An epic Sunday meditation, featuring Polonial prattle, ten minutes of bromancer going full King Donald, and the dog botherer making it all about him ...

 

The pond regrets that it must continue to insist that Dame Slap must stay buried in the archive this weekend ...

Cancel culture takes centre stage as political activism in the arts becomes increasingly cheap
Increasingly, political messaging by artsy folk resembles the sort of mouthy fashion that Lidia Thorpe wears to a black-tie event at Parliament House.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

She's there for anyone wanting to visit the land above the Faraway tree, but only a deeply out of touch MAGA cap wearer would deploy the "cancel culture" ploy and not mention the current fuss, also in the archive with Dramatic Details of Jimmy Kimmel and ABC’s ‘Standoff’ Revealed (actual source Kimmel, Iger, and the Culture of Capitulation).

Then there's Ex-Disney CEO Lashes Company for Bowing to Trump on Kimmel

And even Cancun Ted was in closer touch to reality than Dame Slap ... Ted Cruz Defies Trump on Kimmel: ‘Dangerous as Hell’

They all came out, but not Dame Slap, David Letterman’s Jimmy Kimmel Reaction: ‘We All See Where This Is Going, Correct?’ The comedian spoke about Kimmel’s suspension from late-night TV at The Atlantic Festival.

...As Letterman pointed out onstage, the “easy way or the hard way” verbiage had the ring of Mafia language. “Who is hiring these goons?” he asked. “Mario Puzo?”
Letterman said Kimmel had texted him that morning: “He’s sitting up in bed, taking nourishment. He’s going to be fine.” But he was concerned about the implications for the comedy world more broadly. Trump posted last night that ABC’s decision was “Great News for America” and called upon NBC to banish late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, “two total losers.” Kimmel’s suspension came just two months after CBS announced that The Late Show With Stephen Colbert would end next year with no planned replacement. The network attributed the decision to financial motives, but Letterman instead saw political motives at play, given Colbert’s history of criticizing Trump. “That was rude,” he said. “That was inexcusable. The man deserves a great deal of credit.”
(As for Fallon, Goldberg suggested in his interview with Letterman that he was a less “sharp-tongued” critic of Trump than other late-night hosts. Letterman shot back, “Why do you think that is? Has something to do with IQ, is that what you’re saying?”)
In the years before Trump ran for political office, he was a frequent guest on Letterman’s Late Night, but the host retired from the gig in 2015. (“Ten years ago, I was smart enough to cancel myself,” he cracked at the festival.) Now Letterman is as loud a critic as any of the Trump administration. “This is misery,” he said onstage. In a “dictatorship,” he said, “sooner or later, everyone is going to be touched.”

Not if you're wearing the Dame Slap MAGA cap of confidence.

Besides, if the pond wanted to do comedy, it'd involve the wondrous way that King Donald can cancel the meaning of numbers ...Donald Trump Brings Back Bonkers Claim That Has Critics Screaming, '... What?'

Play the clip...

Or perhaps that lawsuit...

Judge Dismisses Trump’s Lawsuit Against The New York Times
The judge said that the complaint failed to contain a “short and plain statement of the claim.” Mr. Trump has 28 days to refile. (*archive link)

Judgement in full here ... inter alia:

Even under the most generous and lenient application of Rule 8, the complaint is decidedly improper and impermissible. The pleader initially alleges an electoral victory by President Trump “in historic fashion” — by “trouncing” the opponent — and alludes to “persistent election interference from the legacy media, led most notoriously by the New York Times.” The pleader alludes to “the halcyon days” of the newspaper but complains that the newspaper has become a “fullthroated mouthpiece of the Democrat party,” which allegedly resulted in the “deranged endorsement” of President Trump’s principal opponent in the most recent presidential election. The reader of the complaint must labor through allegations, such as “a new journalistic low for the hopelessly compromised and tarnished ‘Gray Lady.’” The reader must endure an allegation of “the desperate need to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass” and an allegation that “the false narrative about ‘The Apprentice’ was just the tip of Defendants’ melting iceberg of falsehoods.” Similarly, in one of many, often repetitive, and laudatory (toward President Trump) but superfluous allegations, the pleader states, “‘The Apprentice’ represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the [Z]eitgeist of our time.”
The complaint continues with allegations in defense of President Trump’s father and the acquisition of the Trumps’ wealth; with a protracted list of the many properties owned, developed, or managed by The Trump Organization and a list of President Trump’s many books; with a long account of the history of “The Apprentice”; with an extensive list of President Trump’s “media appearances”; with a detailed account of other legal actions both by and against President Trump, including an account of the “Russia Collusion Hoax” and incidents of alleged “lawfare” against President Trump; and with much more, persistently alleged in abundant, florid, and enervating detail.

Florid and enervating detail? Sounds like Polonius, but credit where it's due, Polonius dared to go there, and so the pond felt perfectly comfortable continuing its tradition of giving Polonius' exceptionally tedious prattle pride of place for its Sunday meditation ...

The header: Media elites trip up over fake Charlie Kirk murder claims, The assassination of Charlie Kirk illustrates the point that some individuals of high intelligence and considerable education are sometimes foolish.

The caption: American political commentator Matthew Dowd was fired for his comments about the Charlie Kirk assassination.

Polonius got off to an excellent start, as only Polonius can do ...

It is an observable fact that some individuals of high intelligence and considerable education are sometimes foolish. Moreover, quite a few of this cohort believe what they want to believe. The recent political assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk illustrates the point.
The first intelligent and well-educated fool out of the gate following Kirk’s evident murder was MSNBC senior political analyst Matthew Dowd. During an appearance on the station’s Katy Tur Reports program, soon after the news of the shooting circulated, Dowd declared: “We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration so we have no idea about this.”
This was just naive. Unlike some other nations, firing guns and rifles in the air as a form of celebration is not a custom in the US.

Really? Falling Bullets Fall: Los Angeles’s Deadly Tradition of Celebratory New Year’s Gunfire

Sometimes with Polonius it's like shooting fish in a barrel or letting off a shot in the air. (It's also pretty common in the deep south and parts of the mid-west).

