Welcome in the new year with a Lynch mob lynching? That's beyond the vale of tears and into the hills of madness ...

 

After a restful early night's sleep undisturbed by fireworks, the pond woke to a burning question. Which reptile would usher in the new year for the pond?

One thing was certain. The pond wouldn't begin with the likes of this Politico story.

Sheesh, 2028? No link, it was simply too offensive.

Give it a rest already. No wonder many Americans feel lost, alienated, distanced from the chattering class. Just making it through 2025 will be a miracle enough without wondering about 2028.

The pond also had to abandon any attempt to keep up with the latest civil war news ...

If you want that yarn, you can find it at source or outside the soft paywall, at Republicans Admit MAGA Civil War Is a Total ‘S***show’—and It’s Only Gonna Get Worse.

“Often when Elon Musk goes about policy, he’s actually wrong about most of it, and the scary part is most members of Congress don’t realize he’s actually wrong. They just say, ‘Yes, let’s go in that direction.’ Mike Johnson, I think he’s a smart guy who knows that Donald Trump is often wrong and Elon Musk is often wrong, so he’s in this place where he has to navigate the caucus of Trump/Musk followers while also actually doing the business of government,” former Rep. David Jolly of Florida said.

With the greatest respect, Mike Johnson is about as smart as the rocket in Oscar Wilde's story and might soon be settling into the mud ... looking up at the weird stars cavorting above in the skies.

And then came Steve Bannon Ramps Up MAGA Civil War With Graphic Threat to Elon Musk.

On the last episode of the year for Bannon’s War Room podcast, he sent a threatening message to the SpaceX founder: “Don’t come up and go to the pulpit and... start lecturing people about the way things are going to be... If you’re going to do that, we’re going to rip your face off.”

Eek, the leopard party eating faces.

In the middle of all the confusion came this news ...

Apparently they do, courtesy Katie Francis ...GOP Acknowledges Climate Change to Justify Greenland Takeover. Inter alia ...

Speaking on Sunday Morning Futures, O’Brien envisioned a future in which the U.S. could cut down on using the Panama Canal “as the climate gets warmer.”
“Greenland is a highway from the Arctic all the way to North America, to the United States,” he said to guest host Jason Chaffetz on Fox News.
“It’s strategically very important to the Arctic which is going to be the critical battleground of the future because as the climate gets warmer, the Arctic is going to be a pathway that maybe cuts down on the usage of the Panama Canal.
Critics seemed shocked by both the boldness of trying to acquire Greenland, and that O’Brien was willing to invoke climate change as a justification for doing so.
“Wait so they accept climate change as real to justify annexing sovereign nations?” one account wrote in response to O’Brien’s speech.

Climate science, say hello to imperialism.

But enough of all that, time to see what the local reptiles had on offer this day ...

It seems it's definitely 2025, though you might wonder, what with the lying rodent and Petey boy still dominating the reptile headlines. Day after day the members of the hive mind have to enjoy lying little Johnnie and Petey boy, as if the rag was infested with the Y2K bug and never recovered.

At least the pond won't have to worry about getting the date wrong while signing cheques (ask your grandparents, vulgar phone-tapping youffs). 

Over on the extreme far right, the list of contenders was beyond dismal ...

Usher in the new year with the Lynch mob? 

Imre, who these days passes himself off as "an author and journalist", made a valiant attempt by listing the dead 'uns, It has been a year of notable obituaries — and deep confusion, There have been so many notable obituaries in 2024 – they have all merged inside my brain...

But the pond only came away with the deeply confusing captions to the snaps scattered in the yarn ...

<a capiid="92a2d4bea4866721bfc78dfa0442ae8e" class="capi-link">Jimmy Carter.</a>
<a capiid="d693383edf13588e74d4414fc1211ff4" class="capi-link">Dame Maggie Smith.</a>
<a capiid="3c6e3df15521cd1cefceea60f0f08ef3" class="capi-link">James Earl Jones.</a>
<a capiid="405f5412ad636c9463941f07d9ca269d" class="capi-link">Sex therapist Ruth Westheimer.</a>
<a capiid="85f3572d89e072d032bc8e34fd2c0c8e" class="capi-link">Jack Karlson.</a>

The pond guesses that some reptile had a most excellent New Year's Eve...

