Over the weekend the pond woke to the sounds of The Philosopher's Zone doing Schopenhauer's pessimism ...
It occurred to the pond that just this one ABC program on RN was worth more than wasting a thousand hours on the reptiles, all to often blathering on about the uselessness of the ABC ... not least because the pond has come to feel a stark and gloomy pessimism when dealing with its daily foray into the hive mind, a feeling made exponentially worse on a Monday ...
The pond doesn't like Mondays, as the silicon chips inside its head get switched to reptile overload.
Never mind, today the reptiles were obsessed with the war between Ley and the lettuce, with the pastie Hastie doing his best for team lettuce ...
Newspoll: Hastie firms as voter alternative to Ley
Andrew Hastie has emerged as the most popular preferred Opposition Leader behind Sussan Ley, as the Coalition’s primary vote remains stuck at record low levels.
By Geoff Chambers
The reptiles are so desperate they're now giving air time to a man singularly unqualified for the task of removing Labor, as Geoff also chambered an opinion piece ...
If Ley was a Labor leader, she would have been rolled before now
The combined effects of the Coalition fighting for its political future and no obvious leadership contender gives Ley a freedom another Liberal leader might not have to push harder and faster.
His conclusion, extracted from an ocean of words?
If the conservatives decide to call a leadership spill when MPs return after the summer break, they must finalise who their preferred leadership candidate is.
Liberal conservatives in favour of generational change are backing Hastie, who as a Perth-based MP with a young family must decide whether he is ready for the massive challenge.
Liberal conservatives who believe a safe pair of hands is needed to set up Hastie for the future are backing Taylor, despite reservations that he will struggle to stoke the Coalition base or cut through.
Wilson, who will again have to fend off a Climate 200 teals challenge in 2028, is the long-term hope of the moderates.
As her rivals attempt to sort out who it is that they want to challenge, Ley has limited time to fight for her leadership, lay a glove on Albanese and turn around the polls.
Sounding good for team lettuce.
The pond only mentions all this because this day they were all at it, with simpleton Simon keen to join the fray ...
Conflicting pictures challenge the so-called gender split problem while a 2025 election study highlights the sad reality that an ever-greater majority born post 1981 vote anything but Liberal.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst
The pond would have liked to have spent time with the simpleton, but, mired deep in its pessimism, the pond can never resist the siren song of the cratering quarry whispering Caterist on a Monday ...
It was a way to fend off, or mebbe enhance, the bleak ennui of Schopenhauerian despair ...
The header: Re-energised Sussan Ley can wedge Labor on cost of power, Rehabilitation for the Liberals was never going to be smooth, but Sussan Ley must make the most of her tactical advantage with a persistent and relentless focus on cheap energy.
The caption for the snap reminding the lettuce it was in with a fighting chance: This week’s parliamentary contest, the last for the year, will be a crucial test for Sussan Ley and her colleagues. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
The Caterist spent a dreary four minutes in the trenches, with only the lettuce showing the slightest interest in the flood water whisperer's dismal advice.
When the Caterist goes into coach mode, you can sense a ghostly cracking Crace howling at yet another Tottenham Hotspur thrashing:
It has shaken off the shackles of net zero, which had kept it crouched and immobile for the past four years. Sussan Ley has shifted energy policy from the realm of morality to economics. It matters not whether you power the nation with solar panels, hamster wheels or thermodynamic combustion. The first requirement is that electricity is produced cheaply, restoring the competitive advantage Australia once enjoyed.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concluded his 1970 Nobel prize Lecture with a Russian proverb: One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world. The Liberals are in the early stages of discovering that truth is politically liberating: the sharpest weapon against any system built on falsehood.
For the last two elections, the Coalition has been complicit in the lie that power can be clean, reliable and cheap. By acknowledging the trilemma that compels us to choose any two qualities at the expense of the third, the Liberals have been forced to prioritise, recognising that the party that claims a reputation for sound economic policy must put cost and reliability first. It is a socially just choice too, since higher energy prices punish the poorest most, and the residents of Vaucluse and Kew hardly at all.
