In which Polonius stays snug and secure in his Sunday spot ...

 

The pond must apologise at the get go, because two serves of the Mango Mussolini on one weekend is simply too much.

But what can the pond do? The pond doesn't tell the reptiles to chose diverse and interesting topics; they're weak-willed creatures who tend to flock together and chant in unison (perhaps it's the Catholic conditioning).

The pond had already ruled out the likes of "Ned" and the dog botherer for dealing with Covid, which is about as interesting as the Burmese railway death march. Neither of them even mentioned the impending arrival of RFK Jr. as health Tsar, and they refused to speculate on what a world without vaccines might look like. (If you insist on an alternative read, try The Crash of the Hammer, How concerned citizens ran a neo-Nazi out of rural Maine. It's long, but deeply, satisfactorily weird).

Besides, prattling Polonius has always been a pond Sunday favourite, ever since the Pellists and the angry Sydney Anglicans faded from view, and being deeply conservative, the pond rarely likes to stray from its preferred pets.

So it comes to pass that the pond proudly presents Polonius's view of the MM, defiantly headed If Donald Trump derangement persists, read your WWII history, Contrary to the slurs against Trump, there is no one in mainstream politics in Western democracies who can remotely be compared with the founder of the Nazi totalitarian dictatorship.

It's wordy, but then Polonius has never been short of a word, and as usual for the reptiles these days, the layout began with a snap, this time featuring the MM:

Frankly the pond would have preferred it if they'd lashed out and ran that recent meme hit, featuring the MM in high vis gear, mouth open like a gaping fish, designed to provoke a crude Colbert joke (think sex doll), while a mike with windscreen was allegedly designed to hide his gigantic Arnold Palmer:

Now that's a snap and it would have set a better tone for the Polonial mush to follow (the pond is tired of eating mush, and swallowing Polonius is worse than baby porridge):

In the lead-up to the US presidential election next Tuesday (Wednesday AEDT), the evidence suggests that the condition known as Trump derangement syndrome is not in remission. If anything, it has become more widespread.
It is not just that Vice-President Kamala Harris, in a response to a question from Anderson Cooper, told the CNN interviewer that Donald J. Trump was a fascist. After all, Trump on occasions has called Harris a fascist and a communist.
The problem is that the pointscoring by abuse has been up­graded to describing the former president as a Nazi akin to Adolf Hitler. This is quite a step up (or down) from linking Trump to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who is primarily associated with fascism. In his book Fascists, Michael Mann wrote that, as a word usage today, fascism “appears largely as the exclamation Fascist!”. To the author, fascism is an “imprecise term of abuse hurled at people we do not like”. Mann wrote this two decades ago; today the noun is almost meaningless.
So it comes as no surprise that this term of ideological abuse has been scaled up. That’s why Trump is now being described as not only a Nazi but also as Hitler. This dimin­ishes the memory of the millions of victims of Hitler and his Nazi Germany regime, in particular, the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust.
Speaking on Fox News’ The Five last Friday, American political consultant Jessica Tarlov, a strategist for the Democratic Party, spoke out against the association of Trump with Hitler.
In Australia, the ABC is very much a conservative-free zone. I am not aware of any conservative presenter, producer or editor at the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster who is an employee or paid regular contributor. However, on Rupert Murdoch’s right-of-centre Fox News in the US, several Democratic Party supporters who are liberals (in the North American sense of the term) appear on the channel’s leading public affairs panels as presenters or contributors. It makes for interesting debate, which is rarely found these days on the ABC.

Okay, okay, the pond finds itself in the position of celebrating, for the zillionth time, the quintillionth time that Polonius has hit his keyboard short-cut key to announce: 

In Australia, the ABC is very much a conservative-free zone. I am not aware of any conservative presenter, producer or editor at the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster who is an employee or paid regular contributor. 

It reminds the pond of other big numbers that have been doing the rounds of late.  There was the MM suing CBS for $10 billion for allegedly enhancing Harris's 60 Minutes interview (the US legal system seems incapable of dealing with frivolous law suits quickly),  while also having a go at WaPo via the FEC. Both foreshadow whaat might come by way of court clog, whether he wins or loses.

Then there was the fine that Vlad the Sociopath's legal sock puppets handed out to Google:

Russia fines Google more than the world's entire GD,  $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is the number a Moscow court wants the YouTube parent company to pay for blocking Russian media outlets. It is a sum “filled with symbolism,” the Kremlin told NBC News on Thursday.