Moving along...

Then Dowd threw the switch to victim blaming, declaring: “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions; you can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful action to take place.”
In other words, Dowd seemed to be suggesting that Kirk had it coming to him. But Dowd did not cite any evidence to support his assertion of “awful thoughts” with respect to Kirk.

Actually Dowd wasn't victim blaming, he was making an observation ...“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions".

That seemed to be backed up by the alleged shooter's alleged own words ...

Roommate: Why?
Robinson: Why did I do it?
Roommate: Yeah
Robinson: I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out. (BBC)

The pond isn't endorsing the alleged shooter, just noting that MSNBC in recent times has spent many hours exhibiting deep fear about the whims of King Donald ...

Moving along, Former ABC journalist Barrie Cassidy removed his X post after the “excep­tionally embarrassing” situation.

There's always got to be some mug punters who shoot from the hip ...

It was not long before the conspiracy theorists rocked up from the well-educated kind, among others.
This included Australia’s very own former ABC journalist Barrie Cassidy. As The Australian’s Media pages documented last Monday, Cassidy put up a post on X early in the morning of Saturday, September 13, to the effect that Kirk was murdered because he was not conservative enough.
Cassidy declared: “The apparent shooter was a white straight conservative Mormon from Utah who thought Charlie Kirk wasn’t far enough to the right; Trump’s analysis is exceptionally embarrassing and dangerous even by his standards.”
By the time Cassidy sent out his post, President Donald J. Trump had indicated that the shooter was on the left of the political spectrum. But to Cassidy the murderer’s motive was that a Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporter believed that Kirk was not sufficiently MAGA. An unlikely conspiracy, you would think, since it would be difficult to find an American more MAGA than Kirk.

Polonius would trust King Donald's word? Actually the shooter's position in the spectrum seems to be more murky dark corners of the intertubes than political, but more of that anon ...

Within a few hours it was Cassidy who found himself in an “excep­tionally embarrassing” situation. But at least he took down the post and admitted his mistake to The Australian’s Steve Jackson. Namely, he had believed what he read on social media without fact-checking.
It turned out that Cassidy was in famous company. On hearing that Fox News presenter Jesse Watters had depicted Kirk as not being “a controversial or polarising figure” but, rather, just a “patriot”, novelist Stephen King posted: “He (Kirk) advocated stoning gays to death; just sayin’ ”.
This was a vile accusation of advocating murder about someone who could not defend their reputation. King had come across a doctored quote and accepted it as valid.
In fact, Kirk was known to have no objection to gays – maintaining that there was no incompatibility between being gay and believing in the MAGA movement.

Cue an insert at this point, reduced to a harmless screen cap:

 

Actually if the pond might be so bold and sample a Snopes...

...During his June 8, 2024, podcast episode (starting around the 1:00:30 mark), Kirk reacted to Ms. Rachel's statement. After one of his cohosts asked him, "What do you think when Ms. Rachel quotes scripture?" Kirk made the following comment (emphasis ours):
She's not totally wrong. […] The first part is Deuteronomy 6:3-5. The second part is Leviticus 19. So you love God, so you must love his law. How do you love somebody? You love them by telling them the truth, not by confirming or affirming their sin. And it says, by the way, Ms. Rachel, might want to crack open that Bible of yours, in a lesser reference — part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall lay with another man shall be stoned to death. Just saying. So, Ms. Rachel, you quote Leviticus 19, love your neighbor as yourself. The chapter before affirms God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters. Now, so how do you best love somebody? You love them by telling them the truth. Don't be cruel […] I would love for Ms. Rachel to respond to this: Is pride a Christian value? She thinks it is. Happy Pride Month everybody! […] In fact the Scriptures tell us the opposite. "Pride goeth before the fall."
Kirk was not saying that gay people should be stoned to death; rather, he was quoting the Bible in an effort to show how Ms. Rachel was being selective in her interpretation of the Scripture. However, we should note that in the same comment, Kirk called the section about stoning, "The chapter before affirms God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."

Well yes, that was part of the Kirk cunning. 

Citing the Bible's "perfect law", stoning gays to death, and then disingenuously dissembling by suggesting it was all selective, when in reality pride goeth before the fall, or before a bloody good stoning.

That's how Kirk played the game, dog whistling, retreating, and advancing, normalising the notion that maybe a bloody good stoning might sort a few miscreants out, or at least turn them away from their wicked ways ...

Kirk adopted a traditional Christian conservative stance in his approach to many contemporary issues, telling an audience at a Trump election rally in Georgia last fall that Democrats “stand for everything God hates” and adding: “This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way.”
He also lashed out at the gay community, denouncing what he called the “LGBTQ agenda,” expressing opposition to same-sex marriage and suggesting that the Bible verse Leviticus 20:13, which endorses the execution of homosexuals, serves as “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”
“I don’t agree with your lifestyle,” Kirk told a gay Wisconsin college student last September. “I don’t think you should introduce yourself just based on your sexuality because that’s not who you are.”
He also argued against gender-affirming care for transgender people and insisted there are only two genders, sporting a T-shirt at one Arizona rally last year that read: “xy = man.”
More recently, he discussed the burning of Pride flags, writing on X (Twitter): “We should work to overturn every conviction for those arrested, fined, or otherwise harassed for the ‘hate crime’ of doing donuts over Pride flags painted on public streets.
“It should be legal to burn a rainbow or [Black Lives Matter] flag in public.” (The Independent)

But then Polonius probably agrees with all that ...

Dave Rubin is a Fox News contributor. He was reported on the Sky News Australia website as having told King: “Charlie was never anything but kind to me and my husband; we broke bread many times and he never treated us with anything other than respect.” Rubin’s message to King was: “Write about that sometime, you hack.”
In response to severe criticism from Republican senator Ted Cruz, King declared: “This is what I get from reading something on Twitter w/o fact-checking; won’t happen again.” Which sounds like shifting the blame.
Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe was another to believe what he wanted to believe in this instance. He embraced the conspiracy theory that “Kirk’s apparent assassin seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP (Republican)/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals (meaning left in the American sense of the term)”.
Later, Tribe put out a post that referred to Kirk’s “grotesque murder” but added: “Those calling the suspected assassin trans, liberal, or a radical leftist are exploiting a tragedy for political gain by making stuff up.” He said: “My reaction saying he (the assassin) was to Kirk’s right was premature, and I’m sorry I reposted a tweet to that effect before deleting my repost.” It would seem that Tribe was primarily sorry for himself.