Oh dear, that reference to Vaucluse is perhaps untimely, what with the heckles already doing the rounds ...
As a one time proud resident of Toorak - way posher than Kew - the pond had a good belly laugh at the notion that north shore Caterist was at one with the dragons that notoriously live in the outer west.
It was then time to cue a snap of that solar-loving and windmill whale killing Sauron ... It’s tempting to conclude that Energy Minister Chris Bowen presents the Liberals with a target they can’t miss. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw
Coach Caterist carried on...
Which means the Liberals are at last in a position to wedge Labor on energy policy by exploiting the tension between its ideological ambitions and the imperative to ease pressure on household budgets. The tension is bound to increase in the next two years as the government scrambles to meet the 2030 targets it locked into legislation as if success was preordained. There is nothing on the horizon to alter the trajectory of power prices, and the government is still struggling to control inflation.
Add to that an Energy Minister who could out-strut an English batsman, slashing around on a park he’s convinced is too small for him, and it’s tempting to conclude the Liberals have been presented with a target they can’t miss. Yet we know they can. This year’s electoral disaster left the parliamentary party devoid of talent and its members demoralised.
The party’s administrative wing, vital to its stability and longevity, is desperately in need of reform. Robert Menzies shaped a vibrant, democratic party where energy would flow from the bottom up.
Eight decades later, it has succumbed to Robert Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy. Complexity has grown, expertise concentrated, decision-making has been centralised, leaders have entrenched themselves, and members have grown passive.
Factional loyalties have hardened, minor disagreements have swollen into doctrinal battles, and the group has become consumed by what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences”, quarrelling over words, labels and symbolic distinctions.
The ironies in all that were only matched by the reptiles desire to feature Dan the man, and Susssan looking like she knew the lettuce was coming up fast behind her, Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan with Sussan Ley in Brisbane. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen / Courier Mail
All the pond could think, as Coach Caterist outlined his game plan, was the way it's terribly tricky to work out the path of flood waters in quarries ...
Once affordability became the prime question, the explosive force of emissions was instantly defused. Everybody is on the same page, whether they realise it or not, as Kellie Sloane demonstrated on Friday at her first press conference as NSW Opposition Leader. There would be no change to the NSW Liberals’ net-zero commitment, she said. “But we need to understand that families in NSW are doing it tough. Our priority has to be reliability and affordability.”
Stripped of semantics, the differences on energy policy between Sloane, Ley and Victoria’s new Opposition Leader, Jess Wilson, boil down to almost nothing. They agree that reducing emissions should be contingent on lowering costs and maintaining reliability.
Provided the accounting is honest and that government subsidies are included in the price of energy, Ley, Wilson and Sloane are heading for drill-baby-drill territory, committed to the imperative of increasing gas supply.
They are also committed to the continuance of coal, which Guardian readers might be surprised to learn is still legal. Which is just as well, since the insatiable demand for baseload power for AI processing and data storage must be met. Otherwise, we’ll end up sitting around the fire, roasting a woolly mammoth, searching for a signal on our Nokia 1100s. Prioritising cheap, reliable power must mean technological neutrality and the return of competition.
Then came a reptile "go to" snap, which the reptiles have gone to countless times, what with it showing a lip pursing Albo and a downcast Sauron, Labor’s metastasised hubris makes it more vulnerable than PM Anthony Albanese and Bowen may realise. Picture: Dan Himbrechts/AAP
It's the visual equivalent to the endless hive mind chanting, but perhaps that's necessary, a kind of warming up designed to generate the courage required to swallow the Kool-aid:
Competition must include nuclear and will necessarily be driven by commercial incentives. Renewable energy must be weaned off welfare dependency, and there can be no subsidies for billionaires pursuing pet projects with other people’s capital.