The fine amounts to around $20 decillion — 20 followed by 33 zeros — or two undecillion rubles, a 37-digit figure...
...Not only does the figure eclipse Google’s $2 trillion market value, but it’s also far larger than the size of the entire global economy, which the International Monetary Fund puts at around $110 trillion — a figure with a mere 13 zeros. 
That said, at least the fine is not as large as a googol, which has 100 zeroes. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin picked the number as the name of the search engine they then hoped would organize large quantities of information. 

That makes Polonius's quadrillionth (or was it quintillionth?) reference to the ABC being a conservative free zone quite modest. Hey ho, on we go:

When discussion on The Five turned to the allegation that Trump was a Hitlerite, Tarlov had this to say: “I don’t think anyone should be called Hitler. Hitler is a uniquely depraved human being and I don’t want to use his name in those contexts.”
Quite so. The Nazi party in general and Hitler in particular are a unique product of Germany from shortly after the end of World War I until the nation’s total defeat and surrender in May 1945. Put simply, there is no one in mainstream politics in Western democratic societies who can remotely be compared with the founder of the Nazi totalitarian dictatorship.

With the greatest respect, this is mindless historical revisionism, history refracted through the lens of what later happened.

Sure, Hitler started with a profound hatred of the Jews, but no one had a Holocaust in mind when he set off on his beer hall putsch journey.

Hitler might have in his scribbles and speechifying, but it didn't stop German industrialists, media barons and the upper class rallying around him, on the basis that he could be managed and he promised great things for them and the German economy. 

See How Big Business Bailed Out the Nazis:

It’s a largely forgotten piece of history, but in 1932 the German Nazi Party was facing financial ruin. How did the Nazis move from being broke to being in control of the German government just a year later? The Nazi Party was bailed out by German industrialists in early 1933.
The industrialists who led the way were two huge German firms, I.G. Farben and Krupp. Leaders of both of companies were among the few civilians who were later charged with war crimes at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II. These trials placed the story of their financial and moral support of the Nazis into the historical record. Krupp was a huge arms manufacturer. I.G. Farben was a vast chemical company which made everything from Bayer aspirin to Zyklon B, the poison used in the gas chambers.  
According to The Arms of Krupp, the Nazi Party was essentially bankrupt in late 1932. Joseph Goebbels, who would later become the Minister of Propaganda, complained, “[w]e are all very discouraged, particularly in the face of the present danger that the entire party may collapse….The financial situation of the Berlin organization is hopeless. Nothing but debts and obligations.”
Regardless of the party’s financial problems, Hitler was named Chancellor in late January 1933. He called for elections in early March. With less than two weeks left before the vote, Herman Goering sent telegrams to Germany’s 25 leading industrialists, inviting them to a secret meeting in Berlin on February 20, 1933. Attending the gathering were four I.G. Farben directors and Krupp chief Gustav Krupp. Hitler addressed the group, saying “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”  He also told the men that he would eliminate trade unions and communists. Hitler asked for their financial support and to back his vision for Germany.
According to Robert Jackson, the former Supreme Court Justice and chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, “[T]he industrialists…became so enthusiastic that they set about to raise three million Reichsmarks [worth about $30 million today] to strengthen and confirm the Nazi Party in power.”
Gustav Krupp was the first executive to speak at the Berlin meeting, and pledged one million marks. As the United Nations summarized in a 1949 report, Krupp was a key financier for the Nazi Party, including through his corporation:
"It was clear from the evidence that Gustav Krupp embraced Nazism shortly prior to the seizure of power by the Nazi Party and continued his allegiance thereafter. He played an important part in bringing to Hitler’s support other leading industrialists and through the medium of the Krupp firm… from time to time made large scale contributions to the [Nazi] Party Treasury."
Hitler awarded Krupp the title of Fuhrer of Industry later in 1933.

Others helped out. See The Nazi rise to power:

The conservative elite were the old ruling class and new business class in Weimar Germany. Throughout the 1920s they became increasingly frustrated with the Weimar Republic’s continuing economic and political instability, their lack of real power and the rise of communism. They believed that a return to authoritarian rule was the only stable future for Germany which would protect their power and money.
The first move towards this desired authoritarian rule was Hindenburg’s increasing use of Article 48 . Between 1925-1931 Article 48 was used a total of 16 times. In 1931 alone this rose to 42 uses, in comparison to only 35 Reichstag laws being passed in the same year. In 1932, Article 48 was used 58 times.
The conservative elite’s second move towards authoritarian rule was helping the Nazi Party to gain power.  The conservative elite and the Nazi Party had a common enemy – the political left .
As Hitler controlled the masses support for the political right, the conservative elite believed that they could use Hitler and his popular support to ‘democratically’ take power. Once in power, Hitler could destroy the political left.  Destroying the political left would help to remove the majority of political opponents to the ring-wing conservative elite.
Once Hitler had removed the left-wing socialist opposition and destroyed the Weimar Republic, the conservative elite thought they would be able to replace Hitler, and appoint a leader of their choice.
As Hitler’s votes dwindled in the November 1932 elections, the conservative elite knew that if they wanted to use Hitler and the Nazis to destroy the political left, they had to act quickly to get Hitler appointed as chancellor.
Von Papen and Oskar von Hindenburg (President Hindenburg’s son) met secretly and backed Hitler to become chancellor. A group of important industrialists, including Hjalmar Schacht and Gustav Krupp, also wrote outlining their support of Hitler to President Hindenburg.
The support of these figures was vital in Hindenburg’s decision to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Once elected, the conservative elite soon realised that they had miscalculated Hitler and his intentions.

