In which the pond passes up many lizard Oz opportunities and so has to settle for the Lynch mob ...

Thursday is the most dismal day of the week for the lizard Oz, and this Thursday was no different ... 

This was briefly top of the "news" section ...

Motoring
‘Hybrids to cost more’ in EV chase
Honda Australia is warning the price of hybrids will increase under the Albanese government’s aggresive pursuit of electric vehicles.
By Greg Brown

The archived version made even clearer the special pleading for a company which notoriously missed the EV boat...

Hybrids to cost more under Labor’s aggressive pursuit of electric vehicles, Honda says

Talk about a Nesssann Honda failed merger, failed EV strategy mess ...

You have to be enormously stupid to prefer a hybrid to an EV - okay, okay the pond has an EV bias - and that's why Chinese manufacturers are currently cleaning Honda's clock. No wonder they're bleating to the lizard Oz.

Moving right along, there was a variant on the war with China, but by the time the pond got to it, it had dropped well down the page ...

IRON ORE WAR
China’s iron ore ban a bid to drive down prices, BHP told Labor
BHP has privately briefed the Treasurer that China’s iron ore ban is merely a pricing negotiation tactic, as Beijing makes its strongest push in a decade to reset market rates.
By Brad Thompson, Will Glasgow and Greg Brown

The current main reptile jihad seems to be the war on pesky, difficult furriners, what with the reptiles claiming an EXCLUSIVE, meaning they've somehow beat themselves to the punch, what with there already having been a reptile EXCLUSIVE on the matter ...

EXCLUSIVE
Foreign students fill lecture rooms as elite universities rely on fees
Which Australian universities are the most popular with international students? Official data reveals the universities with the highest concentration of foreign students. See the list.
By Natasha Bita and Joanna Panagopoulos

So boring, and again the pond will only note that those names attached to the piece are not really in the WASP category, and so the pond looks forward to the revelation that the lizard Oz is being filled with filings by suspect names ...

Over on the extreme far right there was also much to ignore ...

There was petulant Peta, top of the world ma, blathering on about the green agenda ...

Follow the money: plot to sabotage nation’s prosperity
The green agenda in this country has never been about the planet; it’s all about a funding stream to destabilise capitalist economies and finance the broader left agenda.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist

There's the usual rabbiting on about the "turncoat" Matt Kean, the urgent need to join the Canavan caravan,  with "Orwellian" getting yet another outing... amidst this form of paranoid hysteria...

Rarely, if ever, have I met an advocate for renewables who doesn’t stand to benefit financially from the expansion of the green industry in this country, including some in the parliament.
They’re either big investors in wind and solar or part of the 30-year ecosystem that has grown up around the global green energy push to use taxpayer largesse to fund a hard-left activist army.

So if put solar panels on your roof and get a decent battery set-up you're part of a hard-left activist army?

Nah, even for a deeply masochistic pond, that's a petulance too far ...

Ironic really that the reptiles should make a big splash about the departure of Jane Goodall ...

Jane Goodall, who studied chimpanzee behaviour for decades in Africa, dies at 91
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the conservationist renowned for her groundbreaking chimpanzee field research and globe-spanning environmental advocacy, travelled more than 300 days a year.
By Robert Lee Hotz

Eek, the WSJ obit mentioned that she was apparently part of that hard-left activist army ...

In recent years, she devoted much of her time to activism and charity work surrounding conservation issues, animal rights and endangered primates and climate change. 

Climate change? What on earth is that?

Ah, so in petulant Peta's rhetorical Orwellian eyes, she was deeply delusional, in it for the cash in the chimp paw ...

Moving quickly along, Will gave the iron ore matter another prod ...

Australia had better hope that China remains a paper tiger on iron ore
The $100bn question is this: can the Chinese giant win in its shakedown of BHP? If it can, Beijing will have triumphed over market economics.
By Will Glasgow
North Asia Correspondent

The pond thought that the Ruskis were the new paper tigers, but never mind, there was also a generous serve trans bashing, another outing in the latest reptile jihad...

Jacinta Allan’s trans activism is a betrayal of women
To those of us in the UK who have been vigorously – and effectively – fighting back against the harms of transgender ideology, Australia is a laughing stock.
By Julie Bindel

Bigots gotta do what bigots gotta do, but playing the sneering Pom card - fiddle-de-dee, how we laugh at you ignorant, dumb colonials - seemed like a tactical error, a bit of Pom foot in mouth syndrome.

And after that, all that was left for the pond was the Lynch mob, Melbourne University's shame ...

The header: Peace board can’t be worse than the mullah coddlers, The precedent for Tony Blair as new viceroy to Palestine is not a good one. But no finger-wagging from a progressive leader has brought peace this close, least of all from Penny Wong.

