In which Polonius and the dog botherer offer a quiet, peaceful Sunday meditation celebrating genocide and ethnic cleansing ...

The pond is behind the times this day, but how were the reptiles to know? 

They'd been scribbling and been published long before the news came from Alaska of a man with cankles on full display.

And the canker at the core was on view shortly afterwards ... Per WaPo (archive link).

What was the pond to do? Carry on with the goss about selling Ukraine down the river by TACO King Donald?

Ignore the reptiles of the lizard Ozand their discreet Buñuelian charms? 

Cast them into the digital fush and chups wrapping paper before their time? Surely they'd stayed fresh enough even if left out in the hot Tamworth sun for a day or so?

Besides, others can scribble of many things. They could be handing out a Hydeing, Marina style, to the Beckhams ... First it was a family, now it's a feud. But even in meltdown, Brand Beckham is raking it in.

They could be plaintively asking, Jon Allsop style in The New Yorker, The curious symbolism of J.D. Vance's English getaway, The Vice-President built his political brand on bashing élites. Why does he vacation like one? (*archive link)

Who knows, JA, could it simply be that the VP is a completely up himself member of the 'leets, making out with couches the way a randy Prince Andrew makes out with the reputation of the Royals?

There could be a form of grim optimism, as offered by Quinta Jurecic in The Atlantic in Trump’s Revenge Campaign Has a Weakness,  Prosecuting his enemies is turning out to be more difficult than he’d hoped—at least for now. (that's an archive link).

And given that the dog botherer is on the menu this day, some might turn to climate news, ‘Hellish’: heatwave brings hottest nights on record to the Middle East, Temperatures did not drop below 36C in Sedom, Israel on Tuesday night, while several parts of Jordan stayed above 35C on Monday

What about Susan Sontag, camp, King Donald's delight in showstoppers, Y.M.C.A, and 1980s stars and disco? 

Remarked on as long ago as 2020 ...How camp explains Trump, On the still strangely underappreciated nature of the outgoing president's appeal

...The most obvious sense in which Trump is camp is his voice and appearance. The accent, which has become more strident than it was two decades ago, is a parody of a New York accent, a stereotypical cab driver in an old episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (Compare his pronunciation of "China" in this clip with any recent footage). Meanwhile, everything about Trump as a physical specimen, from the skin (which is, in fact, orange) and the improbable hair and the pouting, curiously androgynous lips to the almost formless body, obese without seeming to possess actual flesh save for in the massive flanks (especially in golf or tennis shorts), is camp. He is a one-of-a-kind grotesque, an actor in an early John Waters feature.
"The essence of camp," Sontag tells us, is "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration." Trumpian aesthetics is a catch-all of the great artificial modes in Western art: rococo, Art Deco, vaporwave. It is above all anti-pastoral. (Like the denizens of Versailles, Trump can only encounter the natural world third or fourth-hand, in a tweet about the imminent signing of the 2018 farm bill embedded with a clip of him singing the Green Acres theme song at the Emmys.) Visually it depends upon absurd juxtapositions, and being in taste so bad that a knowing few are implicitly invited to recognize it as good.
The best, indeed perhaps the canonical, example of this is the dinner Trump gave at the White House for the 2018-19 Clemson Tigers football team: candles burning in golden sconces on either side of the white mantel, above which Lincoln's portrait hangs; tables covered in quasi-Renaissance drapery; gleaming candelabras flanking massive heaps of sandwiches from recognizable fast-food brands, and in the center, his own slightly pudgy face fixed in a smile that would be embarrassing in any other context, his hands spread out in a gesture that could almost be described as liturgical.
Trumpian camp is a playlist that features "La donna è mobile," "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Tiny Dancer," and various stadium anthems. It is a man touring the Mexican border in a Brooks Brothers blazer, golf shoes, and a trucker hat emblazoned with the slogan "Make America Great Again" in Times New Roman. It is Donald Trump's USA Freedom Kids from Pensacola, Florida, performing "The Official Donald Trump Jam," with its over-the-top "patriotism" and its unmistakable (but also totally deniable) hints of violence: "Come on, boys, take 'em down." It is the president of the United States dancing robotically to "Y.M.C.A." in the middle of a federally declared public health emergency, amid the cheers of thousands. It is everything hinted at in the phrase "We will activate Bill Barr and activate him strongly": the attorney general as a sort of Robocop figure in a cheesy cyberpunk dystopia, one in which the audience is meant to identify him with the dictator. (There are shades of Kenneth McMillan in David Lynch's Dune in Trump, and of Ian McNeice in the same role in the Sci-Fi channel miniseries adaptation of the novel). It is putting "science" in scare quotes and even spelling them out alongside the punctuation marks when referring to Barack Obama as the "quote 'president.'"