Well yes, they really mucked up, nobody really thought a second world war and a vast killing machine was in the making ... but it all feels uncomfortably like the feuding billionaires on view in the USA, thanks to the Supreme Court opening the floodgates and thanks to the likes of Uncle Leon spending up big. 

It might well be that the MM retires to his telly and his burgers and diet Cokes and nothing much happens if he squeaks a win, but it also might be that his minions will wreak destruction of an immense kind (attempting to lock up 20 million people would only be the start, with Uncle Leon promising to slash and burn and produce hardships, and that's just a few of the promised low lights).

Never mind, at this point the reptiles inserted a ticking clock, already out of date whenever the pond decided to screen cap it, perhaps to generate a sense of faux urgency lacking in the Polonial screed:

Who cares? It'll be what it will be, and Polonius will keep on rambling in the meantime:

The attempt to link Trump with Hitlerism picked up pace in recent days when Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, drew a connection between Trump’s rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden last weekend to an event that occurred in 1939. Walz declared: “There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden – and don’t think that he (Trump) doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”

The reference was to a rally held in February 1939 by what is best described as an American pro-Nazi party that was supported in the main by some German Americans. It is not at all clear whether Trump was aware of this fact. Moreover, the site of the 1939 rally was demolished in 1968 and a new Madison Square Garden was constructed about a kilometre from the earlier location.

Let's ignore the pathetic attempt at that MSG not being the MSG fudge. The MM thinks it's the MSG and that's enough for the pond.

Best not to obscure another classic Polonial fudge, a tidy bit of dissembling and deflection, that note: best described as an American pro-Nazi party that was supported in the main by some German Americans.

Best described? It was a shamelessly Nazi American Nazi party. No reason to fudge. 

The German American Bund wasn't just pro, it was full on Nazi (possible The Atlantic paywall, but with good snaps), with Fritz Kuhn fancying himself as America's Führer. 

It's a feature, not a bug, of the US and other political systems, that the far right is always around, with George Lincoln Rockfeller forming the American Nazi Party in the 1950s.

As for Trump, a native New Yorker with a Germanic past, not being aware of the MSG do, let's not forget that in 1927 daddy Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan demonstration, and that Trump himself was aware of the comparison:

“They started to say, ‘Well, in 1939, the Nazis used Madison Square Garden,’” Trump said. “How terrible to say, right? Because you know, they’ve used Madison Square Garden many times. Many people have used it. But nobody’s ever had a crowd like that. And I tell you what, right now, nobody’s ever had love like that. That was love in the room, and it was love for our country.”

Yep, he got a bigger crowd than the Nazis. His cult is bigger than Adolph's.

The pond has no time for CNN both siderism, but the notion that the bile on display at MSG was a love fest is hilarious, especially as the MM is prolific in his use of "fascism" and "fascist" as descriptors:

Donald Trump on Tuesday defended his controversial Madison Square Garden rally, telling supporters that the event was “an absolute lovefest” and that it was “my honor to be involved.”

The former president’s comments come amid backlash over disparaging and divisive remarks at his Sunday event in New York City, which included a comedian describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” Allies expressed worry the remarks could have political repercussions, especially given Puerto Ricans’ growing influence in battleground states, with about half a million residing in Pennsylvania alone. But Trump at his Mar-a-Lago rally did not directly address the criticism of that remark.

“I don’t think anybody has ever seen anything like what happened the other night at Madison Square Garden,” Trump told a crowd of supporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida as he addressed criticism of his rally for the first time. “The love in that room – it was breathtaking. And you could have filled it many, many times with people that were unable to get in.”

He claimed that veteran politicians told him there had “never been an event so beautiful.”

“It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest, and it was my honor to be involved,” he said.

