O O O O that Polonial Rag - It’s so deeply inelegant, so remarkably unintelligent

 

The pond looked around to find a lizard Oz columnist who could help keep the pond's comments section open, and what a wasteland it found ...

I think we are in rats’ alley    
Where dead men and reptiles lost their bones.     

This was the digital edition as it presented on the Saturday ...

The Ughmann doing drugs, backed up by Dame Slap doing drugs? 

Foreign import Brendan hired to justify the ongoing genocide? 

The bromancer rabbiting on about "five catastrophic mistakes rendering Australia defenceless"? Oh sheesh ... nausea contending with laughter.

The digital edition drew attention to nattering "Ned" ...

Nah, the pond is on a break, it isn't into climbing the "Ned" Everest, and bro hysteria can also take a holyday. 

And that's why Polonius became a handy standby, with his fear of greenies at the bottom of the garden and underneath the bed pretty standard reptile obsessions ...

The pond could barely stifle a laugh - comrade Bill a fine politician and a real talent? Back in the day, comrade Bill was a rampaging socialist of the Chifley kind ...

That Polonial efforrt ended this way 

...It is understandable why so many members of the Canberra press gallery, along with left-wing commentators, misread the mood of the electorate and underestimated the appeal of Scott Morrison. Many of them are out of touch with how most Australians live. But there is no ­excuse for Labor’s failure to keep in touch with what was once a big part of its base. It took more than two decades for Labor to fully recover from Chifley’s mistaken war against the “top end of town”. But at least Chifley was targeting a large institution, namely the banks.

Shorten’s class war included attacks on individuals living in the suburbs and rural areas on as little as $40,000 a year. It was as if Labor resented Australians who have worked or still work in the private sector. Even Chifley’s hostilities did not extend this far.

Labor’s new leader Anthony Albanese seems to understand the problem and has put up a white flag in the class war. How strange that a leader of Labor’s Left has seen the folly of Labor’s right-wing leadership under Shorten and Bowen.

All you need is the misty patina of time and a dewey-eyed Polonius to move from rampant class warfare warrior to being a fine contributor and a real talent.

Then it was on with the greenies under the bed ...

At this point the reptiles inserted a click bait video showing the demonic figure designed to terrify the reptiles' aged demographic ...

Meanwhile, the pond had broken its golden rule and took a look at the digital Oz, and there was Polonius just clinging to the bottom of the page, beneath the foreign import and the Ughmann and what purports to be a cartoon ...

The pond was once again struck by the complete futility ... a digital attempt to replicate a tree killer presentation, like one of those phantom limbs that produce phantom pain ...

Still it was possible to identify the advertisers, who went on the pond's index prohibitorum ...

"Ned" was elsewhere ...

... and it turned out that everything is for the best in these troubled climate change days ... the country rising from the ashes ...

Dame Slap was on the preceding page ...

And there was special coverage of the US election, with Killer on hand with his letter from America ...

Trump taps Musk to be efficiency tsar? We have a new Speer?

The pond apologises, in that trawl through the digital version of the tree killer edition, the pond plumb lost sight of Polonius and his final gobbet of fear ... and what do you know, he starts it off with a coulda, woulda, shoulda ...

After reading all that, the pond felt inclined to follow preferences as heart and mind dictates, a luxury allowed by the preferential voting system.

This being a holyday edition, the pond thought it might end by ignoring all the other reptiles, and instead arranging a celebration of the fascists of America (sponsored by Faux Noise) ...

The pond's source is the New York Times, which is why the pond includes this as a warning preamble which turned into a meme ...

So you have to take these write-ups with a grain of salt ...

Now there are many people who have their own problems with Churchill - Indians with a keen sense of history for one, not to mention other countries subject to Churchillian colonial delusions. And then there was the firebombing of Dresden, and the arguments about the use of the nukes and so on and so forth. But simply put, Churchill didn't kick things off by invading Poland, and when it comes to the extravagant bombing of civilians, Adolf kicked it off with the terror bombing of London and other cities.

What's more interesting than debating fascist historical revisionism is the way it ties in with Putin and mango Mussolini worship - JD was so undisturbed by Tuckyo's fascist cheerleading that he's going to help out. You'd expect it of Uncle Elon, but JD, the chief doughy nut himself?

Apparently the Times suddenly realised where it had ended with its both siderisms ... but all Tucky wants is attention, and if Holocaust denying and celebrating Springtime for Adolf is what it takes, then that's a fair price ...

Sure, much of its a repeat, but the story is endlessly fascinating, especially the way that Uncle Elon realised his fascist tendencies were showing, and decided there was no need to dwell too long on his ambition to become the new Speer ...

For some reason the pond was reminded of a story in The Graudian ... I am falling for an amazing woman who is a flat-earther. Can I reconcile my diminishing respect?

Only if you're as completely clueless as she is, or as delusional as Tuckyo and his crowd of lickspittle fellow traveling Vlad the Sociopath worshippers ... and speaking of jumping the shark and the electric battery and nuking the fridge ...

Oh it's still available, it might have been deleted, but you can never completely remove the sociopathic mind from the universe ... and so to a final gobbet ...

And there you have it, JD and DT Jr. willingly hanging around in the same space as explicit devotees of Adolf and Holocaust denial, and still enthusiastically supported by Faux Noise ... the 1930s Daily Mail lives in the heart of the emeritus chairman and his spawn ...

If being a Black Shirt is good for business, where's the harm?

What to do? When in doubt in times of trouble, double down ...

“Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture but he obviously does not share the views of the guest interviewed by Tucker Carlson,” the statement read. “There are no stronger supporters of our allies in Israel or the Jewish community in America than Senator Vance and President Trump.”

