In which the pond draws a short reptile straw, and has to settle for a heroic hive mind worker and a Jack of the empire ...

 

In the dead of night, it occurred to the pond that JD Vance might well be just one too many burgers and a heart attack away from the presidency in the very near future. 

It also occurred to the pond, over actively conjuring nightmare scenarios, that given the senile dementia currently on view - who else could confuse an airbase in Afghanistan with the Alaskan wilderness? - that a palace coup and a cunning deployment of the 25th Amendment might see the deeply weird cat fabulist, couch lover and fundamentalist bigot be given the chance to realise all the Heritage Foundation's deepest, deeply weird desires.

It also occurred to the pond that it might be time to retire its "Puff Daddy" (so nicknamed) jacket, acquired in New York way back in 2000 and handy in a NY winter, and a Melbourne one too. While the tag is almost invisible, the look is beyond worn. 

It also occurred to the pond that it might be time to give up on French village mayors, what with one assuring the world that at least no one died, as if that was some sort of consolation for an extraordinary case of truly ugly mass rape.

It also occurred to the pond, as it woke from various nightmares, that it was very much over the reptiles at the lizard Oz, that things had reached a breaking point, and that Thursdays formed some kind of nadir.

Naturally the reptiles were wildly excited by events in what's dubbed, in honour of British empire days, the middle east, but the pond couldn't see the point, except to see that it helped Benji stay out of the clink a little bit longer, and never mind the genocide or the killing fields.

Over on the far right all that stood out was petulant Peta having a bog standard go at the teals. There was also Geoff, chambering another volley in the name of bosses, but the pond was over it ...

Still there had to be something, and it wouldn't be Gina crowing about mining approvals and whining about regulations, it had to be a diligent reptile worker, a solid member of the hive mind, beavering away, tilling the soil so that imperious Peta could petulantly stride the stage.

Come on down Alexi, stick it to the teals, give her something to work with ...

Um, not a good start Alexi. The reptiles want feedback? The pond would rather pierce its ear drums than listen to lizard Oz articles. How's that for feedback?

And the sight of those pitches about the yarn only carrying matters available in the web version always makes the pond feel "take me anywhere that's not there" ... but strangely a click on the "take me there" always takes the pond back to here ...

Sorry Alexi, you were saying about those wicked people who thought climate science was a thing?

Matt Cross? Never heard of him.

In fact the pond had to dig a bit and came across this item in the Nine papers, including inter alia ...

The man whose preselection victory has derailed a female minister’s ambitions to be a future premier helped secure his shock win by pushing for small-scale nuclear reactors in every community as an alternative energy source.

Former Mike Baird staffer Matt Cross sensationally beat Roads Minister Natalie Ward in the preselection for the Liberal Party’s safest north shore seat on Monday night, despite Ward having the backing of Premier Dominic Perrottet and moderate powerbroker and Treasurer Matt Kean.

Ah, he's just a party hack, an apparatchik apprentice spear carrier who's one of them ...

...Cross, who used his speech to preselectors to push for the Liberals to support nuclear power, has been working on replacing outgoing Davidson MP and Speaker Jonathan O’Dea for years. Sources with knowledge of his speech said Cross suggested reactors could be in every suburb to lower energy prices.

He cited federal Liberal leader Peter Dutton, who has called for a debate on nuclear energy as a way to provide reliable power with no carbon emissions.

One senior party source not permitted to comment on the preselection said pushing nuclear power could leave the party open to a scare campaign from teal candidates in Sydney’s north. Cross, who also name-checked former prime minister Tony Abbott, is aligned with the moderate faction.

The source said: “This preselection result highlights how out of touch the membership is with the community.” Another said: “I wonder what the voters in Lindfield would think about a nuclear reactor in their community.”

That's what passes for the moderate faction these days? The onion muncher and Captain Spud? What's more, despite placing an order some time ago, the pond still without an SMR in its back yard ... to hell with leafy Lindfield, what about the inner west?

Strangely the reptiles didn't feature the heroic Cross, grinning like an inane loon as he nuked the 'burbs ...

Instead the reptiles went with a snap of the demonic import, bringing his furrin' Marxist ways in country;.