That was updated last week, as noted in The Bulwark ... (footnotes at the original)

Washington, D.C., in Donald Trump’s telling, may be a festering hellhole worse than Baghdad and Bogotá—but damned if he’s not going to make it a hellhole with some culture. Back in February, Trump appointed himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, complaining that the institution was “in tremendous disrepair” but that “the king of ratings” was going to turn it around. His mind was already afizz with ideas: “The thing that does well is Broadway hits,” he explained.
Yesterday, Trump schlepped back to the Kennedy Center again to make a little news: He’d chosen the honorees for the center’s awards show this December. “They all went through me,” Trump said. He’d “turned down plenty,” he’d added, whom he’d deemed “wokesters.”
Who ultimately made it through Trump’s gauntlet of scrutiny? A battery of decades-past megastars of stage and screen: Sylvester Stallone, the rock band KISS, country legend George Strait, Broadway star Michael Crawford, and disco icon Gloria Gaynor.
“I will say, ‘I Will Survive’ is an unbelievable song,” Trump said.
I have to confess that I look forward to Trump’s regular jaunts to the Kennedy Center, even if only as a break from the regular parade of horribles. It’s a place where his detestable qualities and his merely odd ones merge and interplay in interesting ways. Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Shawn McCreesh suggested there’s “a kind of yearning for a simpler time” in Trump’s Kennedy Center cosplay—“when he was thought of as a tabloid rascal turned reality television maestro, a mostly in-on-the-joke figure who symbolized greed and commercialism and who appeared in everything from ‘Home Alone 2’ to ‘Sex and the City’ to a Pizza Hut commercial.” They don’t put Trump in Pizza Hut commercials anymore. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
There are other reasons to enjoy the spectacle. The right wing worships Trump as a manly man among men. But this image has always fit oddly on Trump, the complexly coiffed, makeup-slathered cosmopolitan creature with a soft spot for a showstopper.
The Kennedy Center gig brings these contradictions to the forefront. Sure, it’s terrible on the merits to have our nation’s official arts honorees openly screened for permissible opinions about the president—but it’s also funny to imagine that president poring over the lists and picking the nominees on a personal and deeply camp calculus of what’s big, brassy, and Broadway.

And so on and on as the macho, macho man keeps meeting his match and his TACO moments.

But can anyone else evoke a Brigadoon, a lost world of remote indolence?

How silly to ask, and how sweet, how utterly charming and delightful was Polonius this day.

Bless his socks, in preference to blessing his dubious heart.

At a time when the world is veering all over the shop, what with a rampaging bull wrecking the fragile china, prattling Polonius managed to elevate into his sub-heading a line that has been haunting his shortcut key for generations ...The ABC is a conservative-free zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its leading news and current affairs programs or its online news.

It's a mantra of epic gigantic maroon proportions, and seemingly it never gets old or stale for Polonius, and so what a way to begin a beguiling, charming Sunday morning meditation ...

The header: ABC culture won’t change without diversity of views, The ABC is a conservative-free zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its leading news and current affairs programs or its online news.

The caption: The ABC is an over-managed bureaucracy that is effectively a staff collective. Picture: NewsWire/Gaye Gerard

It would seem on the evidence that the reptile offer to go elsewhere for digital riches has been definitely withdrawn, and so the pond is stuck here, listening to Polonious go over ancient tropes and memes ...

Interviewed on ABC Radio Darwin on July 31, recently appointed ABC managing director and editor-in-chief Hugh Marks received what sounded like a Dorothy Dixer style soft question. Jess Ong put it to her employer: “There is the idea, this commentary, that the ABC is too left-leaning, too woke; how do you respond?”
Marks is an experienced media operative. He did not give his interviewer the answer she appeared to want – namely, to throw the switch to denial and say the taxpayer- funded public broadcaster was fair and balanced and so on.
Instead, Marks declared that he was a pretty “straight-talking, straight to the point, sort of person”. He added: “I think that’s a new approach for the ABC.” And he wondered how long it would take him “to influence the culture of the organisation”. But Marks acknowledged that “we need to talk about the content”.
Without question, Marks has inherited a difficult gig. The ABC is an over-managed bureaucracy that is effectively a staff collective. Marks wants to address the ABC content, which is controlled by presenters and producers.