Vance may not agree with Cooper, but he does currently follow him on X (as of Friday evening)—and has been since at least Wednesday morning.

Some things just mebbe you should cancel ... talk about the facts of life, and the killing fields, these days these loons are to the far right of Dick Cheney! Unimaginable.

One final note ... the saga was also noted in The Atlantic ...Megan Garber's Tucker Carlson’s Twisted History, According to his counterfactual interview with a fellow podcaster, the true villains of World War II aren’t historical players but modern culture warriors.

In the movie The History Boys, based on Alan Bennett’s play, a student wins a scholarship to Oxford with the help of an argument he makes on an entrance exam: Hitler, he claims, was “much misunderstood.” As fiction, this is mordant comedy—a mockery of the particular type of arrogance required to twist the tragedies of the Holocaust into personal gain. But now the satire has come for our news cycle.

In a long and meandering interview on Tucker Carlson’s show this week, the podcaster Darryl Cooper offered musings about the “mythology”—the heroes, the villains, the plot, the moral stakes—of World War II. In his version, however, it is Winston Churchill who has been much misunderstood. Churchill, Cooper told Carlson, with dramatic flair, “was the chief villain of the Second World War.”

The claim is wrong, in every sense. The gravity of its error was highlighted by a resonant coincidence: Around the time the interview was posted, Alternative for Germany became the first far-right party to win a German state election since the Nazi era. The past is never dead, the old line goes; it is not even past. But Cooper and his enthusiastic host, these history boys with microphones, were not talking about history—not really. They were talking about themselves. They were treating World War II as a branding exercise. And this was, though not surprising in the context of Carlson’s show, a new nadir.

Consensus reality relies on consensus history. In this time of fragile facts, one point most people have been able to agree on is that Hitler was a bad guy. But the time for consensus is over, Cooper implied. Instead, as a phrase in the title of his episode summed things up: “Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.”

What becomes clear during the interview, as Cooper makes his convoluted case (“maybe I’m being a little hyperbolic,” he allows at one point), is that the true villains of his story are not, in the end, Hitler or Churchill, Axis or Allies. Instead, they are the culture warriors of the present: the woke, the mobs, the ruling class—the people who will be offended by claims such as “Winston Churchill Ruined Europe.” And the true heroes, consequently, are those who dare to say the unsayable. “There are just certain things you’re not allowed to question,” Cooper told Carlson, as he questioned the “myths” of World War II. (“Literally, it’s a crime to ask questions?” Carlson replied, before answering his own query: “Yes.”) One might not go to jail for the myth-busting, Cooper allowed; still, “you might have your life ruined and lose your job.” (“You might absolutely go to jail in this country,” Carlson countered.)

If your aim is to offer a clever reading of history rather than a true one, World War II will serve you well: Its excessive documentation is fertile ground, giving you many cherries to pick. It will provide the fodder you need to suggest that the Holocaust was, essentially, an unfortunate accident. And then it will allow you, if you choose, to treat the suffering of the people of the past as evidence for your own victimhood. You can take the accepted narrative and rewrite it.

In other contexts, Cooper and Carlson might have decried such an approach—an archly postmodern attitude in which all facts are relative, all orthodoxies suspect. But history boys need their straw men. And Churchill was the war’s true villain is less an argument than a provocation: a contention that, when World War II is mapped onto Hallin’s spheres, Hitler’s villainy should be relocated to the realm of legitimate controversy. It should be moved there because it is one of those things that you are not allowed to question. “Darryl Cooper may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” Carlson’s show announced, in promoting the interview. “His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.”

“Forbidden”—the stuff of perfumes, of clothing, of heterodox educational institutions—makes sense as branding. The forbidden is exotic. The forbidden is brave. The forbidden can transform history boys into men. And it can do all that from the comfort of one’s personal podcast studio.

Read: Tucker Carlson’s final moments on Fox were as dangerous as they were absurd

History, from such a distance, is easy. Carlson and Cooper can talk about being arrested for questioning orthodoxies with no fear of that actually happening. They can traffic in the mystique of the “forbidden” with no reference to the many things—books, ideas, people—that bear the real risk of being banned. They are free to speak their mind. They are free to do so, indeed, because of the actions of people who did not have the luxury of treating the Holocaust as a thought exercise. The influencers can, if they choose, interpret others’ indignation as their victory. They can brag that they have “weakened the narrative” about World War II. They can choose not to wonder what their questioning really amounts to. “History nowadays is not a matter of conviction,” a teacher in The History Boys announces. “It’s a performance. It’s entertainment.” His students still have time to age out of such arrogance, the film implies. Or at least they should.

You ignore this stuff at your peril, and naturally the reptiles at the lizard Oz elided over it, what with Tucker now outside the tent ... but he's still fellow travelling with the mango Mussolini's mob, and the main problem for the reptiles is that Jesse Waters is a pathetic imitation ...per Margaret Sullivan's piece in the Graudian, The Kamala Harris campaign has Fox News grasping at straws - literally.

Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club.

Rightwing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much.

Take Jesse Watters (please). The primetime successor to Tucker Carlson was grasping at straws – yes, literal straws – the other day as he looked for a way to put down Tim Walz. How best to mock the popular Minnesota governor who is Kamala Harris’s running mate?

“Women love masculinity and women do not like Tim Walz, so that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walz is,” Watters said on the roundtable talk show he co-hosts, The Five.

With that setup, he tried to prove his point.

“The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice-cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”

The joke, or whatever it was, didn’t really land. 

Well yes ...

It tells you everything about Watters' astonishing stupidity, and the willingness of the emeritus chairman and his spawn to put up with inanity, providing there's a buck in it ...

And so to wrap up with a couple of 'toons ...