In which the pond spends its time spurning reptile offerings, before snacking with the Riddster and Jenny ...

 

Like the pond's correspondents, the pond was profoundly disturbed to read the venerable Meade piece in her Weekly Beast ... not because of her satirical thrust at Killer Creighton's follies, but because of the need to inspect the entrails, decipher the runes, work out what she was foretelling ...

There it was, right at the get go ... 

The Australian's outgoing Washington correspondent ...

Outgoing?

Did she mean merely that Killer was ebullient, vivacious, zestful, irrepressible, effervescent, high spirited, at ease in social situations, a companionable reptile, or did she mean that Killer was going somewhere, perhaps out?

 But out where? Where would the going be out to?

As the venerable Meade demonstrated, doing research the pond couldn't be bothered to do, Killer is one of the lizard Oz's very best loons, his loss would be inestimable ...

The Graudian has been approached for comment.

From now on the pond will be on high Killer alert ... and though the pond had no right to expect an appearance this day, the pond's agitation was compounded by Killer's absence ... 

It had been two days since his report on the resignation of the Columbia president, dated the same day as his cry for freedumb, but today, no outgoings ...

Worse, today left the pond with many reptile dilemmas...

Okay, there's a red card for Dame Slap ... blathering on yet again about the Lehrmann matter. 

The pond has no interest in cultivating that deeply weird form of obsessive compulsive behaviour ...and has resolutely refused to indulge the Dame in her devotion to a man found guilty of rape ...which somehow has resulted in an unhealthy obsession with the victim.

Then there was the Ughmann, usually a safe pair of hands ...but dropping the ball this day ...

Did you note it? 

For some reason, perhaps using the excuse he's scribbling about the Hawke years, the Ughmann demoted Keating from Prime Minister to Treasurer, which would be a bit like the pond describing this approach as a typical leitmotif of the former seminarian's style ...

And then there was that deeply weird, truly primitive juxtaposition of Keating and the former seminarian in what passes for PhotoShop skills at the lizard Oz these days ...

At least Crikey used the occasion to roll out Keating's greatest hits: Warm lettuce to desiccated coconut: Paul Keating’s greatest hits ranked on our Sledge-O-Meter™ (paywall).

The pond can't report them all, but there was some controversy as to whether they captured all the top material ...

This produced some correspondence, (paywall) including, weirdly, a devotee of Cheryl and Hawthorn football club, trying to promote his book ...

Former foreign minister Gareth Evans writes: You missed a few PJK classics, as I recorded in this paragraph extracted from my book, Incorrigible Optimist: A Political Memoir. I think you’ll agree that the last on my list has a particular claim to immortality.

“Even some of his cruellest lines had a certain wit and elegance about them. Think of his description of Malcolm Fraser in 1982 as an ‘Easter Island statue with an arse full of razor blades’; or his response to Andrew Peacock returning as Liberal leader in 1989, ‘Can a soufflé rise twice?’; or his ‘Because I want to do you slowly’ response to John Hewson asking him in 1992 why he would not call an early election; or his dazzling extended riff responding to John Howard’s claim that the 1950s was a golden age, suggesting that Howard’s, and Hewson’s, proper place was in a museum alongside the other icons of that age ‘the Morphy Richards toaster, the Qualcast mower… and the AWA radiogram’.

In a line which, sadly, does not seem to have made its way onto the public record, I remember Paul also once describing, I think, John Howard — although it could have been any of a number of other Tories — as having “all the charm of a used suppository”.

Spoiler alert, after all that, the pond returned to the last of the Ughmann, and realised that it was in the company of a gnat or a minnow ...

No, the mark of a small man is one who demotes a Prime Minister to Treasurer for no particular apparent reason, except perhaps, spite or malice ... and as for China, relax, the bromancer has promised the pond that his long-awaited war with China will surely happen no later than Xmas this year.

Then to compound the pond's problems, the dog botherer went particularly rabid this day, scribbling such a dog column, so full of dog attitudes and dog rhetoric and the urging on of dog acts that the pond yearned for Kristi Noem to deal with the thing ...

The pond isn't going to offer the whole thing, it's boofhead headkicker hysteria in the style of Captain Spud, without a shred of empathy or humanity...

The reptiles made it worse by featuring this video...

The sight of genuine suffering only egged the dog botherer on ...

...When social cohesion is being threatened by levels of open Jew hatred that we have never seen before, governments have a duty to act with caution.
The opposition is reluctant to criticise Burgess. Yet his role must be under scrutiny after his acceptance of “rhetorical support” for Hamas and his claim a week earlier that Islamophobia presented a threat “almost equal” to anti-Semitism.
Politicians and authorities should be openly discussing the threat of Islamist extremism and joining with Muslim communities to combat it.
Instead, they infantilise those communities and seek to mollify any discontent while seeking to divert attention or create false equivalence – in the end this approach could generate more resentment than tackling the issues head-on.
When anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic protests and rhetoric is tolerated but Islamist extremism is never mentioned, public trust can be lost.
At the media event to increase the terror threat level last week Burgess did not mention Islamist extremism once but he did mention Islamophobia.
All this is unfolding when our immigration intake has reached a new record level, adding the population of Tasmania last year. Almost one-third of all Australians now were born overseas.
Public confidence in our immigration system and national security is more important than ever. And social cohesion is vital.
This means calling out extreme rhetoric or behaviour on all sides. And placing our domestic security ahead of all other considerations.