By the full to overflowing intertubes, First Dog's celebration of Polonius prattling on about the ABC ran as long ago as 10th April 2008 ...

Poor old Hugh is just the latest in a very long line of recipients of Polonial missives, Recently appointed ABC managing director and editor-in-chief Hugh Marks. Picture: NewsWire

Of course it's deeply Freudian. 

Polonius has never forgiven the ABC for their refusal to give him his own show, despite many branding opportunities, such as Furry Fun with Polonius, a dog and her furry master.

And as for being booted for Insiders, unforgivable, all the more so that his sparring partner David Marr, was given a Radio National gig, while Polonius was forced to endure the slight in sullen not so silent suffering ...

It’s a long time since an ABC managing director, who is also paid to be editor-in-chief, has acted in a way that the editor-in-chief of a commercial media outfit would act. ABC staff believe it is their right to determine content – not that of management.
The ABC as a staff collective is one matter. But it is also a conservative-free zone without one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its leading news and current affairs programs or its online news. In the past, ABC management has denied this, but no one has ever named a conservative in the organisation who fits the bill.
This leads to the lack of viewpoint diversity – I believe that the term was first popularised by Uri Berliner, who resigned from National Public Radio in the US in April 2024 because of what he regarded as its hostility towards Israel when reporting the Israel-Hamas war.
Writing in The Free Press on September 24, 2024, Berliner illustrated his point with respect to US politics. He wrote: “In (Washington) DC, where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions, zero Republicans. None.”
Voters in Australia are not required to declare their party affiliation as they are in most states in the US in order to vote in primary elections. However, if this were the case, I’m sure you would find that the overwhelming majority of ABC journalists in the capital cities support the Greens, or left-wing Labor or the teals. And it would be close to zero with respect to the Coalition.
The ABC’s defence is to state that there is no relationship between political and social views that journalists have and how they do their job in reporting news, determining interviews, appointing staff and so on. Well they would, wouldn’t they? – to paraphrase what Mandy Rice-Davies declared in a somewhat different context.
I was reminded of this when I read an article last Tuesday by John Lyons on the ABC website titled “Western nations’ moves still fall short of real pressure on Israel, but there are more options”.

Oh dear, poor old Lyons is the victim this week, John Lyons is the ABC’s Americas editor based in Washington.

What deeply offensive heresies has he uttered? 

What has resulted in the need for him to be given a hectoring and a lecturing, and perhaps, de Sade permitting, perhaps even a spanking or a sound thrashing, egad?

Lyons is the ABC’s Americas editor based in Washington. Previously he held the position of global affairs editor. Those who have read Lyons’ 2021 book Dateline Jerusalem will know he is highly critical not only of contemporary Israel but also of the leaders of the Jewish community in Australia.
So it came as no surprise when, in the first four paragraphs of his ABC article, Lyons not only criticised “the Israeli government” but “the main Israeli lobby group in Australia”. You would think the ABC’s Americas editor would focus more on contemporary US politics and leave Israel to the ABC’s Jerusalem-based journalists.

Speaking of Lyons, as Polonius was doing, is he capable of a fair call?

A more than fair call, more than Polonius could ever manage, but do go on ...

Ever since Israel went into Gaza in its attempt to defeat the terrorist group Hamas, which had launched its barbaric October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, the ABC has devoted considerable taxpayer funds to the Israel-Hamas war. For the most part the coverage has been one-sided in its hostility to Israel.
A few recent examples illustrate the point. Neither ABC TV Insiders nor ABC TV Media Watch did an on-air correction after having shown the photo of Gazan boy Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq and his mother. Neither program stated that the child was suffering from cerebral palsy, among other illnesses – not starvation as the photo implied. Also, there was the fact his mother looked well – as did his older brother in other photos.
To be fair, Insiders did not have much time to research the issue before it went to air on July 27. But it did have time to make a correction the following week.

Meanwhile, actual starvation is going down, but Polonius, like all the other reptiles, see no need to mention any of that.

Per Haaretz, an actual publication in Israel the reptiles should occasionally visit ...

