In which there's some light moments with the reptiles' Roving reporter, and then there's Henry ...

 

Hard to begin in a light hearted way this day, no thanks to the reptiles, but the pond thought this Bernie tribute helped ...

Don't ask the pond for an explanation, ask Kimmel (and avoid the last Newsom sketch). 

Kimmel's writers came up with a new name, The Cantaloupe-in-Chief, which the pond rather liked, because there's a real resemblance ...

As for coverage, the pond found yet another reason to dislike the NY Times ...

In all that nonsense, they assigned a certain Jacob Gallagher, "a Times reporter covering fashion and style", to cover RFK Jr's tie?

It read like a parody of a New Yorker piece ... (though to be fair, The New Yorker managed to look past the tie to get to The Junk Science of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.)

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday to be health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. looped on a blue tie with embroidered birds. It appeared to be a nod to Mr. Kennedy’s hobby of raising birds, something he has shared with his followers in some affable missives on social media. A falconer, Mr. Kennedy has raised ravens for years, but his tie’s molted yellow, red and green birds looked more like a flock of parrots...
...Mr. Kennedy’s biceps pressed against his suit, hinting at the physique that has become central to his singular image.
His face, tanned to toasted pumpkin, bore the fruits of living in California for decades. (Mr. Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, her kohl eye shadow matching her dark suit, could be spotted over his shoulder throughout the hearing.)

And so on, and if you want an explanation of why the USA is deeply stuffed, Mr Gallagher's approach provided more than sufficient evidence...

But the pond can't get too distracted, it must deal with the reptiles of the day ...

Grim news. Who will stand ready with the reptiles to fight the war on China? 

There's a new approach required ...

Over on the extreme far right, things were even gloomier ...

Oh dear, there's that call for arms, and talk of a lack of firepower. Oh come on, the pond has every confidence that the reptiles, led by the bromancer, will make an epic last stand in Holt street, down there with Colonel Custer ...

And then came our Henry, invoking Auschwitz, not a topic for comedy or his First Law, especially for an Islamophobic bigot, so the pond decided it would begin with a light touch by turning to the reptiles' roving WSJ reporter...

Donald Trump’s executive orders were the easy part, The US President has gotten off to a running start, filling every day with action – but he can get only so far without congress.

Comedy gold, but for some reason the reptiles left out that "Off to a good start", the wording in the splash.

Curious that, but still there were plenty of sightings of the The Cantaloupe-in-Chief from the get go, with the first showing him surrounded by sycophants, Donald Trump signs the Laken Riley Act in the East Room of the White House. Picture: AFP.

It made the pond giddy, and for some strange reason, reminded the pond of that other sycophant, the liar from the Shire, featured in Crikey ...(paywall)

By golly, the pond thought that Oz day was over, but it just keeps on giving ...

It put the pond in just the right mood for the reptiles' Roving reporter ...

In his first week in office, President Trump has moved fast and hard, filling every day with action.

He has removed criminal illegal aliens from America and toughened border defences. He has named trusted lieutenants as acting cabinet secretaries and agency heads. In turn, they’re preparing withdrawals of Biden-era regulations wherever possible on everything from the economy to climate and abortion.

He visited victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the Los Angeles fires in California, spoke at a Nevada rally, and hosted House Republicans at his Trump National Doral Golf Club. He fired at least 17 departmental inspectors general, froze all federal grants and offered buyouts for all federal civil-service workers.

He has issued dozens of executive orders, including creating an “Iron Dome” missile defence, barring transgender troops from serving in the military, reinstating service members discharged for refusing the Covid vaccine, and killing diversity, equity and inclusion programs throughout the government. He has moved to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organisation and the Paris Climate Agreement, to end birthright citizenship, and to declassify all records on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

He was strengthened by Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s refusal to allow US military aircraft to land and repatriate his countrymen. Mr Trump’s instantaneous response — a threat to slap tariffs on Colombian exports to the U.S. (namely oil, coffee and cut flowers) — caused Mr Petro to fold, leaving Mr Trump looking powerful and effective.

The reptiles stacked the yarn with endless snaps of The Cantaloupe-in-Chief, Donald Trump tours areas devastated by Hurricane Helene to assess recovery efforts in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Picture: Reuters.

The Roving reporter did his best to sound enthusiastic, but it was a tempered enthusiasm ...

His furious activity has contributed to the image of a purposeful leader pressing his agenda. This resulted in his best job-approval numbers ever: 50 per cent as of Sunday approved of his performance and 41.7 per cent disapproved in the 538 average of recent polls. He never got that high in his first term. But it’s also the lowest starting approval number for any president since polling began in the 1930s — except for Mr Trump in 2017.