A persistent and relentless focus on cheap energy offers a narrow, if improbable, path to victory for the Coalition. Yet it will also provoke an unprecedented onslaught from the most cashed-up vested-interest group in Australia. A cheap-energy-first policy would destroy their business model and starve them of capital investment. It would expose the monstrous lie that renewable energy is virtually free. The test for the capital market is profitability, and it is hard to find a single project anywhere in the world that does not rely on government support, either current or embedded in sunk costs.
Rehabilitation for the Liberals was never going to be smooth, particularly in a political environment where every misstep is seized upon. This week’s parliamentary contest, the last for the year, will be a crucial test for Ley and her colleagues.
Yet Labor’s metastasised hubris makes it more vulnerable than Anthony Albanese and Bowen may realise. The broken promise of a $275 reduction in household electricity bills hasn’t been forgotten. The YouTube clips are still there to be weaponised. Meanwhile, Bowen seems intent on making himself even more preposterous as COP president of negotiations, organising negotiations, appointing co-facilitators, preparing draft text, and issuing cover decisions about things few Australians understand and even fewer care about.
Ley must make the most of her tactical advantage. By abandoning net zero, the Liberals are no longer bound by the sensitivities of the climate elite and can relearn the language of the people.
Ah, just time to celebrate all that ...
And so to a novelty item:
The header: Trump’s crass Ukraine sellout strengthens our foes, The betrayal of a very brave people is bad news for all the allies and, if it eventuates, is certain to mightily encourage Beijing.
The caption: Donald Trump needs reminding that a nation’s freedom takes priority over a self-aggrandising ‘deal’ and a peace prize. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has until Thursday to respond. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds and Sergei Gapon / AFP
Is the onion muncher, bereft and deep into irrelevance, making a play to replace Lord Downer on a Monday?
Who knows, not that the pond minds or cares, because who can split the difference between His Lordship's Adelaide hills way and the onion muncher's budgie smuggling craving for attention?
As if to prove he was a serious contender, the onion muncher offered five minutes of blather, in a way only a dedicated onion muncher could manage ...
And that’s what’s finally come to pass; he has given Ukraine till Thursday to accept the terms agreed between his representative and the Kremlin’s: Ukraine to hand over to the Russians the unconquered parts of Luhansk and Donetsk, accept limitations on the size of its army and the nature of its armaments, and never to join NATO or to host friendly foreign troops on its soil.
Plus, Russia is to be readmitted to the G8, effectively to be welcomed back into the ranks of “respectable” nations, from which it was expelled after its earlier aggression against Ukraine in 2014, despite its nightly terror attacks on Ukraine’s cities.
The reptiles quickly slipped in a snap of Zelensky being mugged, Volodymyr Zelensky was presented the plan by US Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll in Kyiv. Picture: AFP
It might be thought that the pond might be in tune with the onion muncher, what with the ability of even cuckoo clocks to get the time right a couple of times a day, and what with the pond's complete disdain for Vlad the sociopath, featuring a yearning that someday he too might fall out a window, preferably one no less than ten floors up ...
But the pond has a bone to pick with the onion muncher, and will shortly pick that bone ...
It’s crystal clear that none of Vladimir Putin’s promises are worth the paper they’re written on. Let’s not forget that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the security assurances given to Ukraine in return for sacrificing its share of the old Soviet nuclear arsenal, were almost identical to the security “guarantees” envisaged under the Trump deal.
The only security guarantee that would really count to deter further Russian aggression against its neighbour is the presence in Ukraine of allied troops – and that’s the key measure the Trump deal disallows.
What kept the peace in Europe since the end of World War II was not the provisions of treaties or the words of leaders but the presence on the Soviet bloc’s borders of powerful American, British and French forces that made any Russian thrust into its neighbours virtual suicide.
The Russian leadership knew that it couldn’t swallow weaker neighbours one by one but would have to fight from the start a strong democratic alliance. Likewise, it’s only the presence of American troops on the Korean Peninsula, with back-up forces in Japan, that has guaranteed the peace there. The countries on Russia’s western borders have not subsequently sought to join NATO because of some hostile intent but because they knew from bitter experience that it was only the certainty of mutual self-help that would keep them safe.