Gaza Health Ministry Says 51 Palestinians Killed by IDF in Past Day, Including 17 Waiting for Aid, In Khan Yunis, IDF jets targeted a residential compound in the city center, causing severe damage to nearby buildings and sewage systems, whose destruction led to sewage flooding at the Nasser Hospital complex (*archive link)

The United Nations said on Thursday that its data shows that around 13,000 children received medical treatment for hunger and malnutrition in July alone, compared to around 22,000 children treated in the first six and a half months of the year.
According to the UN, around 2,800 of the children treated in July suffered from severe acute malnutrition, representing roughly 21 percent of all treated children. The number of children requiring prolonged treatment also rose from 215 cases between January and mid-June to 129 cases in July alone.

In short, there are thousands of starving children who might have featured, but this is the art of distraction, deflection and genocidal, ethnic cleansing instincts, Sky News Australia's Media Watch Dog Columnist Gerard Henderson has slammed the ABC for refusing to back down on the now infamous picture of the starving Gazan child.

Polonius prattles on and on and on ...

ABC TV’s Media Watch has a staff of around 10 for a 15-minute program. It ran the same picture when program research should have pointed to the authenticity of the photo being challenged by London journalist David Collier. I was aware of this by midday on July 28; Media Watch went to air at 9.15pm that night with only a limited qualification before the photo was shown. There was no subsequent on-air correction.
On August 10, Insiders discussed the Israel-Hamas war. One of the panellists was SBS News’ Anna Henderson. She managed to discuss the issue without once mentioning Hamas. There was no challenge from presenter David Speers.
Last Tuesday, Radio National Breakfast gave soft interviews to a trio of Australian critics of Israel – Chris Sidoti, Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi and senator Fatima Payman. Liberal Party senator Michaelia Cash received an interrogation. So much so that when the opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman said “we’ve probably both gone and had a cup of coffee this morning …”, presenter Sally Sara responded, “I don’t drink coffee, Senator.” Really.
Meanwhile, the week began with 7.30 presenter Sarah Ferguson interviewing Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and, later, Israel’s ambassador to Australia, Amir Maimon. The former received a soft interview, the latter an interrogation with several hostile interjections.
Good luck to Marks with his focus on ABC content. But reform to content can come about only if there is viewpoint diversity among ABC journalists.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Good luck to the lizards of Oz.

This from AP, an actual news service, back in July, with things only getting worse since then  ...

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Five starving children at a Gaza City hospital were wasting away, and nothing the doctors tried was working. The basic treatments for malnourishment that could save them had run out under Israel’s blockade. The alternatives were ineffective. One after another, the babies and toddlers died over four days.
In greater numbers than ever, children hollowed up by hunger are overwhelming the Patient’s Friends Hospital, the main emergency center for malnourished kids in northern Gaza.
The deaths last weekend also marked a change: the first seen by the center in children who had no preexisting conditions. Symptoms are getting worse, with children too weak to cry or move, said Dr. Rana Soboh, a nutritionist. In past months, most improved, despite supply shortages, but now patients stay longer and don’t get better, she said.
“There are no words in the face of the disaster we are in. Kids are dying before the world ... There is no uglier and more horrible phase than this,” said Soboh, who works with the U.S.-based aid organization Medglobal, which supports the hospital.
This month, the hunger that has been building among Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinians passed a tipping point into accelerating death, aid workers and health staff say. Not only children — usually the most vulnerable — are falling victim under Israel’s blockade since March, but also adults.
In the past three weeks, at least 48 people died of causes related to malnutrition, including 28 adults and 20 children, the Gaza Health Ministry said Thursday. That’s up from 10 children who died in the five previous months of 2025, according to the ministry.
The U.N reports similar numbers. The World Health Organization said Wednesday it has documented 21 children under 5 who died of causes related to malnutrition in 2025. The U.N. humanitarian office, OCHA, said Thursday at least 13 children’s deaths were reported in July, with the number growing daily.
“Humans are well developed to live with caloric deficits, but only so far,” said Dr. John Kahler, Medglobal’s co-founder and a pediatrician who volunteered twice in Gaza during the war. “It appears that we have crossed the line where a segment of the population has reached their limits”
“This is the beginning of a population death spiral,” he said.
The U.N.’s World Food Program says nearly 100,000 women and children urgently need treatment for malnutrition. Medical workers say they have run out of many key treatments and medicines.
Israel, which began letting in only a trickle of supplies the past two months, has blamed Hamas for disrupting food distribution. The U.N. counters that Israel, which has restricted aid since the war began, simply has to allow it to enter freely.
Hundreds of malnourished kids brought daily
The Patient’s Friends Hospital overflows with parents bringing in scrawny children – 200 to 300 cases a day, said Soboh.
On Wednesday, staff laid toddlers on a desk to measure the circumference of their upper arms — the quickest way to determine malnutrition. In the summer heat, mothers huddled around specialists, asking for supplements. Babies with emaciated limbs screamed in agony. Others lay totally silent.
The worst cases are kept for up to two weeks at the center’s 10-bed ward, which this month has had up to 19 children at a time. It usually treats only children under 5, but began taking some as old as 11 or 12 because of worsening starvation among older children.
Hunger gnaws at staff as well. Soboh said two nurses put themselves on IV drips to keep themselves going. “We are exhausted. We are dead in the shape of the living,” she said.
The five children died in succession last Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
Four of them, aged 4 months to 2 years, had suffered gastric arrest: Their stomachs shut down. The hospital no longer had the right nutrition supplies for them.
The fifth — 4 1/2-year-old Siwar — had alarmingly low potassium levels, a growing problem. She was so weak she could barely move her body. Medicine for potassium deficiency has largely run out across Gaza, Soboh said. The center had only a low-concentration potassium drip.
The little girl didn’t respond. After three days in the ICU, she died Saturday.
“If we don’t have potassium (supplies), we will see more deaths,” she said.