At this point the reptiles slipped in a snap, Professor Laurence Tribe apologised for his “premature” reaction. Picture: Harvard Law School

On with Polonius ...

It was much the same across the Atlantic. On his The Rest is Politics podcast, former British Labor Party adviser and author Alastair Campbell said: “I remember one clip I saw of him (Kirk) saying that – literal meaning of the Bible – gay people should be stoned to death.” Campell was not consciously lying. Rather, this was a not unfamiliar case of someone having a clear “recollection” of an event that never happened.
Unlike some others involved in misquoting or verballing Kirk, Campbell apologised for his error, stating: “Kirk did have views with which I strongly disagree but this was not one of them.” Campbell described Kirk’s views, including on Israel, as “horrid”.

And yet: The chapter before affirms God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters. 

And what is that chapter? (Only the errant KJV of course, 20:13):

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

There's a lot of other good smiting and banishing and burning and putting to death in that chapter ...

And remember if you read the stars in your daily rag, there's a price to pay ...

A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.

Moving along, with shades of regret, because the pond loves a good stoning or a good burning, blessed be the cheesemakers ...

British broadcaster Terry Christian lacked grace with respect to his misquotation. He refused to apologise. When confronted on X by a critic who said the quote allegedly from Kirk was false, according to a report in the London Telegraph, Christian replied: “Who gives a f..k what he said.” Well, Christian certainly did, before his howler was brought to his attention.
And now the host of American network ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! has come undone.
Last Monday in the US, Kimmel accused MAGA supporters of “working very hard to capitalise on the murder of Charlie Kirk”. This despite the fact the accused gunman is on the left and a MAGA movement hater. Kimmel was using the death of a conservative to make a political point.

Actually if the pond might be so bold ... Kimmel's writers were being cunning in the Kirk style...

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during his show’s Monday monologue.
“In between the finger-pointing, the White House flew the flag at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level, you can see how hard the president was taking this.”
The show then cut to a clip of President Trump being questioned by a reporter outside the White House, where he was asked how he was holding up in the wake of Kirk’s assassination.
The commander-in-chief said, “I think very good,” then changed the subject to renovations being done to the White House ballroom, before cutting back to Kimmel.
“He’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction,” the late-night host quipped. (NY Post)

In fact, the MAGA gang did try to charactize the kid who allegedly assassinated Kirk as anything other than one of them, and they did do everything they could to score political points from it (and they're still doing everything they can).

And King Donald did immediately move from the murder to his beloved ballroom (not to mention that he also didn't attend the Kirk vigil, preferring to go golfing)...

And so to final thoughts ...

The American left is in denial about the murder of a prominent conservative by an alleged gunman who hated conservatives. Another example of individuals who should know better than believing what they want to believe.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Polonius is in deep denial about the nature of the alleged shooter. 

He was of quintessential Utah Mormon stock, growing up in a gun-loving MAGA family, and addicted to the chaos of the internet's underbelly. No doubt he was deeply confused, but possibly not as confused as Polonius, faithfully following all those MAGA talking points...

See Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker for an alternative take Charlie Kirk and Tyler Robinson Came from the Same Warped Online Worlds, The right-wing activist and his alleged assassin were both creatures of a digital ecosystem that rewards viral engagement (*archive link)

According to an interview that Robinson’s grandmother gave to the Daily Mail, he grew up in a conservative family that staunchly supported Trump. He attended just one semester of college before dropping out. He was registered to vote in Utah but was unaffiliated with a party and did not vote in the 2024 Presidential election. Instead, he seems to have spent time in the corners of the internet where young men can become radicalized toward violence. Like Payton Gendron, who committed a mass shooting at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in 2022, Robinson left a trail of self-implicating messages on the chat-room app Discord. In one chat, he reportedly played dumb about Kirk’s murder, joking about how the suspect was his “doppelganger.” In another chat, though, he confessed to shooting Kirk, saying, “It was me,” just before going with his family to turn himself in to the police.
Whatever radicalization Robinson may have undergone online, people in his offline life seem to have failed to fully understand what was happening to him. Only he knew what ideas he was steeping himself in, and the stubborn opacity of his motivations adds to our collective despair in this moment: if, as one TikTok commentator put it, Kirk’s assassination was in some sense a “shitpost”—a nihilistic in-joke translated horribly into real-world action—then an already senseless act becomes an utterly meaningless one. Memes are incoherent by nature; it’s useless to try to make them mean more than they do. That police are now talking about furries in public is Robinson’s gruesome joke, carried out for the benefit of the online audience that he was, on some level, performing for. (In the text exchange quoted in the court documents, he writes, “The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme, if I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new I might have a stroke.”) Robinson is not alone in this self-referentiality and crackpot mythologizing; the alleged perpetrator of a shooting at a Colorado high school posted TikToks in which he’d copied the poses of previous shooters and showed off a T-shirt that referenced the Columbine mass shooting, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Shootings have effectively become their own memes, with their own viral tropes and signifiers. No matter what political ideas Robinson may have harbored, he might ultimately be best understood as a participant in that warped online culture...

Meanwhile ...