And so to the ongoing, enduring tragedy of the Lynch mob ... though the reptiles promised Why Donald Trump is the anti-Carter president, No former president taught Donald Trump more about the office than did Jimmy Carter. The returning president is the anti-Carter was only a waste of three minutes of the pond's time, even as the sand started its relentless run through the 2025 hour glass.

The Lynch mob is showing signs of lurching off into deep MAGA territory, so it was appropriate that the yarn began with President-elect Donald Trump speaks at the Phoenix Convention Centre. Picture: agencies.

Here we must put aside such stories as Trump Pisses Off MAGA Fans With Sudden Reversal on Jimmy Carter:

Donald Trump’s public condolences for former President Jimmy Carter, who passed away at the age of 100 on Sunday, sparked an uproar among his own fans.
“I just heard of the news about the passing of President Jimmy Carter. Those of us who have been fortunate to have served as President understand this is a very exclusive club, and only we can relate to the enormous responsibility of leading the Greatest Nation in History,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday.
“The challenges Jimmy faced as President came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude,” Trump wrote. “Melania and I are thinking warmly of the Carter Family and their loved ones during this difficult time. We urge everyone to keep them in their hearts and prayers.”
Apparently, that relatively simple statement was too much for some in the MAGA crowd, according to RawStory.
“Lol, I know you’re being nice. But you’re tripping,” replied an account called Theodore Winters. “Carter was a terrible president and damaged The United States Of America to such an extent that we are STILL dealing with his horribly policy decisions and his inflation repercussions in 2024.”

Lol, this was the Lynch mob's attempt to get noticed by Raw Story ... and if the Lynch mob failed in the Kool-aid fuelled attempt, it wasn't for want of trying ...

Donald Trump is about to become the 47th president of the United States – but that is only if you count Jimmy Carter. The 39th president was one of the worst. Trump, then in his early 30s, watched and learned. No former president taught Trump more about the office than did Carter. The returning president is the anti-Carter.
While Trump is an instinctive, gut-driven leader, this does not mean he has no compass. If that compass has one face on it, it is Carter’s. For decades, Trump has been asking “What would Carter do?”, working out what that might be, then doing the opposite.
Where Carter appeased, Trump would threaten. Where Carter dithered, Trump would act. Where Carter finger-wagged, Trump would fist-pump. Where Carter was weak, Trump would be strong.
These are simple precepts. They have sustained Trump’s leadership style from boardroom to television studio to Oval Office.
The overcomplications of Carter would be solved by the simplicity of executive power under Trump. Carter tried to micromanage everything.

Naturally at this point the reptiles interrupted with a picture of Jimmy Carter, apparently the only solution to making the tangerine tyrant look good.

One thing that Carer did which was notable was pardoning the draft dodgers who had sensibly avoided the war in 'Nam.

The Lynch mob, by way of contrast, was besotted by trivia and endless details:

He was famously involved in the purchasing of the White House’s styrofoam cups. Of the 85 Federalist Papers, none covers that use of presidential power.
Trump is not a details man. He invites chaos and encourages churn. The staff turnover in his first term was legendary. He never trusted any one cabinet member very long. He liked to watch them fight among themselves. His administration was undeniably his. Elon Musk, take note.
Again, Carter was the opposite. His cardiganed collegiality was warm but ineffective. He chose big characters to run his foreign policy, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance, men who had a deep dislike for each other. But he could not choose between them.
Carter inadvertently fostered tension without any resulting creativity. His decision to attempt a rescue of Americans at the US embassy in Tehran during the Iranian hostage crisis was taken while Vance, his secretary of state, was on vacation.
In the months preceding this, the Carter administration pursued every kind of back channel into revolutionary Iran. None paid off. This bizarre tale is told brilliantly by Gary Sick in his book All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran.
Compare the approach of both presidents to Iran. In 1980, Carter jumped through every hoop to find a peaceful solution to the kidnapping by student revolutionaries of 52 American diplomats. In 2020, Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian shadow commander radicalised by that undergraduate humiliation of the US, was coldly assassinated on Trump’s orders.