CNN reported Monday that several of Trump’s allies expressed dismay at the language used by speakers at the event, particularly the Puerto Rico remark, which set the tone for an evening of disparaging and divisive comments. The violent and vulgar rhetoric at the rally has prompted finger-pointing within the former president’s inner circle and deep concern that his message was once again eclipsed by controversy.

In an interview that aired Tuesday night, Trump said that the comedian behind the offensive comments about Puerto Rico, Tony Hinchcliffe, probably shouldn’t have attended his Madison Square Garden rally.

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if it’s a big deal or not, but I don’t want anybody making nasty jokes or stupid jokes. Probably he shouldn’t have been there,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Earlier in the day, Trump tried to cast himself as an ally of the island, saying at a roundtable in Pennsylvania, “No president’s done more for Puerto Rico than I have.”

Well he did offer them a generous serve of paper towels, but after that lengthy detour, back to Polonius for another short gobbet:

Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton jumped on the Walz ideological bandwagon, apparently forgetting for a moment that she had participated in a political event at the Garden some years earlier.

In Australia, Walz’s fake historical comparison was repeated on Wednesday by American journalist Bruce Shapiro in his slot on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live. He said the announcement of Trump’s proposed rally “immediately evoked comparisons with a kind of notorious event in New York City history in February of 1939 at a rally at Madison Square Garden of the … leading American pro-Nazi group at the time”.

At this point the reptiles interrupted Polonius with a snap captioned Democrats have been trying to liken Trump to Adolf Hitler, taken from some cheap arsed public domain archive:

Of course it's a distraction, and it entirely misses the point. Strip away the love of a uniform, and you can find the MM in all sorts of evocative poses up there with a rhetorical Adolf:

 

There's no point underselling his ability as an entertainer and a performer with an ability to grab the moment, ranting away for hours in a manner which more than matches Adolf. 

He also has an uncanny ability to produce "there are good people on both sides" moments, as when he inveigled a general into marching with him on a bible stunt, with the general later calling him a distilled essence of fascism:

Obviously there are many differences, but the point of the comparison is the many similarities noted by Bruce Wolpe in Polonius's old rag, outside the paywall here.

The pond is so tired of Polonius that it seemed worth mentioning at length all that Polonius wants to fudge, or disingenuously ignore (follow the link for the embedded hot links):

It was clear, as soon as Donald Trump announced his rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, that to Make America Great Again he would have a thunderclap echo from the infamous rally of American Nazis in that arena on February 20, 1939. That night, the Garden was packed with more than 20,000. A portrait of George Washington commanded the stage. American and Nazi flags and swastikas were on display. The crowd gave “sieg heils.”

The American Nazis gathered to keep America pure from alien influences, and to bring America closer to Hitler’s Germany and his vision of the world. James Wheeler-Hill, the Nazi party’s national secretary, was as clear as day: “If George Washington were alive today, he would be friends with Adolf Hitler.”

Trump wants to come home to Madison Square Garden to continue his fight for America First to purge the country of alien influences and radical left extremism.

The creators on an Academy Award-winning film of that 1939 event, A Night at the Garden, have written: “Every one of the characteristics of Donald Trump’s rallies is present in the film above: the same vicious denunciation of the press, the same appeals to patriotism and white nationalism, the same urging that the audience, the only ‘true’ Americans, need to ‘take their country back’ from a despised minority (just substitute ‘illegals’ or ‘liberals’ for ‘Jewish’ here).”

When Trump has been called out on his flirting with Nazis in America – when he said there were “good people on both sides” in the Nazi march and violence, leaving one dead, in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017; when he had dinner with white supremacists and antisemites; when he instructed the extremist Proud Boys in the middle of a presidential debate with Joe Biden in 2020 to “stand back and stand by” – he denies knowing who they are, their intent, their racism. Trump never accepts that he is complicit.

But Trump has no restraint in being antisemitic. “If I don’t win this election, the Jewish people will have a lot to do with the loss.” He has described Jews as “voting for the enemy”. In his closing arguments in the campaign, Trump has declared war on “the enemy within” that must be put down with military force.

For the Jews, he makes it personal. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.”

Trump faces his full house crowd in New York not only as a former president, but as a fascist. In recent days, two military veterans, General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff in the White House, have both gone on the record on their views of Trump’s character, and why he should never be elected to returned to power.