...Now, Kirk’s assassination—caught on video, ubiquitous in our online feeds—has turbocharged the impact of his content machine. On Monday, Vice-President J. D. Vance filled in as a guest host of Kirk’s online show, broadcasting from the White House. Vance used the platform to claim, without evidence, that “people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.” The Trump Administration has promised to crack down on leftist “terrorist networks,” using Kirk’s death as further justification for the unchecked targeting and silencing of its perceived enemies. A growing number of people, including a Washington Post opinion columnist and professors at Clemson University, have already been fired for publicly criticizing Kirk. Meanwhile, Kirk’s social-media accounts have posthumously gained millions of followers. On X, Senator Ted Cruz posted the kind of imagery that has aptly been labelled “slopaganda”: A.I.-generated images of Jesus embracing Kirk and of Kirk with the late Ukrainian woman Iryna Zarutska, who was recently stabbed to death on a train in North Carolina. The horror of Kirk’s murder will serve the demands of the content mill, stoking more outraged engagement among his preëxisting fan base. As with the epidemic of gun violence, the self-perpetuating cycle of online radicalization continues unbroken, with harrowing consequences for all sides of the political spectrum. 

See also, One of Utah’s Own, The early picture of Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin complicates many assumptions. By Shane Harris, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Vivian Salama (*archive link)

Even better, in the absence of firm data, mushrooms have flourished in a way that would do regional Victoria proud... A script’: Alleged Charlie Kirk assassin’s texts fuel conspiracy theories, Tyler Robinson’s alleged texts to his partner have been met with scepticism across the ideological spectrum.

The deluge of conspiracy theories began almost the moment authorities revealed the text messages allegedly sent by the suspected assassin of right-wing American activist Charlie Kirk.
After prosecutors in the US state of Utah published alleged text exchanges between 22-year-old Tyler Robinson and his romantic partner on Tuesday, countless social media users, including numerous prominent influencers, cast doubt on their authenticity.
Many of the posts suggested that the language and tone of the exchanges did not match someone of Robinson’s age, and the account of the shooting was too forthcoming and detailed to be believable.
Notably, at a time of extreme political polarisation in the US, the conspiracy theorising united figures on the left and right.
Matt Walsh, a right-wing commentator and podcast host with millions of followers on X and YouTube, suggested the exchanges had been scripted to absolve Robinson’s transgender partner of any involvement in the shooting.
“This feels like a strategy they cooked up from watching too much TV,” Walsh said on X.
Utah Governor Spencer Cox has said that the partner, described as a “male transitioning to female”, had no advance knowledge of the crime and has been cooperating fully with authorities.
Steve Bannon, US President Donald Trump’s former adviser, said on his podcast that he was “not buying” the texts, describing them as “too stilted, too much like a script”.

The texts do seem alarmingly well written for texting ... even the pond allows broken English and typos when texting. So let the conspiracy theories flourish ...

‘The worst I’ve seen’: Charlie Kirk conspiracy theories explode online, from the left and right
By
Marshall Cohen

They're all for a good cause ...

And so as a bonus to the bromancer, though before starting on that, the pond should note that King Donald is continuing on his barking mad, whim of a monarch, way, as featured in the reptiles picking up of a WSJ story ...

Donald Trump adds $US100k H-1B visa fee and rolls out $1m ‘gold card’
The new annual fee is intended to crack down on a system the Trump administration says has been used by tech companies to avoid hiring US workers.
Natalie Andrews and Michelle Hackman

US President Donald Trump announced a move to dramatically reshape the nation’s immigration system, attaching hefty new fees to H-1B visas and rolling out a “gold card” for those willing to pay $US1m to secure US residency.
A new $100,000 annual fee for H-1B visa applications is intended to crack down on a system the Trump administration says has been used by tech companies to avoid hiring American workers. Currently, applicants for the H-1B visa must pay a small fee to enter into the lottery system, and the winners of that lottery pay a larger fee to submit their full applications for vetting.
“We’re having people come in, people that in many cases are very successful or whatever, as opposed to walking over the borders,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
An executive order signed by Trump on Friday rolls out a gold card available to people who pay $1 million to the US Treasury. Corporations can sponsor an individual for $2 million. The visas are expedited, and the Department of Homeland Security will still vet the individuals.
“We’ll be taking in hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump said. “We’re going to take that money and we’re going to reduce taxes, we’re going to reduce debt.” The H-1B program has put Trump at odds with US tech companies, the leaders of which have met with Trump frequently in his second term. Amazon.com, Google and Tesla are among the biggest users of the visas, which let companies bring foreign workers to the US on a temporary basis. The workers overwhelmingly come from India and fill jobs in such fields as software development, computer science and engineering.

The pond only mentions this because the bromancer seems to be operating under the delusion that it's possible to negotiate with King Donald and produce a win-win situation.

Ain't gunna happen.

And the bromancer's desire for Australia to go full royal to win with King Donald is simply bizarre ...

The header: How a royal-led UK charm offensive outplayed us as Australia Inc drops diplomatic ball on Trump, It was a royal-led charm offensive. The Brits won Donald Trump over with practised pomp which throws Australia’s diplomatic weaknesses into sharp relief, exposing us as bumbling losers.

The caption: US President Donald Trump was courted in the UK with a royal-led charm offensive.

Warning, this is a full ten minute read, or so the reptiles say, and the pond has spent all its energy on Polonius.

There's also not much to be said, unless you take it as a proposal for the bromancer to become Australia's King Greg, so that he might woo King Donald all the better.

The truth is, King Donald has long been infatuated with English royalty, and it's a matter of Wolff legend that he tried hard to f*ck Princess Diana, who dismissed him with amused disdain.

The royals gathered to watch King Donald probably felt the same disdain, but just as you can have fun with mug punters trying to get above their station by reading, all you need to do is crush them with a bookcase ...

Concerning Donald Trump, the most important and unpredictable factor in global politics today, the feeble, cack-handed, creaking amateurism of Australian statecraft, in comparison with the ruthless effectiveness of the British variety, has been sadly, witheringly, on display this week. The British hosted Trump; the Australians are getting ready for Anthony Albanese’s first face-to-face meeting with Trump, in New York in the coming week.
Consider how the British handled Trump in his second state visit and royal reception.
The glamorous Prince William and his wife greeted Trump. Here was the President in a carriage ride around Windsor Castle, escorted by the royals, just like the ride he must have taken around New York’s Central Park but much more fun.
Behold the biggest honour guard, the mightiest gathering of ceremonial troops, the most horses in the history of Windsor Castle ceremony.
Hear the gilded words of King Charles, who praised Trump for his dedication to ending wars and who quipped, so wittily and spontaneously, that British soil makes excellent golf courses.
Remember, Charles talks to plants and in so far as he has ever expressed religious sentiment it’s about climate change. Does he really love Trump as much as this? It doesn’t matter, of course. Trump declares he and the King are friends.