As a guide to where the dog botherer was going, the reptiles also offered this video, featuring a man deeply devoted to shit-stirring and bigotry and boofhead division ...

The full text accompanying that video?

Former prime minister Tony Abbott urges the government that their first duty is the “safety of Australians”. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called for a ban on all refugees from Gaza. “We have enough Hamas sympathisers in this country already,” Mr Abbott told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “We have too many Hamas sympathisers in this country. “It is a disgrace that we have had these massive protests almost from the very beginning effectively in favour of Hamas, we’ve got rampant antisemitism. “I would simply remind everyone in this government, your first duty as a government is the safety of Australians.”

What an ugly, ugly man he is ...

That's why the pond blinked, and that's why this was about as much as the pond could take ...

Much of this debate will be seen through the prism of partisan politics. But it is much more important than that; it is about preserving our multi-ethnic success story and protecting our communities from imported hatreds.
Still, when it comes to politics it is all downside for Labor. They are exposed in a traditional area of weakness, so they are failing to type.
And it plays into Dutton’s strongest suit. They have ridiculed him for years as a hard man and now they have created a situation where a hard man will be needed.
The vicious calls of “racism” and Islamophobia from the teal independents could cost them dearly, especially in Wentworth and Goldstein where there are significant Jewish populations. It is toxic to throw this slur around, and it is pretty stupid, too, given Gaza refugees are refused entry to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and almost everywhere else.
For Dutton the logic is simple: “Could you imagine if we were proposing to bring people in who were sympathetic to another listed terrorist organisation, like al-Qa’ida or ISIL or ISIS? It’s completely unacceptable. And the government’s trying to patch this up, but they are putting our country at risk.
“We can take people in a measured, responsible way, that’s not what they’ve done.”
Hard to argue with that, you just need the toughness to implement it.
Strength on borders and security tends to be a non-negotiable with voters. Not because they are racist or xenophobic but because they are smart. Labor, the Greens and the teals should know that.
But once more they have lost sight of it in a frenzy of self-defeating moral superiority.

The pond had to reach for a cartoon to wash the stench from the eyeballs...

After all that winnowing, and with Lloydie of the Amazon still MIA, the pond decided it would be better off returning, as a Tamworth dog might to its vomit in the noon day sun, to a triumphant Riddster, missed by the pond, but not so long ago ...

That's more like it ... everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and the reptiles helped out with a glowing video of a glowing reef and a huge snap of the Riddster up against his mortal enemy ...

The Riddster was in exceptional form ...

Now there will be pedants out there who've been deceived by the headlines ...

Bloody Voice of America, the pond doesn't need an English language learning exercise... bloody alarmist cardigan wearers... Great Barrier Reef teeters on UNESCO's 'in danger' status after Coral Sea's hottest summer in 400 years

Trust in the Riddster, he's a chairman of something ...

A prophet in his own lunchtime ...

So that's where he is at the moment ... and for more on the Australian Environment Foundation, follow that link to DeSmog, where you can see how the Riddster is the latest in a long conga line ...

The Australian Environment Foundation has consistently attacked the science of human-caused climate change.  Many of its more outspoken current and former directors, including Alan Moran, Jennifer Marohasy, the late Dr Bob Carter, and Dr Peter Ridd, have claimed that the evidence that climate change is caused by humans is unconvincing. 
The group’s “Climate News” section links to a regular newsletter by AEF director Alan Moran, hosted at Moran’s Regulation Economics website. 

Feeling much better, the pond decided it could do a Jenny George chaser ...

George has become the classic bee in bonnet woman residing in the reptile hive mind, and can always be relied on to generate a satisfactory level of hysteria, dressed up as "seeing through the spin" ... which is to say, renewables terrible, no good, awful ...

You'd think the pond would learn its lesson about clicking on reptile links, but much like those cartoon characters that keep on stepping on the rake, the pond clicked away, only to land on a lizard Oz editorial, rather than proof that Australia's power prices are among the world's highest ...

The pond realises that providing a link to actual data would mean stepping outside the hive mind, but what the heck, there are many sites providing data, including this one ...

Why couldn't the reptiles provide their own data? Why was the pond left brooding about Ireland? How could we compete with the Irish? How soon could we knock them off their proud perch?

And then the reptiles did it again...with the next gobbet beginning with a link ...

Once again the link didn't lead to hard core evidence, but instead to a reptile sob story ...

Luckily by this time the pond had reached the final gobbet ...

A final rake to step on? 

D'oh ...oh dear sweet long absent lord that link was to the Ughmann trying his hand at wit, and so the circle was complete, the reptile ouroboros resolved, the pond's sanity lost ...

No, no, let us not review, let us not step on reptile rakes, let us have a closing cartoon, let us have something truly weird ...