, “I don’t think my rhetoric does at all. My rhetoric is very—it brings people together.” And yet he has not hesitated to mock his victims, even when their loved ones were victims of assault. Nancy Pelosi was “crazy,” he said. And when Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was brutalized by a hammer-wielding attacker, he asked, sarcastically, “How’s her husband doing? Anybody know?” The Capitol Hill insurrection, which threatened the lives of Pelosi, Mike Pence, and other political leaders, found its inspiration in the rhetoric of one man.

That language, that lack of empathy, cannot serve as an example or a way forward. It is absolutely right and necessary to denounce in the clearest terms the crime that we witnessed Saturday in Pennsylvania and feel relief that the result was not even worse than it was. At the same time, one hopes for a sensibility and moral temper of the sort that stepped to the microphone in Cleveland, in April, 1968, to reject violence as an instrument of politics or rage and to pay tribute to an avatar of humanity and peace:

"Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember—even if only for a time—that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek—as we do—nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again."

Two months after delivering that speech, Robert Kennedy won the California and South Dakota primaries and had a good chance to defeat Richard Nixon and win the Presidency. He addressed his cheering supporters in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom, in Los Angeles, and then tried to leave the building through a crowded kitchen. A man in his mid-twenties named Sirhan Sirhan approached him, raised a handgun, and fired multiple times. Kennedy died at Good Samaritan Hospital the next day. He was forty-two years old.

Yes, yes, all that, back to Watergate days again, and just think of the new movie material that's going to be produced, even if the show has to be shot in Pinewood ...

And so to the last two bro gobbets, in which he attempts a little uplift...

The trouble of course is that the bromancer believes in pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye, and transubstantiation and burning or talking bushes, and also believed that Brexit was a splendid idea, destined to produce a triumphant little England...though that no doubt will allow him to scribble another tale, "Little England has always been good on the rebound. I believe it still is... and here, have this wafer, it'll get you into heaven, currently located somewhere beyond Mars ..."

Of such are delusions and conspiracies made ...

Finally, Mein Gott was on hand yesterday, and for a nanosecond the pond hoped that it would be able to offer a world class UFC style fight, Mein Gott v. Dame Groan, three hard rounds on migrants ...

In memory of that lost opportunity, the pond can only note Mein Gott scribbling in praise of furriners...

If only for the way that major parties don&resquo;t understand &mdash don't know how to use a scalpel, it was worth the outing ...

There were a couple of snaps accompanying this heretical outburst, with one just the usual sort of iStock visual pabulum ...

The pond would have preferred some explanation for the infallible Pope of the day ...

Then in a couple of quick gobbets the heresy was done and dusted ... and Dame Groan nowhere to be seen ...

It's to be hoped that Dame Groan will return next week to knock the stuffing out of these outrageous heresies ... and incidentally by then hopefully the Republican convention will be over and everybody can get back to the business of demonising everybody else ...

Meanwhile, is there an upside for the narcissist snake oil salesman yet again stealing the limelight? 

Well on any other day, the reptiles would have been full of other matters, but all that could be seen at the top of the page as an alternative to the orange Jesus was a little feeble greenie bashing by that lesser member of the Kelly gang, one Joe, and the lizard Oz editorialist ... crammed in below, just for fun and for those with reading glasses ...

All well and good and to be expected - coal and gas and nuke the country - but as a result, Setka and the CFMEU were nowhere to be seen, and it was left to the immortal Rowe to celebrate...

Or is the absence from the lizard Oz an admission that the reptiles missed out, and it was the Nine rags that scored in what was once sacred reptile union-bashing turf?

You've got to laugh, or there'll be tears before the day is out ...