In which the unholy trinity of Polonial prattling, Switzer swishing and Bromancer blathering tests the limits of a Sunday meditation ...

Yesterday, the pond took it easy. 

Today is a huge slog, an Everest of a climb, a toil, a trudge, which hardly seems fair for a Sunday meditation, but it is what it is...

On the upside, there's no nattering "Ned", but on the downside, the unholy trinity on hand to day would try the patience of the most understanding parish priest. Even the amiable Don Camillo might find it hard to focus on the voice of Jesus coming through his crucifix up against this noise machine...

First up, always given pride of place on a Sunday, is Polonius and his prattle, and the astonishing news is that he's briefly abandoned his pursuit of the ABC to mount a valiant defence of empire...

Truth to tell, Polonius has never met a colonising he hasn't liked, and any hint of revisionism or alternative thinking is likely to send him and his dog into a frothing, foaming frenzy ...

It so happens that the pond acquired the original print ADB, and makes some fair use of the ADB online, and it also happens that much of it manages to sound a little antiquated and in need of updating.

Remarkably that link provided by Polonius led to Blainers himself explaining that times change and that views of the past occasionally need fresh eyes ...

And so on, and if Blainers can do a little recanting, you might expect to at least make an attempt, but let's face it, this bloody Nolan is a bloody woman, so it's a bit of a struggle...

Talk about ways to get Polonius agitated. Next thing she'll be saying women have been dreadfully underestimated, as if you could say anything about creatures who sheltered in kitchens and contributed very little to the proud colonial enterprise ...

This scandal has been brewing for some time. Way back in 2019 the handmaidens attempted a bit of revisionism ...

Did you know fewer than 4% of entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) record women who flourished during Australia’s early colonial history?
The ADB Editorial Board is committed to increasing women’s representation with 1,500 new entries recognising womens’ achievements prior to 1900.
If you would like to nominate candidate/s whose ‘productive’ contribution was prior to 1900, complete the template provided or email the details listing name, date of birth, death (approximate dates), reasons for nomination and sources to support your nomination. If you need assistance researching the life of a prominent Australian woman, please consult one of our members.

Outrageous, and Polonius wasn't buying ...if they want to go desperately seeking Susan, they should do it in a movie ...

Talk about heresy, and as a closer Polonius raised an issue dear to the pond, and to Major Mitchell... that bloody Commie lickspittle lackey fellow traveller, comrade Clark ...

The pond has mentioned the reprehensible Marr's take on this matter,  featured in the Graudian under Chris Mitchell's massive Marxist memory lapse: mate, I could have put you right.

To provide a variation on the scandal, the pond turned to Jeff Sparrow in Overland, Manning Clark, Agent of influence?...

Sparrow started off with a dead link ...

As Tim Lambert notes at Deltoid, back in 1996, Oz editor Chris Mitchell, then at the Courier-Mail, scooped the world with revelations that Manning Clark had received an Order of Lenin from the Soviet Union, a story the paper adorned with a digitally altered photo of a sneering Clark got up in a Russian peasant smock.
“Clark was indeed a Communist,” the Courier-Mail explained. “No, more than that, he was, until today, an undiscovered member of the Communist world’s elite, a man who would come to be covertly honoured with the highest award the Soviet Union had to bestow, the Order of Lenin.”

Then he cranked into gear...

Good solid history-making as it ought to be done, Major Mitchell and reptile style.

The pond trusts that the ADB will address this as a matter of urgency ... and not just Clark's taste in medals. 

There's Ming the Merciless's taste in medals to consider too, not to mention a taste for frocks ... no one provokes him with impunity, or nemo me impune lacessit if you will ...

Now there will be some that were distressed by Polonius's desire to put aside his usual excoriation of the ABC to defend colonial projects and the need to take a resolute 1950s approach to the world.

The good news is that immediately that burden was put down, it was picked up by the swishing Switzer. 

Polonius might have passed up the chance to contemplate Killer Kim taking charge, but here was a reptile warrior who had his back ...