And that was about it. Alexi burbled on some more ... but the pond was already terrified at the thought of a man wearing that sort of fashionable stubble being allowed in country.

Dear sweet long absent lord, not Rory too, though the pond did enjoy that last "alienated some" from Alexi.

That's in the special line of reptile reporting, "some people say", "some people suggest", "some people get alienated", "some people love the idea of an SMR in every suburb."

Kudos to a diligent worker in the bee hive, doing his best to give petulant Peta food for a rant.

And so to the filler, and here the pond can only offer its 'stripped of snaps' version, old school text only, especially because the pond never bothers with Jack the Insider, and all this does is remind the pond why ...

First came the header and the pitch ...

Liberalism enjoyed a golden age before it fell from favour, Centrism and Liberalism may have become dirty words in the contemporary political lexicon, yet these Liberals did not lapse into stifling political conversation.

Then begin with a snap of former prime minister John Howard, heroically poised against what seems to be a British flag, as a lizard Oz graphics person would do, because he was a great Australian liberal, as any lizard Oz reader wud kno, and it sets the right visual tone for what's to follow.

The pond will do the same and begin by inserting a cartoon featuring a current great American liberal, also given to flag clutching and flag posing ...

Pictorial preliminaries out of the way, we can begin yearning for the trappings of empire ...

Mindful of Groucho Marx’s words on club membership, I entered the Italianate finery of London’s Reform Club with trepidation. For an old Reservoir boy, it felt like being pushed down and held mouth agape while fed strawberries, not by the punnet but by the shovel-load with a smattering of pearls cast into the sluice for good measure.
Yet, as I crossed the threshold bells did not ring, alarms did not sound and when they came, instructions from the attendants were whispered gently and helpfully, not barked.
The Reform Club sits at 100 Pall Mall, London; a street name I had gleaned from playing Monopoly but mispronounced “Paul Maul” to the grimace of anyone in earshot. It is now more a library that serves fine food and wine than the hub of classical liberalism its founders ­intended.
The club counts William Gladstone, Sir Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, HG Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Palmerston and Andrew Carnegie as its asterisked members while those who remain in the vertical include Dame Kiri Te ­Kanawa, Sir David Attenborough and Queen Camilla.

Ah, god save the queen, but is this the right time to recall that HG Wells turned into a top notch eugenicist?

Always fond of gazing into the future, HG Wells pictured a caste of all-powerful super-talented Ubermenschen, who would wear Samurai-style dress, and order the affairs of the planet.

Probably not, probably no need to name check the name dropping. 

Just the list alone is enough to make the pond feel grand ... (by the way, the pond's father knew Lloyd George, or perhaps he knew the pond's father).

Probably best just to insert snap of Groucho Marx because quoting Groucho deserves a cheap snap from the archives, as a penny pinching lizard Oz graphics person would do.

The pond should respond in kind and keep on celebrating that famous American liberal ...

Then it was on with the history lesson

The Reform Club was founded almost two centuries ago, in the heart of the largest empire the world has ever seen, to promote “social discourse for reformers in the United Kingdom”. The club was, and largely remains, the heart of big ‘L’ Liberalism.
While its political influence waned in the 20th century, it was the inspiration for the party of Menzies in Australia.
Like its Australian counterpart, its influence has declined in favour of conservatism. Whigs, radicals and Liberals combined to legislate the Reform Act of 1832, lifting middle class men to a seat at the political table (female suffrage was explicitly prohibited in the Act) while shunning the working classes. The Whig-turned-Liberal William Gladstone, whose bust peers down in the central atrium at the Reform Club, served as prime minister on three non-consecutive occasions. He supported a form of universal male suffrage but only if the working classes “showed more interest in politics”.
It is too easy to condemn the Reform Act by today’s standards. It was at worst a stuttering step towards the democratisation of England and Wales, diminishing the influence of the aristocracy by ­ridding the country of its crude and obvious gerrymanders.
In doing so, the Liberal reformers arguably spared Great Britain political unrest in evidence across Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Karl Marx and a smorgasbord of radicals actively promoted proletarian revolution. Marx, who spent the last three decades of his life in London squabbling with anarchists, had called on England’s working classes to join the bourgeoisie and other agitators in a revolution in Great Britain that never eventuated, largely because the Reform Act provided the middle classes with political representation.
Roughly contextualised by the attitudes of the early 21st century, the Whigs who created the Liberal Party were a French emmental of contradictions. For all Gladstone’s magnanimity, his father, Sir John Gladstone was one of the largest slave owners in the British Empire.