“Certainly the former president is in the far-right area,” says Kelly, a former general in the Marines. “He’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators – he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Kelly says he heard it first-hand from Trump. “He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government … He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’”

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley refused to deploy the armed forces to put down demonstrations in cities across America in the wake of the murder by police of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis. “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” Milley told Bob Woodward in an interview for his new book, WAR. “Now I realise he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”

Trump loves the icons in New York. He wants to own them and to be the subject of adulation in them. The fascist candidate for president of the United States cannot wait to bring into Madison Square Garden his grievance, retribution and intent to wreak vengeance on his enemies, together with a desire for absolute power to prosecute his agenda and vanquish his opponents.

Another New York icon, legendary baseball great Yogi Berra, conjured this wisdom: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” It turns out that the 2020 election wasn’t the most important election since the Civil War – this one is. Trump is the divider-in-chief, incapable of bringing the country together to move forward together. His authoritarian impulses are unchecked.

Indeedy doody, a bit of a mouthful, but just because Fred T. cannily avoided being associated with German fascism and donated to Jewish causes - he was a businessman interested in making oodles of money so his son could piss billions up against the wall - shouldn't obscure his son's authoritarian impulses.

And so to the final Polonial gobbet, wherein he has a triumphant "I wuz right, and, triple yahoo, I was wuz right on the ABC" moment. 

Please allow him his tattered pundit glories:

Trump is no historian. But he did tell Sean Hannity on Fox News’ Hannity program last Wednesday that his father told him never to speak about Hitler or Nazism. The former president’s paternal grandparents were born in Germany.

Appearing on the ABC TV Insiders program on September 11, 2016, I stunned presenter Barrie Cassidy by stating that Trump had a possible path to victory over Clinton by winning in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In fact, he won Michigan and Wisconsin as well. In doing so, I said that I was no fan of Trump. He is not my preferred political conservative. But he does have appeal and he is a great performer.

Trump won narrowly in 2016 and lost narrowly in 2020. Clearly, he has significant support in the US, especially among those whom Clinton once dismissed as deplorables and President Joe Biden recently described as garbage.

Writing in The New York Times on October 22, columnist Bret Stephens commented that if Trump happens to win, the main culprits will be the Democrats. In particular, those who treated the former president’s supporters with condescension and engaged in name-calling, gaslighting, identity politics and pretending that Americans never had it so good. Stephens is a Trump critic but recognises the former president’s appeal.

Trump has many critics, including some who served in his administration. Former military leaders John Kelly and James Mattis have accused him of being soft on Hitler and having an authoritarian streak. Both were dismissed by Trump when he was president.

The US survived the first Trump presidency – indeed, he oversaw a successful government. There are many checks and balances in the US political system and it is hard to believe that Trump is a threat to American democracy. Unless you have a particularly bad case of Trump derangement syndrome.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Is it any biggie to note that the MM now has sundry paths to victory, as has Harris, if only because of the bizarre, labyrinthine morass known as the electoral college, which manages to strip the United States of any notion of democracy and turns it into the unrepresentative swill elected to the Australian Senate.

If you want to do a little counter-programming, try Anne Applebaum at Substack, On Vermin (there's a link to her full piece on the topic in The Atlantic, Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini):

A couple of weeks ago, I downloaded a collection of Hitler’s speeches and started going through them. I also searched my own files, especially the notes I took when working years ago in Russian archives. I was looking for the word “vermin.” Also “parasite.” And, in the Hitler speeches, references to “blood.”

The result was an article that mostly just quoted Donald Trump, noting that some of language he uses comes directly from the 1930s. Not just Hitler but Stalin, Mao and the East German Stasi liked to talk about their enemies as vermin and parasites who “poison the blood” of the nation:

"The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

This language isn’t merely ugly or repellent: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”

Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.”

This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”

In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable."

So he's an aspirational Commie and Fascist authoritarian dictator ...and so on in the rest of the read.

But then Applebaum made the leap against a wannabe authoritarian fascist, while Polonius is stuck with "not my preferred conservative" who nonetheless has appeal (perhaps to Catholics with a taste for Franco), while that lengthy detour also shouldn't thereby obscure another classic Polonial moment in his closer, even if it's stolen from that dire hack Bret Stephens. 

The main culprits will be the Democrats? 

Nah, not really, the main culprit will be the cult, and all those who have encouraged, supported and become a part the cult for their own reasons, including the Emeritus Chairman, Uncle Leon and a shadowy bunch of billionaires intent on using their oligarchical power to create at least a hundred year MM reich ... (perhaps a thousand in time).

As for the MM running a successful government? You have to join Polonius at the Sydney Institute, way above the faraway tree, in amongst the CBD 'leets, to get that one without collapsing into a Covid coughing fit (way better than joining the above average deaths the bleach- and Ivermectin-loving MM managed to produce) ...

And so to close in the usual way with a few 'toons, because what will the world's cartoonists do if the MM loses?