The caption for the authoritarian pointy image: President Donald Trump points to a reporter in the Oval Office of the White House. Picture: AP

The Lynch mob had five minutes, so the reptiles said, to do his best and turn a sow's ear into a mighty set of pearls ...

The pond wasn't happy being made to go down this wayward road, but at least the reputation of the University of Melbourne could be shredded a bit more ...

Unfortunately, all the Lynch mob's opening thrust did was set the nerves jangling ...

Who would you rather have run Australia for the next six months, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump or Tony Blair? It’s a toss-up, isn’t it?

Sheesh, suddenly a game of two up looks like its worthy of a Melbourne uni course.

Bibi would help us restore a sense of national self-confidence and purpose.

Or perhaps return us to the genocidal elimination of Aboriginal people, what with a few of them having survived the first invasion. Talk about renewed confidence and purpose in slaughter ...

Trump would give us back our energy sanity, return us to a commonsense position on gender. Maybe our acknowledgments of country would get shorter.

Oh, he did an Aboriginal joke, in the spirit of the original genocide, and luckily there's a Luckovich to hand for that King Donald line ...

That reminds the pond of a droll piece by Alexandra Petri in The Atlantic, Is Trump's TV Lying to Him?

And so on, but sadly the pond couldn't go a 'toon or a distraction every time for every line ... even as the Lynch mob tried to sell his sow's ear with his utterly unique sensa huma ...

Blair would invade Iraq. Again. As I say, it’s a toss-up.

But the pond could celebrate Bleagh one more time ...

Even the Lynch mob flinched a little at that sight, but he carried on regardless...

How will they each fare in Gaza?
They are its new overlords.
Could they be any worse than the dark theocracy of Hamas?
A generation of Palestinians has grown up knowing only tunnelling and anti-Semitism. Trump at least promises them “eternal peace”.
Will his plan deliver it?
Hard to defend Blair’s Middle East strategy when he was British prime minister (1997-2007).

That scribbled and printed even as the genocide, the mass starvation and the ethnic cleansing continues apace.

At this point the reptiles decided to interrupt with a lengthy audio distraction, and the pond was exceptionally pleased to reduce it to a screen cap ...

Inspired, the Lynch mob tried a little rehabilitation of the Iraq war, but had to confess to a colonial clanger ...

He was the catalyst of George W Bush’s attempted reformation of the region. He gave it the moral purpose the Texan was looking for.
This toppled bad regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the bad dudes came back.
Kabul is again run by the Taliban. Baghdad fell into Iran’s orbit.
So, the precedent for Blair as new viceroy to Palestine is not a good one.
His critics will heap further scorn on the whole venture as an exercise in neocolonialism. Others will observe the apparent incompatibility between Trumpism and Blairism, that MAGA is a reaction against the world view of Blair.
The former prime minister is a Catholic missionary.

At this point the reptiles produced a cheerful snap of the two jolly slaughterers, gaily laughing at their genocidal ways, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Picture: AP

If the pond was going to have an interrupting image, it would have preferred something like an infallible Pope ...

That's a much better portrait of the King, not to mention that lap dog sticking out of the handbag, barking in the way irritating lap dogs are wont to do ...

September 11, 2001, was the opportunity to redeem mankind: “The kaleidoscope has been shaken,” he declared. “The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.”
Trump ain’t that.

As University of Birmingham international security professor Patrick Porter argues, Trump wants “domination without (or with less) commitment”. The world is to be exploited for wealth and prestige.
Blair’s godly humanitarian interventionism is anathema to this.
That the Middle East should now be subject to some sort of Blair-Trump axis seems remarkable.
That is until we remember how Blair has this charm to win US presidents to his cause – something even John Howard could not approximate.
Bush wanted a humbler foreign policy. After 9/11, Blair helped him make a 180 on that. Blair has this uncanny ability to fuse his moral fervour with American realism. Trump is his next target.
As in Iraq, this latest Anglo-American venture may not work. But again, I ask: what is the alternative?

Um, end the genocidal killing fields? 

Show there's an actual alternative to Hamas that would allow Palestinians a life instead of remorseless death?

Nah, instead settle for another snap, Yasser Arafat is greeted by Tony Blair before their talks at 10 Downing Street in 1998. Picture: AFP

The pond can match that one ...

The Lynch mob then settled on a time honoured strategy, a reliable favourite, an evergreen.

Blame it all on Obama, and after that, blame it all on Biden ... and perhaps round it out with laughable Kamala

Works every time ...