Deeply weird, and deeply pathetic, but the bromancer is a bit like King Donald himself, a mug punter and john, ready to be taken down by a monarchy that has made a career out of surviving by shilling ... Donald Trump speaks to King Charles III during the State Banquet at Windsor Castle for the State visit by the US President. Picture: WPA Pool/Getty Images

How does the bromancer think we can match this nonsense?  By elevating King Greg and inviting King Donald to tea and scones in Surry Hills? Not really ...

Pomp and pageantry, palaces and plaudits, tiaras and tea, carriages and courtiers, dinner suits and marching bands, kings and queens, tycoons and hangers-on, flattery and flummery – Trump loved it all. In flattering Trump, there is never too much.
The US and Britain, Trump declared, have contributed more to human welfare than any other nation in history. He rejoiced in the “special” relationship, a tag he won’t bestow on anyone else. He even stuck to a few lines of a written speech.
The US and Britain are like two notes in a musical chord, each is beautiful on its own but they’re designed to go together. Trump noted that no president had received such honours twice. It was, Trump said, “one of the highest honours of my life”.
When Trump praises you for the one morally good thing you can do – enhancing his glory – you know you’ve scored a hit.
UK Inc charm offensive
However much this may seem beyond parody, you can see all the strings and pulleys of UK Inc at work.
Imagine the committee meetings: You, Prime Minister, must lavish praise on the President and find something in common; you, royal family, dazzle and charm like your lives depended on it; Foreign Office, sack and hide our ambassador in Washington who was, embarrassingly, friends with Trump’s old friend, Jeffrey Epstein; Ministry of Defence, assemble the most impressive kit we’ve bought from the US.

Be fair, the pond did promise it would be deeply weird,  Kate, Princess of Wales, toasts with US President Donald Trump after his speech at the state banquet in Windsor Castle. Picture: via AP

Why that snap, why not a snap of that alien spacecraft atop Melania's head?

Never mind, on with the bro ...

King Charles even lobbied for AUKUS, giving Australia an honourable mention, telling Trump, sitting and nodding beside him at the banquet, how important the AUKUS collaboration really is, especially the nuclear submarine bit.
The King is a good friend of Australia, no doubt, but he wasn’t thinking of us. The UK will make many billions of dollars selling us nuclear submarine technology and building the AUKUS subs for us, or technically helping us assemble them in Adelaide.
The King’s intervention is the one time we know for sure someone Trump pays attention to has actually made the case for AUKUS and Australia. Many thanks, Your Majesty.
Trump is intensely unpredictable and none of this guarantees good outcomes for London in the future. But you’d have to say the Brits have given it the good old college try.

Um yes, but out of the mouth of the bromancer babe ...Trump is intensely unpredictable 

And yet for reasons best described as delusional, the bromancer wanted a courtship, or perhaps thinks wielding King Donald makes for a decent domestic cudgel ...

Now contrast the Australian effort, a reeking, stinking wreck of amateurism and failure. Albanese and every part of the governing apparatus in Canberra realise the failure to achieve even a single meeting for the Prime Minister with Trump in the nearly one year since the President was elected has become acutely embarrassing.
Trump is unpopular in Australia – even more so in Britain – and a perceived stylistic association with Trump was so devastating for Peter Dutton at the last election, so there was a chance Albanese could find political comfort in “standing up” for Australia against the evils of Trumpism.
That would be intensely dangerous for Australia.
Even the least strategically sagacious Australian government – and the Albanese government surely makes an honest challenge for that title – gets security and economic briefings.
Given our missing military capability, we are completely reliant on the Americans for national security, intelligence, regional awareness and so on. For decades we’ve marketed, in Asia especially, our special influence in Washington as one of our most singular assets.
You can’t market your influence in Washington if the President won’t see the Prime Minister. Further, the US is, by a vast distance, our biggest foreign investor.
There are also powerful negative reasons not to make a mess of this.

The infatuated reptiles slipped in another snap, The State Banquet at Windsor Castle, in Windsor, on September 17, during US President Donald Trump’s unprecedented second State Visit. Picture: via AFP

If the pond had its way, it'd be count the pond out ...

As usual, all the bromancer had was agigantic billy goat butt as a reason for bending the knee, tugging the forelock, kissing the ring, bowing and scraping and being ever so 'umble ...

Trump is mercurial and unpredictable, but his ability to cause trouble for people and nations he doesn’t like is prodigious.
There may even be an underlying political realisation by the Albanese government.
Australians don’t like Trump but they do like the American alliance and the underlying relationship with the US. George W. Bush was unpopular in Australia, but when Labor leader Mark Latham attacked Bush it looked like Latham couldn’t handle the alliance.
That was the end of Latham’s momentum and the beginning of his poll slide.
Albanese wants his relationship with Trump, and the US-Australia alliance, to be seen as successful, so long as he doesn’t have to do anything disagreeable like spend any serious money on defence, take any hard strategic decisions or say boo to China.
Just as UK Inc must have had many committee meetings, so an analogous Australia Inc committee has been working hard preparing the ground for Albanese’s meeting with the President.
Former US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell, who drove Asia policy in both the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations, and who has vastly more high-level Asian experience and knowledge than any Australian, describes the forthcoming Albanese-Trump date as “probably the most consequential meeting between an American and an Australian in living memory”.
Americans always exaggerate the importance and virtues of friends. Nonetheless, Campbell was making a serious argument.
He was talking about responding to Beijing’s strategic assertiveness in Asia: “The animating worry in Washington right now is the idea of a 1941 bolt from the blue that China would do, without notice, across the Taiwan Strait.”
Campbell is referring to Japan’s devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Like all serious policymakers, he is acutely worried by the Chinese military threat. Campbell might also have been referring to the potential downside of a bad Trump-Albanese encounter.