It was a relief when the reptiles interrupted with an AV distraction:

A state funeral will be held for former United States president Jimmy Carter in Washington DC on January 9. The southern governor turned president died Sunday local time aged 100 after spending the last year and a half in hospice being treated for cancer. President Joe Biden has declared it a national day of mourning. The president has also issued an executive order directing government agencies to close on the day to pay their respects.

Meanwhile, the Lynch mob kept trying to use Carter as a way of bolstering a blustering bully:

Trump accompanied this with the tweet: “WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”
“If you’re Donald Trump,” said Stephen Metcalf, historian of the period, “it’s always 1979. Mr Trump carries Mr Carter with him everywhere, as a kind of anti-self. If Mr Carter was deliberative, Mr Trump must be reactive; where Mr Carter was essentially sermonic, a devotee of Reinhold Niebuhr, the great theologian of human limits, Mr Trump is comedic-demagogic, a fan of Norman Vincent Peale, the pop-evangelist behind ‘positive thinking’.’’
We are used to seeing Bidenomics as Trump’s opposite; it was the precondition for Trump’s remarkable victory in November.
But the economy Trump had to make his way in as a budding property developer was Carter’s. This made the Biden years look prosperous. Stuff that cost the 30-year-old Trump $100,000 in 1976 (when Carter was elected) cost the 34-year-old Trump $150,000 in 1980 (when Carter lost re-election).
Trump’s formative experience was the Carter recession, oil shock, stagflation and a world of foreigners who seemed, to the New Yorker, complicit in US decline. This was when Trump’s world view was formed. He has varied from it hardly at all. To get Trump, we need to appreciate how he got Carter.

At this point the reptiles tried on defamation by association, Jimmy Carter with the Shah of Iran.

Then there was a final burst from the Lynch mob:

Certainly, not every Carter misstep has been met by a Trump correction. Both men, to the chagrin of foreign policy hawks, believed in peaceful coexistence with Russia. Carter was no fan of Israel. But, like Trump, he engineered a peace agreement with Arab regimes that left the world’s only Jewish state more secure. But then most US presidents of the modern era have shared these approaches.
Ultimately, what makes Trump the anti-Carter is the president-elect’s rejection of the woolly progressivism espoused by his hapless predecessor.
Carter, in good and deep faith, pushed social justice and human rights as fundamental causes of American power. Their seizure by the educated elite, and the whole woke revolution built on them, is what Trump intends to wind back.
Perhaps the crucial lesson Trump took from Carter was to be lucky. It is hard to contrive a less auspicious period of modern history in which to be a one-term president. Carter was a poor leader but he got bum luck. Until Covid, Trump was the luckiest president since Bill Clinton. He will hope this luck returns in a second term – and Iran will hope it doesn’t.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne and author of In the Shadow of the Cold War: US Foreign Policy from George Bush Sr to Donald Trump (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

By the end of it all, the pond felt a surprising amount of affection for Carter. 

A genuine Xian, he did his best in troubled times. Neither the tangerine tyrant, nor the University of Melbourne, has that sort of excuse to hand.

Instead, for all the Lynch mob's blather, the already exploding shit show looms in the mind ...

And so to a bonus contender, with the pond astonished to see this in the lizard Oz pages, Ireland’s sympathy for Palestinians is not ‘Israelophobia’, Those who are quickest to proclaim ‘anti-Semitism’ against critics of Israel are often the same as those complaining of the left’s proclivity to close down free speech by shouting ‘racist’.

It was a four minute read, according to the reptiles, and the pond saw Ronan McDonald's effort as some sort of attempt to redeem the University of Melbourne's reputation, routinely sullied whenever the Lynch mob strolls into the public square to bung on a lynching. 

The opening snap, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar speaks at a campaign rally in Or Yehuda, Israel, hardly prepared the pond for what was to follow.