The pond ventures to suggest that this could have been put together by AI from a reading of past Polonial efforts, and then released with the swishing Switzer's byline. It tackles all the hits, all the major platters that batter ...

At some point you might have thought that the swishing Switzer would condescend to address the elephant in the room ... namely the way that for years RN gave Switzer shelter and succour, and so ensured that for the pond RN was a wasteland of Switzers and Kohns ...

But no, introspection has never been a feature of swishing Switzer pieces, nor insight ...

As a prelude to the next gobbet, the pond was reminded of a piece by Christoper Warren in Crikey, The Laura Tingle fallout shows how the ABC kowtows to News Corp (paywall).

It’s been a big week at News Corp’s outrage factory, with one of Australia’s significant cultural thought leaders having been called to order for colouring outside the lines of what the US company decrees as the acceptable limits on the hot issues of race, migration and refugees.

The actual words of Laura Tingle at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on the weekend were too hot to report straight, too dangerous to confront with reason. Instead, each called for a cranking up of resentment and indignation through News Corp’s old friends: diversion, misrepresentation and amplification. 

In The Australian, outrage was quickly diverted to “partisan rot” at the ABC, misrepresented as an “attack on Australia” and active campaigning against Peter Dutton, amplified through the opposition frontbench commentary.

To the surprise of no-one, ABC management stumbled, then fell to the occasion. Fresh off last year’s staff revolt over the public broadcaster’s failure to defend Indigenous journalists during the Voice campaign, ABC leadership rewarded News Corp with a mealy-mouthed sniff that Tingle’s “conversational” comments “would not have met the ABC’s editorial standards”.

News Corp’s pile-on was more than just another skirmish in the Murdochs’ long-running war on the ABC. Policing the tone about migration — and migrants — with an “it’s not racism” deniability is central to the strategy for winning next year’s election.  

They’re reaching for the well-worn register of the dog whistle, eager to keep on the not-THAT-racist side of the debate while arguing that (as per Tingle’s truncation of Dutton’s comments) “everything that’s going wrong in this country is because of migrants”.

It’s a difficult path to tread, one that relies on political reporting that accepts — or, at least, pretends to accept — that the opposition is acting in good faith and responding to genuine community concerns (from housing to traffic snarls, apparently, among other things).

The greatest threat to the right’s plan is the one enduring mass voice in Australian journalism, the ABC. This isn’t just because of what and how the ABC reports, but also because its reach across all programming shapes the poorly understood way the news-lite and news-avoidance audience form their collective opinions (or what US social media users might call “the vibe”). 

That’s why political and media wings of the right work the ABC refs so hard, exploiting the performative objectivity embodied in the ABC’s editorial practices and forcing the broadcaster to turn from truth-seeking to refuge-seeking. As New York University’s Jay Rosen puts it: “That’s what ‘he said, she said’ reporting, the ‘both sides do it’ reflex, and the ‘balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon’ are all about.”

Anyone paying attention could see in real-time how this refuge-seeking distorted the ABC’s coverage of the Voice to Parliament, driving it to manufacture, for example, a false balance between the overwhelming majority of Indigenous voters who supported it and the small proportion who opposed it.

To have a commentator of the status of Laura Tingle call out the right’s strategy threatens to undermine their cunning plan. She’s an opinion maker within the Canberra gallery and a rare unifying influence within a usually fractious ABC. 

In Canberra, her words threaten to break through the traditional media’s cautious prevarications with all that to-ing and fro-ing about numbers that, so far, have stood in for critique of the Dutton plan. Within the ABC, the News Corp attacks — and the ABC’s failure to defend her — will reinvigorate the frustrations that endure from last year’s ruckus. Indeed, within the indefensible social context of racism in Australia, it is plain embarrassing that the traditional media continues to nod to the savvy politics of the opposition on migration.