And so on, and there were other snaps of starving children, too hideous to reproduce here, but what's a little incidental mass starvation when you can rage about a single snap and pretend that it was misleading as to what's going down. 

Good luck to Polonius, should he ever attempt to get his furry-wired head out of his furry bum ...

And that AP report serves as a worth introduction to this day's dog bothering bonus, six minutes, so the reptiles say, of dog bothering inhumanity to people, posties and Palestinians ...

The header: The PM who failed to pull off the voice thinks he can deliver a Palestine state, Anthony Albanese’s gesture politics can have no substantive impact, except to embolden Islamist extremists, undermine peace efforts, undercut Australia’s relations with Israel and put further strain on the US alliance.

The caption: Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong have revealed their plan for Middle East peace. Artwork: Frank Ling

Oh Frank, Frank, must you always ignore the pond's suggestion to blame AI? 

Okay, perhaps AI would do better, but at least think of your own reputation, and the chance to lower AI's standing by blaming it for that hideousness.

Again there was no weird reptile injunction to go elsewhere, and so the pond was stuck here ...

With the all the wide-eyed optimism and Instagram insight of beauty pageant contestants, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong have revealed their plan for Middle East peace.
They demand Israel halt the military pursuit of Hamas, proposing instead that their recognition of the non-existent state of Palestine will prompt the Islamist terrorists of Hamas to disarm, delivering peaceful coexistence for Israelis and the Palestinians.
This differs very little in substance from the immortal words of Miss USA Nia Sanchez in Florida 10 years ago. “If I was given 30 seconds to give a message to the global terrorists,” said Sanchez, “I would just say that as Miss USA I can always spread a message of hope and love and peace.” Perhaps Albanese should track Sanchez down and offer her a role as ambassador to Israel, because their world view and counter-terrorism strategy seem to align.
Albanese’s gesture politics, of course, can have no substantive impact, except to embolden Islamist extremists, undermine peace efforts, undercut Australia’s relations with Israel and put further strain on the US alliance (US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has spoken of “disgust” at Australia’s move).
A Prime Minister who manifestly failed to deliver constitutional recognition for Australia’s Indigenous people now believes he can help deliver global recognition for a Palestinian state. A leader who cannot arrange a meeting with US President Donald Trump keeps meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping and is planning to meet the leader of the Palestinian Authority (closely associated with the Palestine Liberation Organisation) Mahmoud Abbas in New York next month.
Along with the similarly deluded leaders of Britain, France and Canada, Albanese demands that Israel end its military effort to defeat Hamas. Apart from being the governing authority in Gaza, Hamas is the Islamist terrorist group that carried out the most heinous atrocities against innocent Israelis, killing more Jews than in any attack since the Holocaust in a deliberate attempt to spark outrage and trigger a war in which most of the casualties, by Hamas design, would be Palestinian people. Hamas now prolongs the war, refusing ceasefires and dragging Israel deeper into urban warfare in Gaza city.
Yet the Albanese/Starmer/Macron/Carney strategy is to hope that, once Israel stops attacking Hamas, the terrorists may lay down their arms and play no further part in the politics and militancy of the region.
What a stroke of genius. We are left to wonder why Benjamin Netanyahu or Trump never thought of this cunning plan.
Albanese claims as his guarantor for this fantasy the word of Abbas, the 89-year-old leader in the 20th year of a four-year term.