And his dusk-to-dawn, flood-the-zone approach could give the impression that he cares about culture-war issues and symbolism more than inflation and the economy, issues critical to his November triumph. 

Come now, no one cares about the price of eggs anymore, surely ...

The Roving reporter pressed on ...

In the flurry of orders, it’s the hot-button cultural ones that the media jump on. Add his efforts to acquire Greenland, take back the Panama Canal, rename the Gulf of Mexico and make Canada a state (or states), and swing voters might ask if he’s serious about killing inflation and spurring economic growth.

Speed can also lead to mistakes, such as pardoning at least 170 Jan. 6 rioters who were accused of attacking police with deadly weapons. The blanket pardons were an attempt “to move past the issue quickly,” according to Axios. Rather than spend the time to identify violent criminals, “Trump just said: ‘F — it: release ’em all,’ ” an anonymous adviser told Axios’s Marc Caputo.

And an AV distraction followed, US President Donald Trump signed into law a bill requiring the federal detention of undocumented immigrants accused of criminal activity.

The pond doesn't want to rain on the reptiles' pictorial parade, but there was this in Axios, Why Trump won't be deporting "millions" of criminals:

President Trump claims that his administration will quickly deport "millions and millions" of "illegal aliens" with criminal records.

• Those millions don't exist.

The big picture: Less than 1% of immigrants deported last fiscal year were kicked out of the U.S. for crimes other than immigration violations. In the past 40 years, federal officials have documented about 425,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions on the ICE's "non-detained docket."

• About 13,100 of those were convicted in homicides and are imprisoned in the U.S. They'll have deportation hearings after serving their sentences.

To deport millions of "criminals," Trump would have to consider all undocumented immigrants as criminals. But being in the U.S. illegally is a civil violation, not a criminal one.

• Those millions would have to include agricultural, construction and service workers, students and others who are unauthorized to be in the U.S. but have no criminal backgrounds, according to legal specialists and an Axios review of federal immigration data.
• Unauthorized immigrants caught near the border can be quickly removed.
• But any convicted immigrants serving time — or those charged with crimes — will face deportation hearings only after the U.S. criminal justice system is done with them.

Sure enough, of the first 1,179 reportedly arrested, at least 566 people arrested Sunday had not committed any crimes and were only detained because they lacked legal authorization to remain in the United States. (NBC).

Inevitably there were sadly funny stories of Hispanics who had FAFO'd, but the Roving reporter pressed on, deeper into saucy doubts and fears land:

Mr Trump might also want to rethink linking presidential actions to partisanship and political favours. Visiting North Carolina victims of Hurricane Helene, he led with how the region “supported us in record numbers, and I’m supporting them in record numbers, too.” But when it came to California, he said he had “a condition” for approving wildfire disaster relief: The state must pass a voter identification law. The 1988 Stafford Act, which modernised federal disaster emergency response, clearly outlines the criteria for a disaster declaration. It doesn’t include such quid pro quos. Can you imagine the MAGA world rage if a Democratic president conditioned aid to red states on weaker voting laws?

If Mr Trump keeps making disaster relief all about taking care of politics, voters might object. Americans want their president to act for the good of all the people, not just reward supporters while punishing states that went blue.

Then came a final AV distraction, U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday (January 29) that federal workers must agree to show up for work in the office by Feb. 6 or their employment will be terminated.

"Off to a good start"wasn't sounding so good ...

A bigger challenge awaits Mr Trump. Every president has a mandate, no matter how narrow his winning margin. But it can’t all be done by executive orders. A future president can easily undo them. To give his agenda some permanence, Mr Trump must pass it into law.

Which brings us to Congress. It has a role to play, especially on the budget and taxes. And little can be done on a party-line vote. Against Mr Trump’s urging, 38 House Republicans chose not to vote to raise the debt ceiling last December. That points to the necessity of at least some bipartisanship.

Mr Trump is off to a good start, but acting only by executive order is over. Hard, serious work must begin.

Those who champion disrupting the “Deep State” must now show they can unite the country and govern.

Karl Rove helped organise the political-action committee American Crossroads and is author of The Triumph of William McKinley (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

Remarkable really, that the reptiles managed to miss out on the circus currently in town, but help is at hand ...

And so to our Henry, and a sterling example of how a terrible historical event can be pressed into the service of bigotry ...

Auschwitz is a lasting symbol of apocalyptic hatred of Jews, In refusing to learn history’s lessons, world leaders have sullied the memory of the millions whose lives were stolen on Auschwitz’s blood-soaked plains.

