In which the pond presents an unadorned bromancer as a late arvo treat ...

 

As promised, here's the bromancer rant, full and compleat, as foreshadowed earlier in the day when the pond provided a quick archive fix to eager beaver herpetology students who couldn't wait until the arvo ...

The pond promised an undiluted, straight from the hip shoot 'em up, inflected by it being October 7th, and by golly that's what's going to happen.

The pond isn't in the business of providing blather about westerns or offering decoys and lures ...

How easy it would be to do a survey of the tabloids as a way of distracting from the bromancer.

MAGA Demanded ‘Holy Hell Fire’ Before Judge’s Home Exploded

As if the pond would try that sort of cheap trick, knowing it was certain to fail against the enthusiasm of dedicated bromancer imbibers ...

Trump’s Attempt to Goad Navy Into Booing Obama Met With Awkward Silence

As if bromancer gourmands could be so easily swayed from the path of the righteous ...

Johnson Cowers From Challenge for Live Shutdown Debate

The bromancer's not for cowering, he's more for quivering and wobbling like an outraged jelly ...

The header: Reality not part of PM’s foreign policy playbook, How dare Anthony Albanese claim some credit in helping with Trump’s peace plan – Australia’s move to recognise Palestinian statehood made Hamas less likely to accept any ceasefire.

The bleeding obvious caption for the bleeding obvious snaps:Anthony Albanese and US President Donald Trump.

The bromancer got right into it from the get go:

The anniversary of the shocking October 7 terror atrocities carried out by Hamas against Israeli civilians should be a time of sober reflection and deep realism. It should also be a time to recognise that the federal government has deeply failed Australia’s Jewish community, which is now our nation’s most threatened and persecuted minority. In failing the Jewish community, the government has failed our whole nation.
The more you read about the history of anti-Semitism, the more recognisable, and therefore distressing, is the stage that Australia seems to be in now. The Albanese government is not itself remotely anti-Semitic, but it has never grasped the scale or nature of the problem, its seriousness, or the way its own language and actions contribute to worsening a crisis.
The utterly absurd, almost nonsensical, claim by the Albanese government that its decision to formally recognise a Palestinian state when no such state exists contributed to Donald Trump’s peace proposal for the Gaza Strip is a case in point.
Then there is the broader question of Australian foreign policy, which continues to operate primarily in the realm of fantasy rather than actual, physical reality. More on this, later.
But amid the general bleak nothingness of Australian policy, there is one bit of good news. A rare exception to the characteristic vapourware policy is the military alliance Anthony Albanese signed with Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape. This is a real development and a good one. Although the treaty’s language is less binding than the famous NATO Article 5 – an attack on one is an attack on all – it is as strong as the language in our ANZUS Treaty.
Albanese deserves congratulations for bringing the agreement, strongly opposed by China, to fruition.

Say what? Wasn't it just recently that the bromancer was on Sky after dark with petulant Peta, offering "real news, honest views", blathering away ...

‘Monumental incompetence’: Albanese fails to secure Australia-Papua New Guinea treaty
The Australian's Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan says it’s a “tremendous humiliation” that the Albanese government failed to secure a treaty between Australia and Papua New Guinea. “This is a tremendous humiliation for the Albanese government, its Pacific policy is just like its defence policy,” Mr Sheridan told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “You can’t do a security deal with Vanuatu, you can’t do a security deal with Papua New Guinea, but you can solve Palestine. “This was monumental incompetence in management … wildly incompetent.”(sorry, the pond doesn't link to reptile videos)

It was, it was, and what of the monumental incompetence of the bromancer? 

Is he tremendously humiliated by shooting from the lip?

Shouldn't he at least have shown a little of the humble pie he should have been made to eat?

There he was on the 17th September ...

The Australian's Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan says the Albanese government is a government of “flimflam” concerning strategic matters and the failure to secure a treaty between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

Nah, it's the reptile way, never look back, never say you're sorry for getting it wrong.

It's just water under the bridge, here have a still, and pretend none of it ever happened... James Marape and Anthony Albanese on Monday. Pictures: AFP, Martin Ollman

Back to the rant ...

Tying us to PNG, and PNG to us, is a good thing. The chief strategic objective for us is that PNG deny Beijing excessive influence within the country, and particularly its security sector.
However, here are two questions no one is asking about the treaty. What extra resources will we now commit to defence to ­fulfil this new obligation? We’ve taken on the responsibility of ­defending PNG against any threats. Either the treaty is meaningless or it imposes new obligations. If the new obligation is real, it demands commensurate new resources.
Yet as this column, along with every other realistic defence analyst, has often observed, the resources we devote to defence are radically insufficient even for our current tasks. The defence budget was 2 per cent of GDP when Albanese came to office. It’s still 2 per cent of GDP. There’s been no meaningful increase in nearly four years of Labor government. Yet in that time we’ve committed to the huge expense of acquiring nuclear submarines, and now we’ve added a new defence commitment to PNG. We seem to have done all this under some psychotropic influence which allows us to make-believe that it all doesn’t need any extra money.
To slightly adapt an old saying, strategy without money is simply noise before defeat.
The second question about the alliance is this: Marape keeps saying it will mean 10,000 PNG citizens can serve in the Australian Defence Force. How can this possibly be true?
Our defence ­recruitment procedures are notoriously slow, ­byzantine, ineffective and discourage all but the most determined Australian talent. It can take the better part of a year for well-qualified Australian volunteers to join any part of the ADF. It can only be explained as part of the Defence establishment’s commitment to pacifism.