Tingle has long been a target of News Corp. It’s little comfort when you’re in the middle, but her endurance and continued influence demonstrate both the strengths of her work and the spreading weakness of the News Corp attack.

That was back in May, and yet here we are, the parrot still cawing away in August, repeating the same sorry lines about crackers and conservatives ...

Boris? He's quoting Boris? Didn't the pond read just yesterday the Ughmann's comments on this sort of source?

The best description of Boris Johnson’s tenure is undisciplined and erratic. The worst is that he was congenitally unable to tell the truth and failed to live by the standards he demanded of others during the dark era of Covid restrictions. Rank hypocrisy has a price and Johnson went from election hero to zero in three short years, leaving a party so badly damaged that no one could save it, just as none could describe what it was. The only contribution of Liz Truss is as a quiz question: who was the shortest serving prime minister in British history?

The pond couldn't leave out that reference to the lettuce lady, as the swishing Switzer carried on, giving credence to liars and perhaps lettuce ...

Each time the pond reads a reptile deep into the hive mind of reptile groupthink berating the ABC for groupthink the inclination is to let out a shriek of a howl.

As for that talk of Tony Jones, the pond well remembers his interminable sessions late at night with Clive Palmer, a mutual benefit society where they provided entertainment for each other... 

Thank the long absent lord the ABC is beyond attempting repeating that feat with some late night host bedding down regularly with Gina of the IPA ...

Oh there was a shot of Andrew Olle too, because everything in the ABC was better in the 1930s, when dammit, an empire was an empire and colonisation meant something ...

Then it was on to the last of the insufferable Switzer swishing away ...

Yep, he did it, and the pond hasn't been handing out this gong of late, but the swishing Switzer is exceptionally deserving, what with his ability to mix monoculture with globalist brands with woke ...

What a pathetic man he is, and why does he always manage to sound so deeply insecure and needy?

And so to the real challenge, what you might call the godhead of this unholy trinity. 

In the absence of "Ned" and his natter, the bromancer has taken up the challenge to bore the socks off punters with his extremely lengthy impression of US politics, down there with his devotion to Boris and Brexit and the Church of LDS and the war on China ...

Sure, the turf was covered by Killer yesterday, but the ebullient, outgoing Killer was just a warm-up act for the real deal ...

The pond has of course arranged for cartoons at each way station on the climb (or the tour of the stations of the cross in your local church, whatever)... but first an evocation of the bromancer's journalistic methodology ...

When you understand the point of the exercise, everything becomes clear ...

The pond has no idea why some Republicans might be effective speaking out against an aged and increasingly demented and doddery old man deep into a kind of degeneration... could it be?

Burn baby burn, drill baby drill, melt planet melt.

There is an upside to reading the bromancer, the call to the dark side is strong, and so the Catholic urge to sin provides an endless struggle ...

Oh that joy and love and happiness schtick, how appalling and upsetting it is ...

The bitterness in the bromancer is palpable, and all the more enjoyable for it, and how he resents the ability to call in the stars...after all there's Kid Rock and the Hulk ...

... and then there's Oprah (and you could always be reading Jonathan V. Last at the Bulwark rather than the bromancer...

The reptiles interrupted with a click bait video of Bill ...

...while the sour old grump carried on, apparently with a festering hatred of laugh tracks and 1960s sitcoms, as if there's something wrong with men from Mars and talking horses and comically inept troopers... (did the bromancer's resemblance to Captain Wilton Parmenter forever ruin his social life?)

Tricky, a palpable hit, a veritable rattling of the chest, but after a snap of that fiendish, diabolical black woman ...

... the bromancer settled into the task of explaining how racism in the mango Mussolini is a good and meaningful thing ...

Indeed, memes are bankable currency. 

The reptiles offered a snap of the crowd size, designed as a concern for policy not being talked about..

... apparently unaware that crowd size is all that matters to the Donald ...

You know, crowd size ...

Oh yes, and then the bro shifted to all the talk of the weird ...

Wait, let's not leave the weird just yet ...