It's not so much what's in our Henry's read as what isn't, and even more bewildering, why the reptiles offered up this snap as starters, Catherine, Princess of Wales and Prince William, Prince of Wales light candles during a ceremony commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day in London. Picture:Getty Images

Never no mind, the reptiles love the monarchy, and then it was on with our Henry ...

Entering Auschwitz on Saturday, January 27, 1945, the Soviet soldiers struggled to make sense of what they saw. The camp’s liberation had not come cheaply: overcoming fierce resistance from German guards cost some 230 Soviet lives. As they fought to break through, the Soviet troops knew virtually nothing about what lay behind the dense thickets of barbed wire.

According to General Vassily Petrenko, one of the operation’s commanders, “We only learned about the camp’s existence the previous night”. And they were given next to no information about the camp itself.

That this was a site of mass murder was soon obvious. But in fleeing, the SS had tried to remove every trace of the slaughter of 1.1 million people, of whom one million were Jews.

Of the 67,000 inmates who were in Auschwitz 10 days before it was freed, only 7000 remained, the rest having been sent on “death marches” that quickly earned their grim name. Strewn amid frozen corpses, the survivors, whose bodies had to be carefully examined to ascertain whether they were dead or alive, hardly had the strength to explain the camp’s workings.

It took two months for a coherent picture to emerge. Once it did, however, its horror made “Auschwitz” synonymous with the Holocaust and defined the image that gave, and still gives, the newly coined term “genocide” its emotive force.

Yet the transformation of Auschwitz into a symbolic reference had fateful consequences. As the whole notion of genocide was stretched into meaninglessness, the specific nature of the Holocaust, and of factors that made it possible, faded from sight. And with them faded public understanding of the risk that it could recur.

To say that is not to ignore the many controversies that mark the enormous scholarly literature. But this much is beyond dispute: had it not been for the apocalyptic version of anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology, the Holocaust would never have occurred.

The Jews were, Hitler said, “the evil enemy of mankind”, “vermin” who, like “rats”, poison the body politic. The choice was stark: either “our people and our country become these bloodthirsty Jewish tyrants’ victims”, allowing “the entire world to fall into their clutches”; or “if Germany can free itself from the Jews’ grasp, this greatest of all dangers will be eliminated from the whole world”.

And on January 30, 1939, as he prepared to launch the “final struggle” to assure the supremacy of the Aryan race, Hitler, speaking “as a prophet”, assured the German people that the battle would end “not in the victory of Judaism, but in the extermination of Europe’s Jews”.

It was that apocalyptic vision, which combined an unbridgeable division between the good and the evil with the conviction that salvation requires the disappearance of the evil from the face of the Earth, that gave the “final solution” its impetus. Elevating slaughter into a moral duty, it justified acquiescence at best, active participation at worst, in crimes that, merely a decade earlier, would have seemed unimaginable.

The reptiles decided on a break ...Penny Wong joins King Charles III, King Frederik X of Denmark, Queen Mary of Denmark amongst other dignitaries and Holocaust victims during the ceremony for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp.

It wasn't enough to stop a bigot in full flight, as the hole in the bucket man disappeared up his fundament in his usual way ...

Unfortunately, apocalyptic anti-Semitism did not vanish with the Nazi Reich’s collapse. On the contrary, it lived on in the Middle East, where it could build on beliefs deeply ingrained in the Muslim world. Fusing elements of Jewish messianism and Christian millenarianism, Islam had long nourished an apocalyptic narrative in which small and then great “signs of the hour” unleash a sequence of terrifying events that culminate in “a grievous day for the disbelievers”. As the Mahdi, a messianic deliverer, leads the “army of wrath” to victory, the oppressors of the faithful will drown in rivers of blood, heralding the end of times.

That vision always coexisted uneasily with official Islam, which was wary of apocalyptic fantasies’ potential to foment unrest. But grounded in both the Koran and the Hadith (the sayings and teachings of Muhammad), the promise of deliverance steadily acquired doctrinal prominence.

Epitomised by the rebellion that swept Sudan in the 1880s – when a self-proclaimed Mahdi announced his intention “to destroy this world in order to construct the other world” – one of the vision’s most distinctive features was its obsessive focus on Jews.

Thus, in his highly respected compilation of Hadith, Muhammad al-Bukhari (809-870) warned that “the Last Hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them”. Slightly later, as Sufism was taking shape, the integral role of the extermination of the Jews in unlocking the “Last Hour” was emphasised by ibn al-’Arabi (1165–1240), the most celebrated of Islam’s great mystics.

Hang on, hang on, what about more recent great mystics continuing the tradition?

Never mind, the pond understands it's a leaf and trees matter ...

It then received authoritative endorsement from the 13th and 14th centuries’ teachings of the scholar Abu ’Abd al-Andalusi, known as al-Qurtubi, and especially of ibn Kathir, who was a disciple of ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), the unrivalled champion of Hanbali literalism.