WTF? Cue another snap, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, the Hon Richard Marles MP meets United States Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth, right, at the White House.

Who cares? The main worry for the pond is the way that vaccines are likely to dry up just before the next plague sweeps the world ...

Or maybe the burningn of the planet, but the bromancer will have his war with China, and preferably no later than Xmas ...

Albanese has been acutely sensitive to this possibility, which is why Canberra turned down a potential White House meeting for Albanese before the G20 meeting in Canada where he was scheduled to see Trump. Trump left the G20 early, without seeing Albanese or speaking to him on the phone.
So Canberra deployed at least three stratagems to create the right atmosphere for the Albanese-Trump “summit”. As Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has made clear to Richard Marles, the Americans want us to spend more on defence.
Campbell (politely) called for it, so does every serious person, American or Australian.
Albanese claims he won’t do anything just to please Trump.
Nonetheless, just to please Trump, Albanese and Marles announced $12bn in allegedly new money to build the Henderson Defence Precinct in Perth that will service US and Australian nuclear submarines.
It turns out the planning and “scoping” is not scheduled to finish until 2027. So the new $12bn won’t start until 2028 if, through some miracle, everything runs on time.
And $12bn over 10 years starting in 2028 is such a tiny addition that Marles, understandably, won’t even say by how much it increases defence spending as a percentage of GDP. The answer is effectively by nothing.
The Pentagon, though conscious of every element of Canberra’s woeful defence performance, probably wants to help Marles so they may not point out to Trump the fatuousness of Australian policy.
They may instead connive in pretending Australia is doing something, if not enough.
Stratagem No.2 was to talk tough on China.
This was accomplished by our ambassador in Washington, Kevin Rudd.
Rudd is the only strategic heavyweight in any part of the Albanese system.
His words on China, that through its radical military build-up and actions it was the chief disrupter in our region, were powerful and noticed.
But of course everyone in Washington also notices that Rudd plays pretty much a lone hand in his analysis on China. Certainly Albanese never talks like Rudd.
By the way, Beijing increasingly expresses annoyance at Australia’s fitful efforts to be close to the US, and occasionally to support Japan and The Philippines.
This reminds me eerily of the atmosphere just before the Morrison government called for an inquiry into the origins of Covid.
After that, Beijing switched from friendly to punishing. The Albanese government may yet suffer a rude awakening from Beijing.
PNG treaty failure
But Canberra’s Trump card, so to speak, was Stratagem No.3, concluding a security agreement with Vanuatu and a military defence treaty with Papua New Guinea.
As we now know, first Port Vila, then Port Moresby, declined to sign the agreements we had already announced.

This was a shocking, humiliating failure for Australian diplomacy and illustrates appalling lack of influence in the region of our core national interest.
This column has always had the greatest respect for Foreign Minister Penny Wong, seemingly the smartest person in the government.
But this outcome is a monumental failure of diplomacy. Under her leadership, what was DFAT doing?
I’ve been covering Australian foreign affairs for more than 40 years and time without number I’ve heard the lecture about our influence in Washington: the US is interested in our views on China, takes our lead on Southeast Asia and has complete faith in our mastery of the South Pacific.
What a load of nonsense those pieties are.
What was DFAT doing that was more important than securing the right outcomes in Port Vila and Port Moresby?
How did they let an Australian Prime Minister get so blindsided? What a spectacular embarrassment.
If it was meant to demonstrate to Trump our rock-solid, reliable strategic mastery of our immediate region we can only hope, probably with some justification, that Trump wasn’t paying attention and no one in his circle noticed.

Phew, that was a long rant, but the pond had to let the bro rant, with only a snap to provide a break ... Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister James Marape, right, and Australian PM Anthony Albanese failed to sign a long-awaited mutual defence treaty as expected on September 17. Picture: AFP

The pond had determined that there'd be a bonus to the bonus, and so the pond had to skip quickly through the remaining lengthy bromancer weirdness ...

In PNG we were offered the pathetic excuse that the PNG ministers were away in their home districts celebrating independence day and thus couldn’t approve the treaty.
To believe that, you’d have to think our high commission in Port Moresby was fast asleep.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape said China played no role in the failure of the cabinet to sign the treaty. Yet PNG Defence Minister Billy Joseph said “external forces” were working against the treaty.
Marape then dispatched Joseph to Beijing to explain the treaty to them. Campbell observed that Beijing would do everything it could to thwart such Australian initiatives. Beijing’s role in killing the Vanuatu agreement was public.
So far, in the South Pacific strategic contest, that’s Beijing 2, Canberra 0.
A mutual defence treaty with PNG is a very big deal. It means we would defend PNG against Indonesia if necessary. It also means if we, with the US, were involved in conflict with Beijing, we would expect to use PNG’s territory to launch fighter jets, to refuel surface ships (if we had any), to support submarines, if necessary for our newly amphibious army to conduct “shoot and scoot” operations. Some senior PNG figures, especially Jerry Singirok, the former commander of the PNG Defence Force, have grave reservations about this.
But Beijing’s hand was strong. Trump hates losers. Albanese and Marape say the treaty will be signed in the next few weeks. If that happens at all, and it’s a big if, it will be after Albanese meets Trump.
The nature of Canberra’s regional influence with Washington was never based on Australians knowing more about Asia than Americans, a colossal furphy. The US has more and better experts on China than Australia does and more experts even on Indonesia.
The difference was that our (past) leaders were thinking about China, Indonesia and the South Pacific all the time, whereas US leaders have global worries. And because we’re a US ally, Washington takes our Asian interests seriously. But that only worked when we had leaders who were serious strategic players, and when they were close to the American leadership. Neither of those conditions applies with Albanese.

The reptiles tried to pretend that we should care about the undertoad, Australians don’t like Donald Trump, but they do like the American alliance and the underlying relationship with the US. Picture: AFP

All the pond wanted was for the bromancer's war gaming to end ...