There’s more than a whiff of Munich about the planned sellout of Ukraine. Czechoslovakia, remember, had a security guarantee from the French. Hitler, on the pretext of the mistreatment of the German minority there, demanded the surrender of the Sudetenland, and the effective demilitarisation of his target.
Unwilling to risk war, Britain and France forced the Czechs to accede, only to see the rest of the country gobbled up by Germany six months later, and war break out within a year. There is at least this, though, to be said for Munich: Neville Chamberlain began Britain’s rearmament at breakneck speed; and Britain and France were not expecting some financial pay-off for themselves from betraying their ally.
At that point the reptiles slipped in a snap of King Donald with Vlad the sociopath, Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at Anchorage, Alaska, in August. Picture: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP
And that's when the pond snapped ... because it reminded the pond of the company that the onion muncher had been keeping ...
Yes, the onion muncher has been a lickspittle fellow traveller with a man who has done his very best to enable Vlad the sociopath's war ...
And it's not just an idle one off. The onion muncher as taken Viktor's coin, and blathered endlessly about the joys of far right Hungarian extremism ...
On and on he ranted ... Tony Abbott doubles down on praise for Hungary's far-right PM Viktor Orbán
And now here we are ... Hungary’s Orbán backs US’s Ukraine proposal in bid to derail aid to Kyiv (*archive link)
And so on and on and on, and this is what you get when you're a desperately irrelevant man, willing to lie down with authoritarians...completely tone deaf cluelessness ...
The global order that’s existed since 1945 has rested on the readiness of the United States and its allies to fight for each other should any of them be attacked.
Underlying this has been the moral conviction that freedom was worth fighting for, because the life of a slave was hardly worth living. It was best expressed by president John F. Kennedy, who said, in his inaugural address, that the United States “shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, (and) oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty”.
With America as a benign global policeman, pre-pandemic, pre-Ukraine and pre-October 7, the world was more free, more safe, more fair and more rich for more people than ever before in history.
Regrettably, that version of the Pax Americana is now over. China, in particular, has taken advantage of globalisation to make itself the near equal of the United States, economically and militarily, declaring its determination to be the global hegemon by 2049, and it has now formed an alliance of convenience with other predator nations determined to overthrow the “decadent and declining” West.
Trump’s America will still intervene to help its friends (by bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, for instance, once Israel had effectively neutralised the Iranian air defences) but it won’t take major risks unless it’s sure its own vital interests are at stake.
Perhaps that’s simply pragmatic self-interest reasserting itself against a bogus liberal internationalism, but it’s very bad news for all the allies (Australia included) who have relied on the United States to keep the world safe and free.
Speaking of self-interest, this in Crikey (sorry, paywall) ...
You can't be a bird displaying those feathers, and then try to be a bird pretending to fly with a different flock ...
The reptiles flung in an AV offering to distract the pond ... European leaders said in a joint statement on Saturday (November 22) that a 28-point U.S. plan for peace in Ukraine, which has been seeking to repel Russian forces since 2022, was a basis that "requires additional work". Group of Seven nations and European leaders met on the sidelines of a G20 Summit in Johannesburg to discuss the U.S. peace plan for the war in Ukraine.
Gormless Europeans, and the onion muncher opening his final gobbet with "King Donald was right"? It's all too much for a Schopenhauerian to bear ...
Back in March, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said Britain and France would lead a stabilisation force in Ukraine to keep the peace once there was a ceasefire. The only ceasefire Ukraine could honourably accept is one that gave it lasting security, and the only ceasefire Putin would respect is one guaranteed by allied troops.
That’s why Britain and France – if they’re still countries to be taken seriously – should back Ukraine in refusing Trump’s deal and make it clear that Ukraine should not be expected to surrender any more of its territory unless its armed forces are pulling back to a line that’s also held by allied troops.