The reptiles obliged with a snap, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Picture: Zain Jaafar / AFP

The dog botherer stayed true to Benji and his barking mad far right fundamentalist mob, intent on taking over the entire joint ...

The PA leader has yet to deliver elections promised 16 years ago, and he refused to take up a genuine two-state solution offered by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, but Albanese trusts him now to hold elections, disarm, recognise Israel, stop funding terrorists, cease paying the families of suicide bombers, end the indoctrination of children into Islamist death cults and convince his bitter factional rival, Hamas, to disappear.
Albo and co must believe the Israelis are fools or heartless warmongers persisting with the sacrifice of blood and treasure in a harrowing war when just promising a Palestinian state would have delivered peace all along. It is amusing, sure, but deeply alarming that serious countries could espouse such hollow foreign policy. Presumably, sometime after this new Middle East nirvana is delivered, this quad of quislings expect the 50 remaining Israeli hostages may be handed back – at least 30 dead bodies and up to 20 living hostages, depending on how many last that long.

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about dog bothering outings is the way that the reptiles insist on doubling down with him, making sure punters trapped in the hive mind not only read him, but listen to him whining and droning away on Sky Noise after dark, Sky News host Chris Kenny says Hamas are playing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese “like a puppet” with Palestinian state recognition.

How luck to have screen caps as a substitute, how lucky to be spared the verbal sprays, there not being a spittle mask to hand ...

Will this be in a year or 10 years, or have these leaders just forgotten all about the hostages, given up on them? What an abysmal betrayal. What an insulting delusion.
Albanese is rewarding the Islamist extremist terrorists of Hamas with what he thinks may placate them and their supporters. It is a natural and grotesque progression from his constant demonisation of Israel, a meme he has fomented since his days of university activism, and it shows a complete misunderstanding of the aims and motivations of Islamist extremists.
In fact, so ineffective would this diplomatic gesture be in curtailing Hamas’s operations, and so conveniently has it advanced Hamas’s aim of turning Israel into a pariah state, that the terror group went public with its gratitude. The same group that shouted “Allahu Akbar” as it slaughtered children, decapitated victims, raped women and took mothers and their children hostage has now praised Albanese’s “courage” in recognising Palestine, noting the UN push he has adopted was advanced by its October 7 atrocities.
And just when we thought this macabre pantomime had reached its nadir, trashing Albanese’s diplomatic credibility and diminishing our nation’s standing, the Prime Minister sank even lower.
He claimed the Hamas praise for him was illegitimate, warning others not to “repeat Hamas’s propaganda”, and he cited as his evidence – wait for it – another piece of Hamas propaganda.
You have to marvel at the chutzpah of this call, and the sheer idiocy, given that Albanese has been a chief promulgator of Hamas propaganda for months; on casualty numbers from Gaza, incidents such as the accidental killing of aid workers and claims about the starvation of children.
Albanese has amplified concerns based on propaganda photos and accused Israel of inflicting mass starvation in the face of Israeli denials and without independent evidence.
The green left’s capitulation in the face of terrorism and propaganda has been morally repugnant since the hours after October 7, 2023, when they turned a blind eye to the Islamists celebrating on our own streets the slaughter. Their every effort since then to blame the Israeli victims has only fuelled anti-Semitism at home and given succour to Hamas on the other side of the world.

Remember what the pond said about doubling down with dog bothering Sky Noise after dark?

It should have been tripling down ...

Sky News host Chris Kenny says Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong have “absolutely no idea” about the issues involved in the Middle East or the repercussions of Palestinian recognition. Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef has praised Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood, celebrating Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's "political courage". “They are all about gestures and political positioning; they are clueless about the central issues and the practicalities,” Mr Kenny said. “Our Prime Minister and Foreign Minister want Israel to stop fighting Hamas, they just want Hamas to disarm and disappear, only they don't actually have any idea about how that might happen.”