The pond wondered when the reptiles would get alarmed. What's this unseemly talk of thousands of black people being allowed in country? What a terrifying thought, shocking the hive mind to the core.

Is it true that they'll have a thugby league team in the Australian competition? 

Isn't it bad enough that the bloody Kiwis are allowed in, and are seen to be representing NSW in a battle with the toads? (Apparently it actually happened with vulgar youff - thanks to the pond's partner for that one).

Relax, have a still, we're still AUKUSing, Defence Minister Richard Marles said last month that he was 'very confident' the $368bn AUKUS subs deal would continue.

As the pond has explained many times before, the pond understands the bromancer's bitterness.

The continued refusal of this government to promote him to Reichsmarschall des GroßAustralisch Reiches is simply inexcusable...

All anyone needs to do is turn to the bromancer military advice, and the fix is immediately in ...

Most ADF positions require high levels of education and lots of formal qualifications. The total ADF, fewer than 60,000 people, a wildly disproportionate number of them senior officers, is smaller than half a crowd at a Taylor Swift concert. Have we severely misled the PNG PM on how many of his citizens can actually join the ADF? In five years time, when the number of PNG recruits is perhaps a dozen, how will it look? Will this lead to bitter disappointment? If not, how is this recruitment procedure meant to unfold?
The Albanese government never does detail in its grand ­announcements, especially regarding defence and foreign ­affairs. It’s world class in making announcements, but very feeble at following through and implementation.
Back to the Middle East and Albanese’s preposterous claim that Australia recognising a non-existent Palestinian state helped push towards the Trump peace proposal.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who before his current job was many years a US senator intensely involved in foreign affairs and security, said that the day France announced it would formally recognise a Palestinian state, Hamas walked away from what had looked like promising ceasefire negotiations.
That’s because Hamas saw that its terrorism, combined with its intransigence, had won it a huge political victory – French recognition of a Palestinian state. Who do you believe about the effects of such recognition? Rubio or Albanese?

So to a still implying it was only Oz wot did it, Anthony Albanese recognised Palestine as a sovereign state last month, a move slammed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Actually many countries have done it, and a few, some with European clout, did it recently ...you know...

Fergeddit, once the bromancer gets the blinkers on his eyes and the bit in his teeth, he's off at a gallop ...

Hamas famously welcomed the Albanese government’s move to follow the French with formal recognition. So on all the available credible evidence, formal diplomatic recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state made Hamas less likely to agree to a ceasefire.
Nonetheless, the Middle East uniquely suits Albanese government diplomacy. Australia has more or less zero influence in the Middle East, so the characteristic gap between announcement and failed implementation can’t ever really come back to bite Albanese.
France, Britain, Canada and Australia recognising a Palestinian state also had an effect on the Israelis. Like both Rubio and Hamas, the Israelis saw the move as a reward for terrorism. So, outraged and determined to thwart the dynamic of rewarding terrorism, the Israelis were ­moving towards annexing part of the West Bank.
Because the Labor government has entirely destroyed Canberra’s traditional relationship with Jerusalem, it had no ­influence with the Israelis at all.
In so far as the move of several left of centre Western governments to formally recognise a Palestinian state had any consequence, it was to make Hamas less likely to accept any ceasefire, and Israel more likely to annex part of the West Bank. A policy, therefore, which was not only dishonourable, but also dishonest, counter-productive and dumb.
It was Trump, and Trump alone, who stopped Israeli consideration of annexation and also produced a peace plan with half a fighting chance.

And Israel and Benji's growing sense of international isolation had nothing to do with it?

Oh no, none of that, just adore him, and his many majestic works ... 

Join with the bromancer in his adoration, neigh, his adulation, for blessed are the cheesemakers and the gold gilded ones ...

Sorry the bromancer had a few last words to add about the demonisation of Muslims in the lizard Oz...

Meanwhile in Australia, where we routinely hold ritual moral panics over non-issues, we have a genuine crisis of racial, ethnic and religious prejudice against a profoundly vulnerable minority. The Albanese government, in effectively ignoring many recommendations of its own hand-picked anti-Semitism envoy, shows a characteristic disregard for this reality.
You see, it doesn’t care for ­reality much at all.

We keed, we keed.

When has any reptile deep in the hive mind worried about the national Murdochian sport of Muslim bashing? You know, that profoundly vulnerable minority ...there was report about it, studiously ignored by the reptiles.

Been going on a long time, and it's not just the sort of friendly atheism emanating from the pond about all religions being pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye ...

Inter alia, with many familiar faces being given a mention ...

That's how bad it was, and by the pond's own gut way of surveying the reptile scene, it's got a whole lot worse since then, what with the devotion of the hive mind to ethnic cleansing and genocide ...

Now back to the business of backing the lettuce, there's nothing like having money on a lettuce to distract and to generate real excitement ...