Because Australia’s role has always been to help our allies to build a more just world, and because it’s clearly in our national interest that the world turn more on right and less on might, Anthony Albanese should consider offering to Britain Australia’s military help.
Perhaps that might remind a transactional President that a nation’s freedom should always take priority over a self-aggrandising “deal” or baubles such as the Nobel Peace prize.
Tony Abbott was prime minister from 2013 to 2015.
Talk about an invitation to indulge in pessimism with Schopenhauer ...
And speaking of why the the pond would rather be listening to the ABC early in the morning...Major Mitchell was on the prowl, having left the golf links with club in hand ...
The header: ABC collusion: Media Watch falls prey to groupthink, Media Watch’s lame defence of Sarah Ferguson’s discredited investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia should prompt ABC chair Kim Williams to take action.
The caption for snap of the man who has finally achieved some credibility by quickly rising up to the top of the reptile hit list: ABC's Media Watch presenter Linton Besser
Now the Major, with that risible form of projection in the header, "falls prey to groupthink", immediately triggered a pond contractual requirement.
Whenever the hive mind does a little projection and invokes "groupthink", the pond is contractually required to note David Merritt Johns in The Atlantic:
That done, the pond must also note that it's not in the business of defending Media Watch.
They can do it themselves, and Besser does it better than the meandering mendacity offered up by the Major, last week in ...As the BBC grapples with its Trump-editing scandal, the spotlight has also swung onto the ABC. But is the criticism fair?
Of course the criticism's not fair, but then Major has given up invaluable golfing time to swing his club at the ABC yet again, and that makes him very cranky and grumpy ...
For some ABC journalists, damaging Trump – or indeed undermining any position that does not fit the ABC world view on renewable energy, the war in Gaza or trans rights – is more important than accurate reporting.
This mirrors the attitude at the BBC where inaccurate reporting of Trump forced the resignations of director-general Tim Davie and news boss Deborah Turness on November 9.
Media Watch host Linton Besser even admitted at the end of last Monday’s program – which scrutinised the BBC’s biased editing of a speech by Trump on January 6, 2021 – that some ABC coverage of trans issues, for instance, needed a rethink. That’s the only positive from Besser’s lame defence of the edit of the same Trump speech by a Four Corners episode, Downfall, fronted by Sarah Ferguson on February 1, 2021.
Now the host of 7.30, Ferguson dealt with the BBC issue on November 11. She covered the BBC’s biggest ever crisis by interviewing Alan Rusbridger, who unsurprisingly attacked the Beeb’s critics. Rusbridger, a staunch left winger, edited The Guardian from 1995 to 2015.
Ferguson’s next item that night dealt with the news that the International Olympic Committee is considering banning trans women from women’s Olympic events. Journalist Adam Harvey did not interview a single supporter of the likely ban, which he linked to Trump at the end of his piece.
Nor did the story include a single female voice. Yet the push to keep elite women’s sport exclusive to women has been the biggest issue in world sport for almost a decade.
A leaked internal BBC report published by The Daily Telegraph in the UK found similar problems at the BBC with its reporting of trans issues, as well as matters involving Trump and Gaza.
Admirable really, that the Major could quote the UK Terror with a straight face, as the reptiles flung in a distracting snap, Former BBC director general Tim Davie. Picture: Getty Images
Is the Major sublimely unaware that the UK Terror is even worse than the Oz Daily Terror?
The Major is also apparently clueless at the way the lizard Oz has been doing the very best in the past week to give the lettuce a break, but never mind that, it's litany time, with simpleton Sharri (full disrespect), Covid conspiracies and a host of other grievances:
Nor have ABC viewers been told Covid-19 almost certainly did start in a laboratory in Wuhan. This column in 2023 criticised Media Watch for its multiple defamations of Sky News Australia host Sharri Markson, who got the issue right in her book What Really Happened in Wuhan.
The catalyst for Media Watch’s latest attack on this newspaper and Sky News was journalist Chris Kenny’s report that Ferguson’s Downfall program had also edited Trump’s speech to make it seem like the President was directly urging his supporters to violence.
