In which the pond goes back to the future with Our Henry ...

 

How weak and pathetic Susssan now looks, how Amazonian strong is the lettuce, how bizarre that the Barners tail should be wagging the dog ...as this day the reptiles did some mopping up ...

The brown out set the new pace...

Liberals settle on policy
Ley lays battlelines for climate war with net zero axing
Sussan Ley’s net zero gamble to keep leadership
Sussan Ley has declared war with Labor over electricity prices by following the Nationals in dumping net zero, but Liberal MPs warn her leadership would face ongoing scrutiny.
By Greg Brown

Put it another way ...

Geoff chambered yet another round to help ...

ANALYSIS by Geoff Chambers
Ley’s last stand: plan to sell energy policy and survive
Sussan Ley chooses power bills over net zero – but will voters and Liberal conservatives believe her?
Sussan Ley and Dan Tehan released slogans rather than detailed policies on Thursday. And we’ve heard them all before under Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison.
Sussan Ley had no alternative but to jump on the anti-net-zero train. If she hadn’t, her leadership was over.
By Geoff Chambers

Put it another way ...

The pond woke to talk on the Beeb of climate migration and the new forms of climate nationalism impeding action, but it was like dwelling in a foreign land.

Over on the extreme far right Simon blathered into the hive mind void...

It’s time … for the Liberals to catch up with voters
The prominence of climate change is almost entirely out of the Liberals’ control. The segment of the electorate receptive to less ambition on climate is small and shrinking.
By Simon Jackman

Did the prof have the first clue that the reptiles were going to saddle his story with a truly pathetic image? 

An eye-shattering effort imported from iStock that immediately sent the pond blind?

That's the sort of styling the reptiles are using to appeal to vulgar youff?

The long absent lord help their business plan.

Besides, you're way too late to help prof ...

The Barners tail has wagged the dog, and the hive mind is off on the Canavan caravan, with the pasty Hastie in a biblical fundamentalist fever dream ...and consider that image as payback for your cruel use of the Gough slogan ...

Why you might have even woken the Kraken Our Henry from his slumbers ...

Meanwhile, Dame Slap continued on her mission to make the lizard Oz an unreadable gathering of navel gazers ...

EXCLUSIVE
Reynolds fires back at ‘mean girls’
What do the ‘mean girls’ have to hide, asks Reynolds, as Wong and Gallagher erased from claim
A mysterious demand by Labor heavyweights Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher to be scrubbed from Linda Reynolds’ legal action has reignited tensions over the Brittany Higgins case.
By Janet Albrechtsen and Stephen Rice

That's what passes as an EXCLUSIVE these hive mind days? A story no one gives a toss about?

For this the reptiles think punters should get out of bed, fork over their shekels and try to discover what's happening in the real world?

So over it, so boring, and not a hint of a murmur about King Donald and the Epstein files to ruin Hedders revisiting the Jayant Patel case at the top of the page ...

True crime is the new reptile way forward? 

And never mind that everybody is on the true crime bandwagon and there are zillions of variants flooding the ether?

The pond couldn't believe it, and couldn't even be bothered offering archive links.

Anyone who wants to retreat into yesteryear with the reptiles surely knows by now how to take a Url and head off to the archive ..

Meanwhile, in a world far away, there's true crime going on all the time ...

Just not the sort of true crime the reptiles dare to acknowledge ...

Even worse, it's been some 17 days since the hive mind has heard from the bromancer,  and the pond's anxiety is increasing at a pell mell pace ...

And yet this day Our Henry, the hole in bucket repairer, brought no solace.

He had joined all the other reptiles in banging on about Gough in a billy goat gruff way ...

What alternative did the pond have?

Others in the extreme far right pack were still at it...

PM’s toddler tantrum over Whitlam Dismissal
Albanese rewrites history in fiery attack over Whitlam Dismissal
Anthony Albanese’s appraisal of the Whitlam Dismissal was that of a toddler hurling his teddy from the political cot.
By The Mocker

Between attempting to mock a mocker beyond mockery and celebrating Our Henry the pond simply had no choice ...

Between paying attention to a cowardly anonymous scribbler - how the reptiles fear, loathe and despise cowardly anonymous bloggers and would never imitate them - and paying attention to the ancient Greek classicist left the pond in Hobson's choice land ...

The header: Whitlam cult still revelling in leader’s call to rage, Gough Whitlam’s tragedy was that he turned statesmanship into a destructive drama of self-vindication.