Barack Obama never got this close to something better. His 2011 intervention “from behind” in Libya ruined that nation. His ambivalence towards Syria locked its people into a civil war. The great hope for regional peace, the first president with an Arab Muslim name, left the Middle East worse than he found it.
Joe Biden never recovered from his 2021 surrender in Afghanistan. He signed no meaningful peace deal while in office. Trump is now on his second. The Abraham Accords in 2020 did more for regional stability than any Arab-Israeli treaty since Camp David in 1978. His war on Iran a few months ago did not change that benighted regime. But neither did the mullah-coddling of his Democrat predecessors.
Biden was impotent as Hamas rape gangs rolled into southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Kamala Harris laughably made Israel’s response to this horror a litmus test of its legitimacy. The rise of global anti-Semitism happened under the Biden-Harris watch.

And what of King Donald's first reign, and the good people on both sides and Jews not replacing them?

Shush, focus on the strategy, take a sideswipe at Western moralisers and progressives, those silly types who seem to think genocide might be a tad reprehensible ...

Why not the Trump plan? His Board of Peace (on which Blair will sit) can hardly do a worse job than Western moralising under a progressive mandate has already done.
Anthony Albanese will be a long time waiting for an invitation to join it. He has consistently refused to recognise the civilisational stakes of Israel’s multi-sided war. At every turn he has chastised the region’s only liberal democracy while unwittingly appeasing its enemies at home and abroad.
Turns out Trump has a plan that does not involve the building of a regressive Islamist autocracy on Israel’s border – the almost certain consequence of Albanese’s misplaced recognition. Do the Queers for Palestine brigade imagine any Palestinian state won’t resemble a demi-hell for LGBTQI+ people?

Sorry, the pond thought the demi-hell for TG folk was the lizard Oz carrying out daily demonising jihads, ...

What the heck, have a photo celebrating the genocidal triumph, People walk past damaged buildings along a street in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. Picture: AFP

The Lynch mob bravely pushed on past the devastation ...

It is less the leftism of Canberra, Paris and London, and more the realism of the Arab world that makes this new peace plan so intriguing. Eight Arab and Muslim tates (sic, perhaps a typo for 'taters?) including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, backed Trump’s plan, saying in a statement they “welcome the role of the American President and his sincere efforts aimed at ending the war in Gaza”.
No finger-wagging from a progressive leader has brought peace this close; Penny Wongism freed not a single hostage.
Even Arab leaders who, for decades, used the plight of Palestinians to conceal their own dodgy human rights records have recognised how fundamentally Israel has rewritten the region’s geopolitics. Bibi did them all a favour by attacking Iran and its proxies. Us too – though most of our cultural elite refuse to admit it.
When Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, to bring world peace in 1918, the French prime minister exclaimed: “Meme le Bon Dieu n’en avait que dix!” (“Even the Good Lord only had 10!”) Trump has 20. That may be over-ambitious.
However, they are more thoroughly grounded in a hard-nosed realism than anything coming from the progressives at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Trump will not cajole Hamas out of the Gaza Strip. Rather, if it doesn’t down tools, free the 48 remaining hostages (living and dead), “Israel would have my full backing to finish the job of destroying the threat of Hamas”.

Ah yes, back to the wanton destruction, performed under the baton of the very stable genius ...

Actually the reptiles had decided to drag comrade Albo into the folly with a very big snap ...Anthony Albanese. Picture: AP

The Lynch mob warmed to polishing the apple and kissing the bum and tugging the forelock ...

The US President’s Nobel Peace Prize may not be as distant as his detractors imagine.

Who could possibly argue with that one?

Already forgotten the Obama strategy?

Please remember, it never gets old ...

Recall how the massed ranks of Euro-liberals gave Obama his prize in 2009 before he’d got within a whiff of any peace – and just before he condemned Libya and Syria to civil war.
Obama, the great cosmopolitan-in-chief, gave us none of the peace that the allegedly amoral isolationist, Trump, seems on the verge of. While Obama toured the Middle East apologising for Western colonialism, Trump, armed with little scholarly grasp and only an instinctive feel, has more effectively knocked heads together.

Hang on, hang on, the great cosmopolitan-in-chief?

The pond had thought he was a Kenyan socialist, but it turns out that he's a rootless cosmopolitan of the Jewish kind?

And King Donald as chairman of the board is a winner?

And so, having disgraced Melbourne University yet again, on with the final Lynch mob flourish ...

We can reflect on the irony that the President who last week was mocked by the left for criticising the UN is this week the leader who brought peace closer in Israel-Palestine than a thousand UN resolutions have done. The New York Times headlined this as “Trump and Netanyahu Tell Hamas to Accept Their Peace Plan, or Else”. But it is the “or else” that may make all the difference. We’ll see.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Unfortunately, there are many ironies to reflect on ... and the pond suspects that what we'll see is another elephant in the room ...