But the Americans want access to our geography. That anchors them with us. The deep structural integration we’ve achieved over decades gives us some institutional staying power. By the early 2030s, it’s scheduled that there will be more than 400 Australian navy personnel serving on US nuclear submarines, notionally in preparation for operating our own nukes.
Perversely, paradoxically, you might say preposterously, that gives Canberra a kind of semi-veto over American military action.
If the US were involved in hostilities with Beijing and Australia suddenly withdrew all its personnel, that would be a serious blow to US fighting power.
Everything like that is entirely a result of the momentum of the past closeness between the systems. The Albanese government is living off the strategic capital of the past.
It looks like Albanese wants a low-key, side-corridor meeting with Trump, where nothing of substance is discussed, there’s not much, or even no, joint press conference, but everyone can say the relationship has never been better. There might even be an announceable on critical minerals.
The problem with that much discussed initiative is that everything is so expensive in Australia. Who is going to pay the Australian premium for critical minerals – us or the Americans?
Australia is in a dangerous state of strategic drift, our diplomacy notable for incompetence and inability to produce results.
Having tried to influence the real world and failed, Albanese in New York will surely retreat to fantasy policies on climate change and Palestine.
Nonetheless, Albanese will probably survive a slight Trump meeting unscathed because Trump pays him no attention and has no interest in him, an unbelievable circumstance for any previous Australian prime minister. And Australia is popular in the US.
Certainly Trump doesn’t look to Albanese for strategic advice. Our influence is as slight as it has ever been. Let’s hope we’re still the lucky country.

King Donald doesn't look to anyone for strategic advice. King Donald hasn't a strategic bone in his body. All he knows is how to divide and stir hate ...

But good-oh, we'll join in with King Donald in his desire to re-invade Afghanistan and take back Bagram Air Base ...

Or maybe it's just another monarchical whim, like the desire to make Canada a state, or take over Greenland or invade Canada or perform some extrajudicial killings.

And so to the bonus to the bonus to that tediously long-winded bromancer piece...

The pond immediately regretted doing it, but it's important in terms of herpetology 101 because in it the dog botherer spends six minutes, or so the reptiles say, making the Kirk assassination all about the dog botherer, and his endless suffering...

It's narcissism at a level that King Donald might envy ...

Don't believe the pond? Harbour the delusion that the dog botherer isn't a narcissist of the first water?

Take a squiz ...

The header: I’ve been cancelled by left and right ... guess which is worse?, Charlie Kirk’s assassination and its aftermath deliver a reality check about the public square’s demise.

The caption: Charlie Kirk, who established Turning Point, addresses university students before being fatally shot. Pictures: Getty Images

is there anything more pitiful than the sight of a self-pitying reptile?

In case you have never experienced it, let me share that reading a public death threat against yourself, or even a declaration someone would like to see you die, and then to see it welcomed by others, well, it can be bracing. Even unsettling.
If you are a public figure identified with right-of-centre politics, you will have experienced it. Conservative women cop it worst, with threats of sexual violence adding to the malevolence.
This is the so-called public square in the digital age.
On what was Twitter, people fantasised about the chance to drive over me and some colleagues while we crossed the road; other times people have sent more direct and disturbing threats, and even tracked down one of my sons online to let him know they wanted me to die a slow death from cancer. Nice.
For years I told myself this was water off a duck’s back, just the entry price for engaging in serious debate and mocking the green left on social media.
It took an intercession (let’s call it an ultimatum) from my infinitely wise wife to get me off Twitter and rediscover sanity.

Cue a snap,  Charlie Kirk hands out hats before speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on September 10. He was assassinated during his speech. Picture: The Deseret News via AP

Snap aside, is there anything more pitiful than a self-pitying reptile intent on trading off and in classic narcissistic fashion, attempting to make it all about himself?

It is difficult to know that such indecency walks among us. I used to console myself that most of this bile came from Russian or Chinese bots, or a handful of losers.
But the horrendous, cold-blooded assassination of American conservative organiser and public advocate Charlie Kirk on a university campus has delivered a chilling reality check.
While US gun culture played a role in his death, we cannot escape what it demonstrates about public debate, political hatred and the demise of the public square.
Nor can we ignore the truly disturbing online response in the US and around the world, including in Australia, that shows a widespread lack of decency on the political left. Kirk’s murder has revealed a moral black hole at the heart of politics.
For years this column has lamented the way digital media and the political polarisation have destroyed the civil contest of ideas. Kirk was seeking to revive this through articulate debate and sharp wit, taking his open disposition and Christian certitude to the liberal left hotbeds of US campuses.
“Prove me wrong,” the banner said as he welcomed protagonists, enduring some abuse but enjoying illuminating discussions and sharing them online. His reward for this respectful discourse was to take a bullet, quite literally destroying his voice box, ending the accomplished and promising life of a husband and young father.
This waste, injustice and barbarism has consumed me since, even though Kirk was not properly on my radar.
I received a text message from my regular Sky News contributor Kristin Tate at 5.22am on Thursday last week saying simply: “Charlie Kirk was just shot.”
Tate had known Kirk since they were teenagers in the same Christian conservative movement. But his name did not register immediately with me until I checked the news, watched some video exchanges and realised I had seen and admired some of his work.
Not being a Trumpian conservative or evangelical Christian, I agreed with some of Kirk’s political and social views and disagreed with others.
To those aligned with the MAGA movement and Instagram politics, Kirk was a giant.
It was his reanimation of the public square that was most impressive, especially taking political and social debate back to university campuses where civil debate should always be nurtured.

At that point in the hagiography the reptiles slipped in another snap ... Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Lane Frantzve, has vowed to continue his work. Picture: Getty Images/AFP

The pond will concede that she's perfected the Mar-a-lago look and has perfected the trad wife speak ...