As the pond plunged in, it began to feel like the same sort of new year prank as had been performed by Imre's captions:

Israel’s closure of its embassy in Dublin last month, in response to pro-Palestinian actions by the Irish government, has led many commentators to accuse Ireland of Israelophobia and even anti-Semitism. We are hearing suggestions that Ireland has a particularly noxious history of this ancient hatred, a bigotry that has survived the collapse of its erstwhile Catholicism (“Why Ireland’s ‘new morality’ thrives on Israelophobia”, 23/12).
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, announcing the decision to close the embassy and playing to a domestic audience, declared the “anti-Semitic actions and rhetoric that Ireland is taking against Israel are based on delegitimisation and demonisation of the Jewish state and on double standards”.
As eminent a historian as Simon Sebag Montefiore explains Ireland’s “weirdly unreasonably anti-Semitic and anti-Israel” position by pointing at the experience of his own family in the notorious 1904 Limerick boycott.
About one-third of early settlement of Australia comes from Ireland and the Irish still come here in significant numbers. If they are bringing an anti-Semitic bacillus with them, it concerns us here too – especially since both the Irish and the Jews often come here to the same places and share much. If you see someone with red hair at Bondi Junction in Sydney’s eastern suburbs it’s likely to be one group or the other.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with another snap, Ireland's Prime Minister Simon Harris.

Also at this point the pond must interrupt to note that the link in the piece, “Why Ireland’s ‘new morality’ thrives on Israelophobia”, 23/12, didn't actually work -  what a splendid new year's eve some reptiles had - but it could be found with a search, and it turned out it was referencing the Lynch mob, in exceptional Lynch mob form ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, the pond was caught up in an epic battle between University of Melbourne dons ... food fight, food fight ...

To understand the root of the current diplomatic collapse between Ireland and Israel we would do better to look to the parallels and connections between these two diasporic peoples rather than exceptional Irish prejudice.
In the Irish case, a balanced look at modern Irish history reveals extensive solidarity and sympathy with the Jewish people and the Jewish state, at least up until the past few decades.
Let’s start with the fact Israeli President Isaac Herzog is entitled to an Irish passport. His father, the sixth president of Israel, Chaim Herzog, was born in Belfast and reared mostly in Dublin.
The stories of the Jews and the Irish, both persecuted and scattered, intertwine around the world, especially in the US where both groups (until recently) tended towards the Democratic Party.
In the famous Battle of Cable Street in the East End of London in 1936 the Jewish and Irish residents, working together, faced down Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Irish nationalist ideas were deeply influential on early Zionism, and the Irish and Jewish independence movements were aligned across many decades. However much the memory of “Zionist Sinn Fein” may embarrass that party today, it was a historical reality.
No figure exemplifies the relationship between the two countries more than Robert Briscoe, born into an Orthodox Jewish family in South Dublin in 1894 and reared as a committed Irish republican. Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky visited Dublin for instruction from Briscoe on the use of guerrilla tactics against the British.

Yes, it was obviously an attempt by a maddened Melbourne uni academic to suggest not everyone on campus was a member of the Lynch mob.

At this point the reptiles managed another snap, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog.

The pond was still gobsmacked ...and so signed up for the history lesson ...

Briscoe was one of the founders of Ireland’s largest party, Fianna Fail, and a close friend of Eamon de Valera. Both campaigned against the partition of Israel because of the Irish experience.
We often hear about de Valera’s lamentable visit to the German legation in Ireland to offer his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler. Less often these days do we hear about Eamon de Valera Forest outside Nazareth, dedicated in 1966 by Dublin’s Jewish community in recognition of Dev’s support for Jews in Ireland. That support includes special recognition of the Jews in Ireland’s 1937 constitution, unprecedented at the time.
Irish sympathy for persecuted Jewry goes back further. The most prominent Irish politician of the 19th century, “The Liberator” Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), was a champion of Jewish emancipation throughout Europe.
Michael Davitt, the great Land League leader and social justice advocate, exposed the Kishinev pogrom to the world in his book Within the Pale: The True Story of Anti-Semitic Persecution in Russia. Davitt held that political independence for both was the only solution to the Jewish question and the Irish question.
Before he took up his role as Ireland’s first ambassador to Australia, TJ Kiernan was posted to the Holy See during World War II. There with his wife, singer Delia Murphy, and celebrated Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty, he plotted to help Jews in Rome escape from the Nazis.