The caption: Then president of the ACTU Bob Hawke speaks at a lunchtime rally outside Parliament House showing support for Gough Whitlam. Whitlam is also on stage to the right, partially covered by a loudspeaker. Picture: National Archives of Australia

Our Henry seemed entirely unaware that it was only the reptiles in the lizard Oz that had made a big thing of the Whitlam dismissal, and that mainly to help ancient Troy flog his new tome.

What could the pond do?

It had banned all reptile attempts to join in the book flogging, and yet here was the pond's Friday favourite determined to keep it alive.

The pond simply had to give Our Henry an exemption, a special pass, but only on condition that he stuff his treatise full of the usual arcane references and show off his inclination to ponderous, portentous pretentiousness ...

Our Henry played the game in the right spirit.

The pond could retrieve from the five minutes of wasted living times some referential gems of a kind only Our Henry could deliver...

Who else could or would begin with Stendhal?

In The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal’s hapless hero, Fabrizio del Dongo, blunders into the Battle of Waterloo and rather enjoys himself – blissfully unaware he’s witnessing one of history’s pivotal moments.
Judging by the torrent of commentary about “the Dismissal”, the keepers of Australia’s most enduring political grievance did just the opposite: having lived, directly or vicariously, through those tumultuous days, they convinced themselves Gough Whitlam’s sacking marked a decisive crisis in Australian democracy.

Excellent start, now for a little Frank:

That politics as usual promptly re-established itself clearly proved insufficient to extinguish the passions of what Frank Moorhouse memorably called the “days of wine and rage”. Nor was it ever likely to, given the smouldering rhetoric that defined the left’s reaction at the time. To describe the language as apocalyptic would be an understatement: amid those outpourings of fury, the end of life on Earth would have been dismissed as a mere sideshow.

Oh he's on fire. 

Now for Manning Clark ...

Manning Clark’s pronouncements strikingly captured the left’s descent into delirium. The Whitlam government, he declared, had “offered Australia the final chance to show the world that it was capable of building a society free from the evils or errors in both capitalist and communist societies”.

The reptiles helped with this meander through the past with a snap of the Anglican turned tyke, Historian Manning Clark. He told an incandescent crowd at Sydney Town Hall the time had come to invoke Henry Lawson’s prophecy that ‘blood will stain the wattle’. Picture: HWT’s Moments in Time.

That mention of Henry Lawson would surely return, but it was time now for a Biblical turn of phrase ...

But just as the Pharisees and Sadducees struck down Christ and his vision, so this “prophet nurtured in a harsh, dry land” – who, for the first and probably last time, had offered “the men and women with creative gifts a place of honour in Australian society” – was, after only “three halcyon, golden years”, felled by “the forces of reaction”.

Did Our Henry next try to stay up to date, or at least up to 2012 by invoking Ridley Scott's Prometheus?

Probably not, probably he was referencing the original Greek ...

And in what was surely the cruellest blow, “the ockers” who handed the Coalition a sweeping electoral victory “had destroyed the man striving like Prometheus to teach Australians that they could steal fire from heaven – that they were capable of better things”.

Ah, of course, the defier of the Olympian gods, the taker of fire to give humanity technology, knowledge and civilisation ...

By golly Our Henry provides room for all sorts of distractions ... not least the infallible Pope referencing the Simpsons so the pond could almost feel down with it ...

Yet, Clark grimly foretold, those narrow-minded fools, wedded to “petty-bourgeois values which the progressive part of the world is shedding and destroying”, would regret their mistake.
As the enlightened turned “from parliamentary to direct action”, the dismissal and the subsequent election would be remembered as “the days when the wind was sown which led to the whirlwind”. The time had come, Clark told an incandescent crowd at Sydney Town Hall, to invoke Henry Lawson’s prophecy that “blood will stain the wattle”.

Yes, there's Our Henry invoking that Henry...

Surely we can spare a moment for a few verses from Freedom on the Wallaby ... after all, if the infallible Pope can do the Simpsons (why did Sydney lose its monorail? What this town needs is a monorail...)

...Our fathers toiled for bitter bread
While loafers thrived beside ’em,
But food to eat and clothes to wear,
Their native land denied ’em.
An’ so they left their native land
In spite of their devotion,
An’ so they came, or if they stole,
Were sent across the ocean.

Then Freedom couldn’t stand the glare
O’ Royalty’s regalia,
She left the loafers where they were,
An’ came out to Australia.
But now across the mighty main
The chains have come ter bind her –
She little thought to see again
The wrongs she left behind her.