At a 2021 Turning Point event, Erika said, “Boss babe culture is completely antithetical to the gospel.” Earlier this summer at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit, Erika spoke in front of an audience of 3,000 people about how marriage had changed her life. Before she met Charlie, she said, she was not focused on “six kids and a white picket house fence. But that’s how amazing God is. When you meet the right man, everything shifts. When I met Charlie, that was it. I could care less about a career.” Erika told the young women gathered to hear her speak that she didn’t want them to chase a paycheck. “You’re not wasting a degree when you’re raising your children with wisdom, love and truth.” (Rolling Stone)

But back to the pitiful dog botherer, pitifully attempting to make it all about himself, as narcissists are wont to do ...

Agree or not with Kirk’s conservative politics or evangelical righteousness, his mission was brave and timely.
The public contest of ideas is at the heart of our freedom, democracy and prosperity.
Almost single-handedly, Kirk was trying to revive that beating heart, and he was silenced in the most brutal way.
His widow, Erika, has vowed to continue the Turning Point political movement that in the days since the assassination has attracted more support than ever.
Yet we should be deeply worried about the chilling effect of this murder deterring others on the political right from speaking up.
Hatred and abuse sometimes emanate from all points of the political compass and it should always be condemned. Yet in contemporary times, at least, it is the political left that has been more hateful and violent.
This stems from the tendency of the left to characterise every issue as a moral choice.
From climate change and border protection to taxation and education, the left argues there are moral choices to be made and if you stand on the “wrong” side you are portrayed as evil.
In this way a unilaterally imposed moral judgment (often incorrect) leads to the demonisation of opponents. Once people are demonised, the path to violence is smoothed.
Back in 2012 Richard Parncutt from Austria’s University of Graz proposed the death penalty be applied to climate deniers: “I would just like my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and the human race in general, to enjoy the world that I have enjoyed, as much as I have enjoyed it. And to achieve that goal I think it is justified for a few heads to roll. Does that make me crazy? I don’t think so.”

Ouch, that's gotta hurt, but maybe not so much as actual climate change will hurt, as the reptiles dropped an AV distraction to add to the dog botherer's hagiographical approach, The fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk has become a flashpoint in Britain's already contentious debate over free speech. WSJ's David Luhnow explains the U.K.'s struggle to define the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

The dog botherer did attempt some distractions, but inevitably it came back to being all about him and his endless suffering ...

Conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and John Howard were routinely denounced as fascists or Nazis – protesters burned effigies of them. When Donald Trump first won office Robert De Niro wanted to “punch” him in the face, Madonna wanted to “blow up” the White House and a comedian used his severed head as a prop.
Protesters burned cars and smashed windows, and media organisations as supposedly reputable as our own ABC ran serious programs pretending he was a puppet of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. After years of legal attacks and character assassinations Trump was targeted by a would-be assassin’s bullet during his comeback campaign.
When you call someone a Nazi or fascist you elevate the stakes to a level where some nutters think they have a duty to act. Which is how we end up with young people openly celebrating the shocking murder of a young political campaigner – before Kirk’s bleeding and lifeless body was even carried from the scene, people were cheering.
The visceral hatred of the left was unmasked worldwide and it was frightening. This callous disregard for life spread far wider than anonymous online trolls – people interviewed in the street were openly happy, politicians such as our own Fatima Payman were seemingly unmoved, and even TV host Jimmy Kimmel accused the MAGA crowd of killing one of their own.
What have these people become? Where is their shared humanity? How do we recover?
The right of politics is not blameless, and Trump of all people tends to inflame rather than calm political debate. But we need to be frank about how this is primarily a scourge of the political left because on the progressive side this sort of hatred is not confined to the fringes, it is promulgated by those considered mainstream.

Uh huh, and never mind the obvious, because it was disappeared ...

Cue another reptile AV distraction ... Independent WA senator Fatima Payman has been slammed over comments about Charlie Kirk's assassination

\

Somehow the man who did sordid things to couches became a symbol of freedumb ...

In response to JD Vance’s denouncement of hateful political rhetoric, one of the ABC’s favourite commentators, Jane Caro, posted: “It must be hurtful to be called ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’, but I think I can help. Stop behaving like wannabe Nazis and fascists & I bet people stop calling you such names.”
Shameless, hateful and unapologetic.
Where are the leaders on the left speaking out for common decency? In the US the liberal left talk show host Bill Maher has set a decent standard, which is no more than we should expect.
Maher spoke emotionally about Kirk’s murder and condemned those of his fellow travellers who were rejoicing. “Charlie Kirk was always willing to engage, I talked to him here,” Maher said on air. “Say what you want about right-wingers, but they’ll talk to you. The left has more of a: ‘I won’t talk to you. You’re deplorable. I can’t break bread with you.’ Right-wingers don’t have that attitude.”

Bill Maher? That drug-addled loon, constantly bothsidering in an attempt to appeal to all, and ending up very unappeling?

“I know, when you’re a Pope, you got a direct line to the big guy up there. So, you know, his first prayer as a Pope, he’s he prayed for wisdom, he prayed for humility, and he prayed ‘keep JD Vance, the hell away from me.” (The Wrap)

The reptiles produced a final hagiographic flourish, The reflection of a US flag appears in a portrait of Charlie Kirk during a vigil in his honour. Picture: AFP

Then it was a wrap, with the dog botherer still trying to make it all about him ...

Barack Obama also described the response as a “threat to all of us” as he called for reason. “What happened to Charlie Kirk was horrific and a tragedy,” the former president said. “The central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without resort to violence.”
My experience during the voice campaign gives me a unique insight into the partisan divide on hate speech. After decades of abuse from the left, I got to experience abuse from the right.
Neither was pleasant. But the relentless attacks from the right were different.
They lectured me, disowned me, insulted me, boycotted my show, told me to go to the ABC, and accused me of being on the take. In some ways it was more wounding because while they were hard-hearted, they addressed me as a person and offered damning character assessments.
Yet they did not do what the worst of the leftist critics always do. They did not demonise me, portray me as inhuman or threaten to kill me.

Poor, poor, pitiful him ... didn't the right wingers tell him to harden the f*ck up, to grow a set of balls, and other classy forms of endearment?

Never mind, the news in review ... ‘Trump visits Britain and wages war on free speech’ 

And so to end with a 'toon review of King Donald's America in all its current glory ...