Why the fatuous far right Utegate fraud should think he has any more of a clue must remain a mystery. 

Suffice to say that far right genocide lovers and skilled practitioners of the art and science of ethnic cleansing love to hunt in packs ...

The international tide of activism and diplomacy directed at Israel has ensured that the October 7 atrocities, or the al-Aqsa flood as Hamas called it, will go down as one of the most successful terrorist attacks in history.
Just as Hamas and its Iranian backers had hoped, it forestalled the normalisation of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, lured Israel into a costly and deadly war, and turned global opinion sharply against the Jewish state, further isolating Israel diplomatically.
Only a united international push against Hamas, backing Israeli and US resolve, could have changed any of that. Australia could have played a strong role on that front, but Albanese chose to indulge his leftist activist instincts and overturn decades of Australian solidarity with Israel and the US, siding instead with the European dilettantes and the Islamists.

Could it get any worse? Speaking as we must of dilettantes, of course it could, that's a dog botherer speciality, and so he wheels in that high-heeled dilettante, Lord Downer ...

This is a “huge change in Australia’s historic position in foreign policy”, according to our longest-serving foreign minister, Alexander Downer (for whom I worked from 2002 to 2007). “We’ve gone from supporting a liberal democratic country under siege from a terrorist organisation, and opposing that terrorist organisation, to supporting that terrorist organisation and opposing the liberal democratic state,” Downer told me on Sky News this week. “This is an extraordinary thing for Australia to have done. I think in a way it is the worst foreign policy decision Australia has made since the second world war.”

Now the kind thing to do would have been to emphasise Lord Downer's skills as a diplomat ...

Instead the reptiles quadrupled down, with Lord Downer and the dog botherer doing it together on Sky Noise after dark ... Former foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has undermined negotiations for a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine by recognising Palestinian statehood. “Hamas has welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision and applauded it and congratulated him for it,” Mr Downer told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “He has been roundly condemned by Israel for what he’s done, including undermining the negotiations for a ceasefire, which Hamas just walked away from. “This is a huge change in Australia’s historic position in foreign policy.”

And here we go again ...

The moral anarchy fuelled by the left’s anti-Israel/anti-US bias seems to get worse every day. Just this week, appallingly, Albanese adopted the Islamist extremist term of “martyr” for Palestinian terrorists, including suicide bombers, who are financed by the Palestinian Authority.
And at the ABC, global affairs editor (and staff-elected board member) Laura Tingle posted a four-minute video justifying Albanese’s Palestinian recognition. While Tingle found time to mention suffering in Gaza, “mass starvation” and “pictures of small children dying of starvation”, as well as criticism of Trump and Netanyahu and her dim view of Israel’s “behaviour” over the past 22 months, she failed to make a single mention of the October 7 atrocities that triggered the war, Hamas’s continued killing and aid disruption that extends the trauma, or the hostages, alive and dead, who are still held in Gaza by Hamas – not a single word about any of this provocation, the abominable continuation of the war or the Israeli victims.
Not a word. Think how someone could be that blind.
The green left loves to clothe itself in the moral vanity of humanitarian inspiration, but it is driven relentlessly by ideology and its political agenda.
Mere humanity seems expendable in pursuit of its cause, certainly if the lives in question are Jewish or Israeli.

The stench, the gall, the hideous abomination of it all, the nausea-inducing sight of a man preening and blathering about moral anarchy, and never mind the ethnic cleansing or the genocide or the mass starvation, a criminal act of wanton proportions.

What of the Palestinians? Trapped between fundamentalist fanatics on one side, and fundamentalist fanatics on the other.

Zero, nada, zilch, of zero concern to the dog botherer...

Less than human, perfect for a ghetto or a gulag and extermination.

And yet what's currently going down is clear enough for all but the bigots of a dog bothering kind to see. 

Per Haaretz, 'Thousands More Will Die in Gaza, Not From Bombs or Bullets, but From Bureaucratic Decisions', International Rescue Committee's Bob Kitchen explains why Gaza is the 'most intense crisis' he's seen in 25 years of responding to humanitarian emergencies and how the IDF strangles aid efforts in the Strip (*archive link)

The pond left it perhaps a little too late to turn to alternative forms of news, what with many likely to have already switched off and left the scene, but for what it's worth ...