Even the reptiles couldn't help it. 

The pond would normally downsize the click bait videos, but just look at the way they managed to make even Hillary look normal up against the orange Jesus, pointing to the sky with mouth pouting, and with a deeper orange than usual...

Then it was on to more unhappy bromancer moments ...

The pond hates to mention it, though it was noted at AP here ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans blocked legislation that would make it a right nationwide for women to access in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer forced a vote on the matter Thursday in an effort to drive an election-year contrast on reproductive care.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who has used the fertility treatment to have her two children, has championed the bill, called the Right to IVF Act. The bill would have also expanded access through insurance as well as for military members and veterans.

And it featured at the Graudian here ...

No wonder the bromancer hates American politics. 

How it must stick in his Catholic craw to lie on a regular basis for the firm, and all because of these insufferable wretches ...

On he pressed, this time attempting to take down the Coach ...

This is way beyond desperate, invoking Sarah as a way of savaging Walz, and with a snap to try to make it stick ...

The bromancer faithfully regurgitated all the GOP attack dog lines that have surfaced in recent weeks without denting the surface of the Coach ... but no more can be asked of a lickspittle lackey and fellow traveller just doing his job as Faux Noise hacks are wont to do...

Mediaite 1:

Staunch Trump ally and former Fox News and Newsmax host Eric Bolling sounded the alarm following Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech to cap the Democratic National Convention, telling Republicans to “Wake the F**k up! We are LOSING!”
The Democratic National Convention (DNC) has dominated the news and cable television all week, and was capped off Thursday night by a widely-praised acceptance speech by Vice President Kamala Harris. As CNN’s Chris Wallace noted this week, the Democratic gathering swamped former President Donald Trump’s RNC in the ratings.
But within those ratings, Bolling saw a sign in the fact that normally dominant Fox News has been getting beaten by MSNBC during the convention.

Sacred, sacrificial lambs, not thrashed in the ratings ...

Mediaite 2:

...Navarro noted that Kennedy had complained that Harris refused to meet with him and that the political scion sold his endorsement to “the highest bidder.” The anti-vax Kennedy is reportedly angling for a position in a second Trump administration, particularly in the Department of Health & Human Services.

“I think a campaign that’s already wrestling with the label of ‘weird’ bringing in a guy who’s had to deny that he ate a dog, who’s told us he had a worm in his brain, and who stabbed a dead cub bear and then posted it in Central Park – man, talk about adding weird to weird,” she said.

Host Wolf Blitzer noted Kennedy’s history of anti-vax activism and his embrace of conspiracy theories.

“Could this end up backfiring on Trump?” he asked Jennings.

Jennings said that most Kennedy voters will probably throw their support behind Trump. However, he added a caveat:

"There could be some costs on the other side of the algebra. I mean, I’m old enough to remember when RFK was a liberal conspiracy theorist. Now, he’s more of a conservative conspiracy theorist. But the throughline is he’s a conspiracy theorist and a lot of people think he’s kind of a looney tune.

So, I would just caution the former president, be a little careful here. Don’t make any promises you can’t get out of because this guy, over the course of his career has been a, you know, a little bit– so, just careful."

Loons, so many loons singing looney tunes, so little time, but the pond will always have time for a bromancer looning around ...

By golly for a moment there the bromancer was sounding defeatist ...but there's always a way forward with name calling ...

... and with solid policy initiatives that can form the basis of a successful campaign

But after all that, after all his best lines, after all that regurgitation of GOP attack lines, the bromancer was still a tad fearful, and sounding like he wouldn't want to bet on the result ...

Way too tight a call? There's no need to be a scaredy cat, you might end up sounding like a cat lady, instead of showing manly love for a couch. 

That sort of talk is defeatist, and suggests that the cat ladies are the underdogs, so to speak, and we know what happens when dogs and cats mix ...

Fortunately Tom the Dancing Bug has prepared a great message which will surely tip the campaign in favour of the orange Jesus ...