In fact Trump had urged them “to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women” and “to peacefully and patriotically make your voice heard”.
Kenny’s criticism was unarguably correct, even though the Ferguson edit was not as shocking as the BBC’s. ABC chair Kim Williams should admonish managing director Hugh Marks and news boss Justin Stevens for their silly defence of the program and instruct ABC ombudsman Fiona Cameron to accept Kenny’s formal complaint about the Downfall edit.
Media Watch also linked this column to its criticisms over a piece published a month earlier that bagged Ferguson’s three-part 2018 pot boiler, The Story of the Century. It was a small mention in a wider column about the approach to controversial issues taken by new CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss and her Substack publication The Free Press. Besser took issue with that column’s criticism of Ferguson’s main corroborating intelligence source, former Department of National Intelligence director James Clapper.
That October 13 column also referred generally to the latest intelligence revelations during the second Trump presidency. One concerns Barack Obama’s former CIA director John Brennan, now facing a series of criminal charges for giving false evidence about investigations into Trump.
Brennan may face further charges relating to the concealing of evidence he received from Dutch intelligence in July 2016. The Dutch had learned Russia already knew by then of a Democrat plan to accuse the Trump camp of colluding with Russia.
Besser says “neither Clapper nor Sarah Ferguson ever claimed that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin”. Yet the entire three-part Four Corners program was designed to imply to the ordinary viewer that Trump’s team not only colluded with Russia but that Trump is Putin’s puppet.
To pay attention to all the Major's spurious claims would see the pond as long and as tedious as the King Donald worshipping Major, US President Donald Trump. Picture: AP
Best keep it straightforward whenever a sighting of King Donald pops up ...
It starts with an intelligence community probe initiated by Obama into alleged Russian influence peddling before the 2016 election but morphs into a story about Trump collusion with Russia. That collusion story was driven by Clapper and Brennan through The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC. Brennan was on the payroll at NBC and MSNBC from the start of 2018.
The intelligence community’s undermining of Trump finally finished when 50 former intelligence officials signed a statement in 2020 falsely claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Were Ferguson aiming for a balanced piece, she would have admitted at the start of part 1 that Clapper had already testified to congress privately in early 2018 and admitted in several subsequent interviews that he had never seen evidence of Trump collusion.
Four Corners should also have owned up to Clapper’s role in pushing the false Christopher Steele document that was paid for by the Democratic National Committee. Steele is mentioned at some length by Ferguson.
Steele’s discredited dossier, leaked to the then Buzzfeed news site, claimed among much else that Trump had urinated on prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.
Clapper had been accused of lying to congress when denying he leaked the Steele document, which he later publicly admitted he had discussed with CNN political journalist Jake Tapper.
This is critical because Steele was used by Obama’s closest intelligence leaders as the basis for extending the Russian interference probe into the possibility of Trump camp collusion. All this was in response to the Russian hacking of rival Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails and their leak by WikiLeaks in March 2016.
When Besser claims neither Clapper nor Ferguson suggest collusion he is being too cute. The program barely discusses Russian disinformation or use of social the internet to influence potential voters. But it is chock full of innuendo about Trump, his family and his junior staffers.
The promo to part two, focusing on the investigation of junior Trump aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, specifically says: “On Monday Four Corners reveals the story of two key players central to the allegations of COLLUSION between the Trump campaign and Russia.”
One of Ferguson’s key sources in part two is Luke Harding, author of a book on Russiagate called Collusion.
The Mueller Report in 2019 cleared Page. Papadopoulos, a novice, unpaid adviser to Trump, admitted lying to the FBI and was jailed for 14 days.
Part three finishes with a spectacularly false collusion claim attributed to Clapper: “Russia is the existential threat to the United States. They are a foe of ours and I think right now the indifference to that imperils the country.”
In a voiceover, Ferguson declares: “The Kremlin’s puppet master now has America dancing to his discordant tune. He couldn’t have planned it better.” Spooky music plays while the vision morphs into a portrait of Putin.