Haaretz: What is unique about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza compared to others you've worked on?

Kitchen: "To put it in perspective: While Sudan is currently facing the world's largest humanitarian crisis in terms of sheer numbers – it's a much bigger country with a far larger population – Gaza is, by far, the most intense crisis I've seen in my 25 years of humanitarian work.
"The proportion of the population that has been profoundly affected – and affected very urgently – is off the charts. Over 90 percent of the population has been displaced. That means they've lost their homes and been forced to flee, either because of destruction or evacuation orders. And not just once – people have had to move multiple times.
That level of displacement across an entire population is something I haven't seen anywhere else. It's staggering.
"The second thing is this: I have never seen a famine, or a famine-level hunger emergency, happening in a location that's surrounded by so much food. All the neighboring countries, including Israel, have plentiful food. There are abundant resources and aid infrastructures right on the borders. Tens of thousands of tons of food are ready to go. They could solve this problem tomorrow.
"Famine is usually the result of a combination: a natural disaster like drought, plus a man-made conflict. But even in those cases, it rarely tips into famine anymore. That's why, for the past hundred years, it's been war – not drought – that pushes food insecurity over the edge into famine.
"But in Gaza, there's no drought. The land around it is fertile. The problem isn't environmental. It's political. It's a result of decisions made by people.

Haaretz: Can you speak about what the humanitarian consequences would be if Israel fully occupies Gaza?

Kitchen: "To address your phrasing: I don't think there's a square inch of the Strip that hasn't been impacted already. I don't think there's a single family that hasn't been profoundly affected. I was there a year ago, and even then, the destruction was immense. Since then, it's gotten at least four times worse.
"A so-called total occupation would only make things worse, millions of lives in immediate danger. The only real solution is a cease-fire and the return of the hostages. Without both, we'll just continue in a cycle of suffering and loss. An end to the violence and the return of those held is the only way through this.
"Beyond that, the only viable path forward in humanitarian intervention is rapid and unimpeded access – that's language taken directly from international humanitarian law. We need to be let in."
Haaretz: What is the IRC is currently doing in Gaza? How much aid is getting in, and what's the scope of your operations right now?
Kitchen: "Very little is getting in for us, or for any other NGO or UN agency. We're doing what we can with the people and materials still inside Gaza. That means distributing water – collecting it from desalination plants and trucking it into densely populated areas, especially for displaced families.
"It might sound counterintuitive, since hunger is dominating the headlines, but people rarely die from hunger alone. What usually kills them are complications – communicable diseases like diarrhea, which become deadly when there's no clean water or sanitation. A simple stomach bug can be fatal when someone is severely malnourished.
"We're also supporting women and children affected by the violence. We are offering counseling, stabilization and trauma-processing activities.
"Where we can, we're helping malnourished people through therapeutic feeding programs, but that's getting harder. We've had trucks loaded with ready-to-use therapeutic food stuck outside Gaza in Jordan and Egypt for six months."

There's more, but that's more than enough, and so to the deeply pathetic dog botherer for a final word ...

Many Australian voters feel the Middle East imbroglio should not dominate our politics or be a preoccupation for their government. And they would be right.
But perhaps still they will see how the Albanese government has shamed our nation and emboldened Islamist terrorists everywhere. The current terror alert in our nation is “Probable”.
The Australian Jewish population rightly feels abandoned and vulnerable. Many are considering whether this is where their families should live.
Like me, many of you may never have felt such shame in our government and our country’s global posture. We can only hope that Albanese admits his error and changes his mind before next month’s UN vote, or this becomes his “troops home by Christmas” moment and people start to realise he has all the substance of Mark Latham.

What a pathetic final attempt at a slur, but then the Utegate climate science denying dog botherer has all the substance of a Malware ...

No wait, that's defaming Malware. Perhaps Barners, Tamworth's shame. would have been a better comparison.

On the upside, those are the final words of a genocide lover and an ethnic cleanser this day, a verbal offering by a Lord Haw-Haw, a quisling performing in his inimitable way an attempt to do in words, what is currently being done in the butchery known as Gaza ...

What a relief to return to normalcy, where the world operates in the style of a Mafia gang, of shakedowns, extortions, and rackets ... and so celebrated by Tom the Dancing Bug ...