Splendid stuff. It's probably not the right time to dwell on Bill Gladstone's foreign police, and in any case there's a lengthy wiki about it here, with this gem:

...His term saw the end of the Second Anglo-Afghan War in 1880, the First Boer War of 1880–1881 and outbreak of the war (1881–1899) against the Mahdi in Sudan.
Paul Hayes says it "provides one of the most intriguing and perplexing tales of muddle and incompetence in foreign affairs, unsurpassed in modern political history until the days of Grey and, later, Neville Chamberlain."

The pond could moan about being made to study Gladstone and the rest of the tossers, but it's probably best just to insert snaps of inside the Reform Club, London and Lord Asquith’s chair inside The Reform Club, as a deeply bored lizard Oz graphics person would do.

Or perhaps go housing 'toons, what with the matter a sensitive subject for some ...

Then it was back to th history lesson ...

His Liberal son opted for a meek form of abolition known as manumission – the gradual prohibition of slavery provided slaves as free men and women maintained a solid work ethic driven more by desire than the threat of the lash.
When slavery was abolished, Gladstone oversaw a compensation scheme that delivered approximately $60,000 in today’s money to his father for the loss of his slaves. Today’s political careers, on average, might span a parliamentary term or two, Gladstone’s career spanned 50 years. Lord Palmerston’s influence over the parliament extended for more than three decades.
In a corner of a vast library on the Reform Club’s second floor, sits a slightly dishevelled red velvet desk chair, known as Asquith’s chair. Asquith was the last Liberal prime minister in the UK. His political ambitions, and his party as a political force, would not survive the sorrow of World War I. In peacetime he established the first old age pension in 1909. Australia followed suit the same year.
The Great War was a war that would end social liberalism as a political force in the UK. Not just any war but a war, it was said, that would end all wars.
Eschewing Downing Street and parliament, Asquith conducted planning and operations for the first two years of the Great War from the Reform Club.
From that uncomfortable red seat, Asquith dispatched the six divisions of the British Expeditionary Force to France in the northern autumn of 1914, stopping the German advance at the First Battle of the Marne and establishing the conditions for attritional trench warfare.
The war was little more than a month old when it fell into bloody stasis. Asquith’s cabinet split in two – the Westerners of which Asquith was one and the Easterners led by Churchill and Lloyd George who pressed for an invasion of Turkey at the Gallipoli Peninsula. Asquith’s secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener, and the admiral of the British Fleet, John Fisher, rejected the plan.

No need to dwell on the glories of the first world war, though the pond would like to honour the confusion in the minds of the likes of Siegfried Sassoon ...

In May 1915, Sassoon was commissioned into the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and went to France. He impressed many with his bravery in the front line and was given the nickname 'Mad Jack' for his near-suicidal exploits. He was decorated twice. His brother Hamo was killed in November 1915 at Gallipoli.
In the summer of 1916, Sassoon was sent to England to recover from fever. He went back to the front, but was wounded in April 1917 and returned home. Meetings with several prominent pacifists, including Bertrand Russell, had reinforced his growing disillusionment with the war and in June 1917 he wrote a letter that was published in the Times in which he said that the war was being deliberately and unnecessarily prolonged by the government. As a decorated war hero and published poet, this caused public outrage. It was only his friend and fellow poet, Robert Graves, who prevented him from being court-martialled by convincing the authorities that Sassoon had shell-shock. He was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. Here he met, and greatly influenced, Wilfred Owen. Both men returned to the front where Owen was killed in 1918. Sassoon was posted to Palestine and then returned to France, where he was again wounded, spending the remainder of the war in England. 

No need to dwell on his poetry. 