Meanwhile, as even the onion muncher could understand, Kremlin puppet master Vlad the sociopath now has America, especially King Donald, dancing to his discordant 28 point sell out plan.
Speaking of that devil, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Picture: AP
That provides a chance for another 'toon, what with Vlad the sociopath not helping the planet's emissions, by way of words or war ...
And so to end with the Major valiantly trying to defend King Donald ... as if the onion muncher hadn't just scribbled ...
As the former NATO secretary-general has said, this would not be a peace but a pause: a pause for the Russian tyrant to rebuild his forces, recruit more quislings inside Ukraine, and refine his grey zone aggressions against the free countries of Europe, before finding some new pretext to complete his conquest; perhaps, to save Trump’s blushes, after the President has left office.
Not a problem for the lickspittle, strangely Ruski loving Major (is there a spare Order of Lenin medal in the house) ...as if Glenn Greenwald himself was anything other than a Putinesque lickspittle toadie twit ...
Pulitzer Prize-winning former Guardian journalist and founder of the Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, nailed the silliness of the idea Trump was a Russian puppet.
“How can you say Donald Trump is a stooge of the Kremlin when he is right now trying to remove one of Vladimir Putin’s client states in Venezuela or when he’s trying to bully Angela Merkel out of buying Russian gas, probably the thing that’s most important to the Russian economy. Or when he sold lethal arms to the Ukrainians – something Obama refused to do,” he wrote.
“Or when he bombed Putin’s client state in Syria … this whole narrative that Trump is being blackmailed by Putin is idiocy.”
The great irony is four years of Democrat-aligned efforts to destroy Trump only drove sceptical voters back to him in 2024.
All this as King Donald conspires to sell Ukraine down the river to Vlad the sociopath ...
Please, Vlad the sociopathic impaler, send the Major a ticket so he can join his chums in Moscow...
Is there any hope at all, any way of ending this Schopenhauerian pessimism?
Nope, come on down immortal Rowe to make it a truly dark Monday dive ...
Catering: "...the quarterly reminders that arrive in their letterboxes".
ReplyDeleteWell they do in mine because I'm old fashioned, but how many people have their electricity bills delivered via AusPost nowadays ? Or any bills at all ?
There’s also an option here in the ACT (and possibly elsewhere) where utilities users can have a set amount, based on past usage, deducted from their account each quarter and adjusted as necessary. Such modern wonders, along with the entire concept of online payments, appear beyond the comprehension of the Caterist - hardly surprising in someone who seeks guidance from the 80 years- past achievements of a bloke dead since 1978.
DeleteThere’s an apocryphal anecdote about a writer on a serial whose predecessor’s chapter ended with hero in an unescapable trap, facing certain doom. Unable to come with a logical way out, the author simply types “With one mighty leap, our hero was free!”
ReplyDeleteThat old tale sprang to mind when reading today’s gibberish from the Caterist. All the Coalition, and Susssan in particular, have to do to beat the government is to come up with a credible alternative energy policy guaranteed to deliver lower prices and successfully sell it to the public - it’s so easy!
At times though the Caterist’s usual mindless optimism seems dampened by reading Yeats.>>Complexity has grown, expertise concentrated, decision-making has been centralised, leaders have entrenched themselves, and members have grown passive. Factional loyalties have hardened, minor disagreements have swollen into doctrinal battles, and the group has become consumed>>. It’s all a bit reminiscent of
>>Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.>>
Fortunately though, all is well now; all it needed was the magnificent negotiating skills of Dangerous Dan Tehan in caving in entirely to the Nationals!
Despite the Caterist’s sunny (oops) optimism, he deserves a coal-black mark for using that execrable American term “the Beltway”. Canberra doesn't have a Beltway, Caterist; couldn’t you at least have said “the Parliamentary Triangle” or Scotty’s “the Canberra Bubble”?
Also - it’s no use being rude about English batsmen, Nick; we know where you’re from.