Please just go Joe ...

 

... not that the opinion of an obscure blogger down under amounts to a hill of beans in the scheme of things, but the pond's American friends are in a state of abject hysteria, and the Democrats as usual are fiddling while the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and a rough beast slouches towards Washington, and then there's the orange Jesus's Project 2025, the sequel to Project 1984, and while he denies any knowledge of it, he wishes his cronies all the best, which means the very worst, vexed to nightmare, and besides, watching Morning Joe rabbit on endlessly about Lincoln and endlessly repeat himself like a senile cable loon has become unendurable.

Look Joe, it's okay for doddering nonagenarians to get out and about and fuck the planet and blather on ... the Chairman Emeritus is doing it today in the lizard Oz, a nutter talking of nuts ...

... but the world needs somebody to take down the orange Jesus. Just the thought of banning all pornography should be enough to get the juices flowing ... and wait 'till they hear that sex should only be in marriage for purposes of procreation ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, maestro, a little mood music, or at least a little setting. For those who can get past the WaPo paywall, there was an excellent aggregation of stories ...

You won't find any of those in the lizard Oz. AP also delivered the goods, with tales of Vegas suffering, and we're not talking about pumping cash into the slots ...

AP also delivered the goods with tales of ice to go with the tales of fire ...

For masochists there were more personal tales ... stories of Death Valley and bikers dying in Death Valley and NPR noting A third hiker has died in the Grand Canyon in less than a month ...

That should surely set the mood for a special treat ... a gaseous Groaning on the Friday ...

You can take Dame Groan off the Santos board, but you can't take the Santos out of the groaning, and so the reptiles featured a snap of dear sweet gas and a couple of reprobates ...

For all of that, it as a disappointing effort, with a standard gassing of all those who thought gas might not be helping...

As for the planet? Keep on gassing it, and paradise will await...

... but sadly after that offering of extra gas, there was just one last gasp of groaning to go ...

Having warmed up with a Groaning - so much warming - it was time for a jolly good nuking of the nukes and Malware with Ted ...

Just the snap of a smirking Malware was enough for the pond to declare Ted the winner ...

 

That snap of a power plant didn't placate Ted ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, no costings. Quelle surprise. Ted was feeling decidedly chill, more Alaska than Vegas ...

Apropos of all this, there was a lovely Wilcox to hand ...

Always wanting to support y'artz, the pond had to note the Wilcoxian reference ...

Pity Giotto forgot to include the cash in the paw. Every Catholic church needs brown envelopes to keep the Ponzi scheme running ...

The pond supposes it should now turn to the last of Ted's nuking, luckily short, but with a good gassing designed to delight Dame Groan...

Of course this is all just a preliminary to a good serve of erudite Islamophobia from the pompous, portentous Henry ...

The first rule of bigotry and bigots is to never let up, and our Henry knows how to maintain the rage.

Sure there might be a genocide going down. 'Uninhabitable': Gaza City district levelled by Israeli army after invasion, and dire famine as a war tactic and a war crime ...

... but our Henry knows what to rant about ... Mark Scott ... with bonus Hannah and that viperish woman ...

It wouldn't be a Henry offering without some arcane reference, and this day he turns medievalist ... not quite the same as Thucydides, but enough to produce a gagging or a hollow Sierra Madre laugh ...

When does a pompous blowhard become a caricature of himself? Around 1215 would be a good date ...

And then it was on to Hannah ...

Funny, when the pond thinks of Arendt these days, it thinks of this story ...

There was more, well worth the quoting if you can't read the Gessen piece in The New Yorker... (Politico did an interview with Gessen which is outside a paywall)

...Here is the offending passage from Gessen’s New Yorker article, In the Shadow of the Holocaust:

“But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards –Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

The irony is almost too thick to cut.

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975. As a Jewish German woman who was forced to flee Germany in 1933, after being arrested and detained by the Gestapo, Arendt’s writing on Germany would be more controversial than Gessen’s own. The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

“The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

Gessen’s comparison was more light-footed than Arendt’s, whose reflection appears eerily prescient, but their rhetorical tact wasn’t enough to stop the censors at the gate in Germany who police what one can and cannot say about Israel, cowing the Foundation into compliance...

And so on, and the hole in the bucket man does a pretty fine job as a member of the thought police ...

Yeah, love it or leave it, do it the way we do things around here, or disappear off to the cornfields. It's the 1215 way ... cue the darkness and the thick irony...

Politico: Your essay cited Hannah Arendt but a foundation affiliated with the German Green Party withdrew from awarding you the “Hannah Arendt Prize.” Did you find that ironic?

Gessen: The layers of irony are almost impossible to unravel. Hundreds of people at this point have said that Hannah Arendt would not be eligible for the Hannah Arendt Prize. But I was also corresponding with this philosopher, Susan Neiman — an Israeli citizen who lives in Germany who is a premier scholar of German politics of memory — and she wrote to me saying Arendt wouldn’t even be able to get a visa to come to Germany, if she needed a visa of course.

So, there’s that irony. But yes, my essay cites Arendt a lot because I read her as insisting that we make comparisons to the Holocaust and to Nazis and to totalitarianism all the time. Not in the sense that we need to level everything and say that everything is like everything else. But in the sense that with these things being the worst that humanity is capable of, we always have to be checking to see if we’re sliding into that darkness again.

Luckily there was only one small gobbet of darkness and nausea to go ... comically with a member of the reptile 'leets blathering about the 'leets.

In a nutshell? Just another dose of Henry bigotry dressed up in academic bile. Meanwhile, in another country...

No need to end in gloom however. The pond is sure that the infallible Pope and the immortal Rowe will lift the spirits and allow the pond to end on a high celebratory note...

Foolish pond ...perhaps a song or two instead?