To help with the history lesson, the reptiles dug deep into their archives to come up with Eamon de Valera.

On and on Ronan rambled, as the pond wandered back to the days it paid homage to its ancestor Irish folk, the ones who had fled a small village in Tipperary ...

Those old enough to remember the worldwide best-selling Jewish-American novelist Leon Uris, author of Exodus (1958) and Trinity (1976), may recall that in the 1970s and into the ’80s it was not at all uncommon for the Irish and Israeli causes to resonate together.
When did these links begin to change? Bluntly, it changed when Israel started winning. Once Israel became successful militarily and politically following the Six-Day War in 1967, Irish progressives began to identify more with the Palestinians as victims of Western “settler-colonialism”, a narrative that has been tremendously assisted by the influence of the US academy in a globalised Ireland.
The alignment with the Palestinian cause has hardened into a coarse binary, perhaps most manifest in Belfast, where nationalists swath the streets with Palestinian flags and loyalists with Israeli.
Nonetheless, when we seek to understand why Irish people in great numbers feel sympathy for the Palestinians there are far more plausible explanations than the history of Irish anti-Semitism or “blood and soil” Irish ethnic nationalism.
Probably the most obvious is the fact the Irish are reacting to the live-streamed images of horrific human suffering from Gaza. You can see that reaction as double standards, given they reacted less strenuously to horrors in Syria, Yemen and the Sudan. But “whataboutery” is not a strong moral defence. Most Irish people, like most humane people around the world, also were horrified by the footage from Hamas’s barbarity on October 7, 2023. One moral response must not cancel the other.

Well yes, there's nothing like watching a genocide unfold in real time, and as for the other conflicts, it's possible to reel away from the destruction and the despair, and not understand what drives it, while the hypocrisy of a country which purports to be a democracy is sickening.

Meanwhile, the reptiles led with another snap, a man much loved in his day by the Daily Mail, Fascist leader Oswald Mosley inspecting members of the British Union of Fascists outside the Royal Mint in London, 1935.

No doubt the Lynch mob could explain why Oswald put the tangerine tyrant in a jolly good light.

Then it was on to a final gobbet ...

If Ireland is applying double standards to Israel, as the latter alleges, the same is true in the opposite direction.
Israel maintains its embassy in South Africa, the instigator of the charge of genocide in the International Criminal Court that Ireland supported. Norway and Spain allied with Ireland back in May to recognise a Palestinian state but still retain consular relations.
Why has Israel decided to make an example of Ireland? Could it be that Israel expects of Ireland, as Ireland expects of Israel, higher standards than it does of other countries?
It’s notable that those who are the quickest to proclaim “anti-Semitism” against critics of Israel are often the same as those complaining of the left’s proclivity to close down free speech by shouting “racist”. You can criticise Ireland for naive idealism, for moral self-congratulation, for too readily taking on a progressive orthodoxy, for not listening well to its EU partners and for under-recognising the eliminationist imperialism of Israel’s adversaries.
But the idea that Ireland’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause originates in its history of Catholic nationalist anti-Semitism holds little explanatory weight.
Ronan McDonald is Gerry Higgins chair of Irish studies at the University of Melbourne.

Actually the pond sees nothing wrong with a little naïve idealism ... it surely beats the far right claptrap and malarkey that routinely emanates from the Lynch mob, ruining the reputation of the University of Melbourne in the process ...

Sheesh, fancy welcoming in the new year with the Lynch mob and a rebuttal of the Lynch mob ... about the only thing that would have been worse was spending time with Vlad the impaler and Russian state media ...

Speaking of which, this was offered in another place as vintage Wilcox, what with many cartoonists bludging their way into the new year ...

And this was Russian state media showing the Lynch mob how to do it ...