Establishing an intellectual tradition on which future generations could draw, it was those works, rather than European anti-Semitism, that provided the doctrinal foundations for the explosive growth of apocalyptic versions of Islam that began with the Iranian revolution in 1979.

Um, this is all well and good, but might not there be a strong tradition of anti-Semitism in Xianity? Might there be things the pompous pedant had omitted?

Should anti-Semitism - remembering that Arabs are also Semites - only be defined in an Islamic context? 

If you're a bigot, perhaps, but please, it's there in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions. The pond felt the need to indulge in its own form of portentous pedantry.

Luther, for example, was what passed for Germany back in the fifteen century. 

He had plenty to say, as per the wiki on the matter, and there's a more direct lineage between him and Adolf than there is between Adolf and medieval Islamic bigots ...

In a paragraph from his On the Jews and Their Lies he (Luther) deplores Christendom's failure to expel them. Moreover, he proposed "What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews":

• "First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools ... This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians ..."
• "Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed."
• "Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them."
• "Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb ..."
• "Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside ..."
• "Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them ..."
• "Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow ... But if we are afraid that they might harm us or our wives, children, servants, cattle, etc., ... then let us emulate the common sense of other nations such as France, Spain, Bohemia, etc., ... then eject them forever from the country ..."

Why no mention of any of this? 

Why no mention of any of the many other examples to be found, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which emanated from imperial Russia, or so its wiki says ...

Towards the end of the 18th century, following the Partitions of Poland, the Russian Empire conquered the world's largest Jewish population. The Jews lived in shtetls in the West of the Empire, in the Pale of Settlement and until the 1840s, local Jewish affairs were organised through the qahal, the semi-autonomous Jewish local government, including for purposes of taxation and conscription into the Imperial Russian Army. Following the ascent of liberalism in Europe and among the intelligentsia in Russia, the Tsarist civil service became more hardline in its reactionary policies, upholding Tsar Nicholas I's slogan of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality, whereby non-Orthodox and non-Russian subjects, including Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, were viewed as a subversive fifth column who needed to be forcibly converted and assimilated; but even Jews like the composer Maximilian Steinberg who attempted to assimilate by converting to Orthodoxy were still regarded with suspicion as potential "infiltrators" supposedly trying to "take over society", while Jews who remained attached to their traditional religion and culture were resented as undesirable aliens.

Well yes, it wasn't just the Islamics, every Xian European country, tyke, proddie or orthodox, had its own tradition of anti-semitism, with few exceptions, but none of this makes our Henry's cut. Why?

One explanation? Could it have something to do with the need to step discreetly past the fanatical fundamentalists currently in charge in the state of Israel, intent on ethnic cleansing and a genocide of their own?

The subsequent outpouring of apocalyptic texts – in which Jews are repeatedly described as “harmful vermin that eats its own dung”, “termites that gouge the wood until it collapses” and “scorpions that harm only the non-Jews who come close to them” – contain plenty of claims that verge on delirium.

For example, according to the wildly popular Egyptian author Said Ayyub, who has spawned imitators throughout the Muslim world, “the Jews have placed themselves in the hands of the Antichrist”, planning “the Third World War in order to eliminate Islam”. Fortunately, in the colossal battles that will unfold as the final hour strikes, “their corpses will be delivered up to the birds of Armageddon, and their flesh will be scattered about the skies”.

But drenched in the stock figure of the scheming Jew and celebrating in advance the Jewish people’s complete disappearance, the vision those works embody is now at the very heart of Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s world view – as well as that of near-nuclear Iran. Rendering hatred inexpiable and compromise inconceivable, there is only one thing that will quench their fanaticism – a new Holocaust.

Years ago, as the Nazis armed for war, Sebastian Haffner, who fled Germany for England, despaired over the inability of the British to understand that there could be people who would never accept a compromise or respect an agreement. Convinced there were “moderates” in the Nazi party whose position would be strengthened by concessions, the appeasers and sentimentalists were, Haffner said, “dooming humanity to disaster”.

That is the tragedy of this week’s commemorations. As Israel is once again threatened by genocidal enemies, and violent anti-Semitism becomes normalised, world leaders stood by, piously intoning “never again”. In refusing to learn history’s lessons, they sullied the memory of the millions whose lives were stolen on Auschwitz’s sombre plains.

Yep, if we're talking of sombre plains, try Palestinians confront a landscape of destruction in 'ghost towns'...

It's hard to come back from all of that, but the pond is determined to end how it started, on a cheerful note, thanks to the immortal Rowe and the infallible Pope, celebrating first world problems...