Instead insert a snap of Sir Winston Churchill, as a reptile graphics person would do. Or perhaps a cat and dog or a Haitian immigrant 'toon, as the pond would do ...

And so to a final short gobbet ...

Asquith dithered while the Russians telegraphed the attempted invasion of the peninsula with naval artillery bombardment. Ultimately almost half a million men were hurled into a maelstrom at Gallipoli; 56,000 died, 8607 of them Australians. Churchill and Lloyd ­George left the club over the blackballing of a Jewish MP. Churchill’s politics would turn towards conservatism. The Liberals quietly moved on to minor party status and later political oblivion.
In today’s often twisted political thinking, Liberals like Gladstone, Palmerston and Asquith are seen as colonial oppressors, despots in the cloistered safety at the Reform Club, sipping gin and tonics. Centrism and Liberalism may have become dirty words in the contemporary political lexicon, yet these Liberals did not lapse into stifling political conversation. They encouraged it while turning their minds to social inclusion, taxation and electoral reform. Without them, the UK would be a very different place, as would Australia today.

Today's often twisted political thinking? 

Nah, the pond is too Irish for all that glories of empire crap ... because they really did enjoy a gin and tonic, and in their own complacent self-indulgent, self-regarding way, they stuffed up monumentally.

The pond slipped in the bit about Sassoon as a way of reminding Jack that his blather about stifling political conversation is just the tired old mantra of the Faux Noise crowd.

Truly they were a bunch of mugs and privileged loons, and when it came to the crunch, completely useless ... they died out because they deserved to. Explain it it Jack, please, Dr Michael Lynch ...

...The demands of the four-year struggle against Germany drove the party to adopt policies that would have been unthinkable in peacetime. Liberalism had never been wholly pacifist but it had developed a strong aversion to jingoism. The Liberals had vigorously opposed the Conservative government's conduct of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) as brutalising and degrading. But, in 1914, the Liberal government accepted the necessity of declaring war on Germany. This meant that in order to sustain Britain's war effort, they were now obliged to appeal to that same spirit of nationalism that they had formerly found so distasteful.
Thus began a process that, over the next four years, was to undermine many of the ideals to which the Liberals had previously held dear. The decision to enter the war against Germany was an obvious abandonment of the policy of seeking peaceful solutions to international problems. The soaring costs occasioned by war made it impossible to control government expenditure. Most telling of all, the concept of personal freedom was rapidly eroded by the growing encroachment of the State upon the rights of its citizens.
The change of direction forced on the Liberals was evident in the very first government measure of the war, the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), rushed through Parliament in August 1914. DORA, which was re-enacted a number of times during the course of the war, conferred on the State and its agencies' unprecedented authority to control the lives of ordinary persons. A whole range of restrictions followed. The Press was subject to censorship and the government dictated what war news could be made public. Men were conscripted into the armed services. British travellers overseas had to apply for passports and identity cards had to be carried by ordinary citizens. Income tax rose from sixpence (2.5p) to six shillings (30p) in the pound. Food was rationed, alcohol and tobacco were heavily taxed, and strict licensing laws were imposed on public houses. Trade was directed, and controls were imposed on the use of currency. Employers in key industries were told what to produce, what wages to pay, and whom to take on the payroll. Employees were forbidden to strike or demand higher wages and could be made to move home and change jobs.
The irony was that it was a Liberal government that did all this, for, although Britain after 1915 was formally led by coalitions, the key ministers continued to be drawn from the Liberal party. The truth was that the longer the war lasted, the more Britain's struggle became a matter of survival. In such grim circumstances, the traditional peacetime values of freedom of speech and assembly came to be regarded as a risk to national security. Lloyd George, Prime Minister from December 1916, justified the Liberal shift by claiming that a democratic government in time of war had 'the right to commandeer every resource, every power, life, limb, wealth, and everything else for the interest of the State'.

Ah, yes, that'd be the old 'stifling of the political conversation' rag. Sorry Jack, have another gin and tonic on the pond, and enjoy the magnificent benefits of the first world war. No doubt the world would have been a very different place without it...

And speaking of that, time please, for a few final 'toons ...