Our parents toil’d to make a home –
Hard grubbin ’twas an’ clearin’ –
They wasn’t crowded much with lords
When they was pioneering.
But now that we have made the land
A garden full of promise,
Old Greed must crook ‘is dirty hand
And come ter take it from us.

So we must fly a rebel flag,

As others did before us,
And we must sing a rebel song
And join in rebel chorus.
We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting
O’ those that they would throttle;
They needn’t say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle!

Then the reptiles lowered the tone by introducing petulant Peta, being petulant in her usual way ...Sky News host Peta Credlin highlights how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese delivered a shocking speech at Parliament House which was the “stuff of conspiracy theories”. Ms Credlin said Mr Albanese believes Australians were “in on it” over the Whitlam dismissal. “The prime minister delivered a speech last night … that has today been reported as quite an extraordinary attack, a divisive intervention on the dismissal and a scorching speech.”

Next came Our Henry's acknowledgement that Gough was a fine classicist, an excuse for our Henry to show that he himself was a stupendous classicist, with a Dictionary of Classical Greek Quotations always handy by his keyboard ...

The rants had, of course, been stoked by Whitlam himself. With characteristic theatricality, he had, immediately after being dismissed, called on the protesters gathered outside Parliament House to “maintain your rage and enthusiasm” – but it was the rage alone that blazed in the months and years ahead, with Whitlam its most enduring vessel.
A fine classicist, he knew that the Greeks had warned statesmen who let passion and the hunger for glory overrun the clear-sighted grasp of necessity and limitation that they were courting disaster. For them, the highest political virtue was arete: excellence not of display but of measure, the harmony of reason and purpose within the bounds of circumstance. It was the antithesis of hubris – the refusal to recognise limits, the belief that will and eloquence could bend necessity itself.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of Gough, the excuse for Our Henry's ranting, Then federal opposition leader Gough Whitlam in 1977. Picture: NCA

Once Our Henry gets hold of a word, he's like a dog with an arete bone, gnawing away, extracting every last ounce of le jus prétentieux...

Yet that, in the end, was Whitlam’s tragedy: he mistook theatrical assertion for arete and, in doing so, turned statesmanship into a destructive drama of self-vindication.
There was, in that, more than an element of narcissism: a self-absorption so complete that admiration became the measure of worth and reflection gave way to performance. The rage therefore came naturally, for when life’s constraints threaten a grandiose self with the collapse of its imagined omnipotence, the response is not comprehension but boundless aggression – a pattern Freud recognised long ago.

Ah, Freud. Our Henry reveals yet again his extraordinary chameleon powers and turns shrink to analyse the past (though professional shrinks are warned against conducting this sort of analysis without the patient being present).

At this point, the reptiles tried to remind Our Henry that the whole exercise had been to help ancient Troy flog his tome ... Political journalist Troy Bramston recounts the dramatic events of November 11, 1975, as Gough Whitlam was dismissed as Prime Minister.

The pond regrets that nowhere to be found is that image that so titillated a pond correspondent ...

Our Henry would have none of it. There was to be more Moorhouse and more Freud ...and even more Manning Clark ...

Yet Whitlam was hardly alone. His rise coincided with the massive entry into political life of the Baby Boomers – a generation that redefined what had once been condemned as narcissistic self-indulgence into a positive ideal of authenticity, autonomy and empowerment.
Freud’s “maturity ethic”, centred on internal discipline and the acceptance of limits, gave way to a new “psychology of power”, which viewed anger and assertion as the language of liberation. The old pathologies of fury and aggression were recast as an untrammelled right of self-expression – less a plea for understanding than a bid for mastery through the conspicuous display of indignation, the very spirit of Moorhouse’s “days of wine and rage”.
For the ancients, indignation was justified only as a response to insulted dignity; for these moderns, the perpetual theatre of indignation became an entirely legitimate way of asserting individual identity. But that spirit also prevented the mourning that might have allowed the rage to subside.
As Freud observed, the “extraordinarily painful” process of normal grieving requires relinquishing what has been lost and reconciling oneself to reality; yet that is precisely what the narcissist cannot do. At worst, Freud argued, narcissistic bile turns into venom; at best, it curdles into a melancholy that, instead of releasing an imaginary past, endlessly pines for it and endlessly relives it.
Pervasive in the literature of the day – for who could be more ensnarled in the world of phantasm and wish-fulfilment than Clark’s “men and women with creative gifts”? – the melancholia found one of its most perceptive expressions in Ross McMullin’s centenary history of the ALP, where he spoke of the “affectionate nostalgia” felt by Whitlam’s true believers for that heady period.

What a splendid additional reference, and it would allow Our Henry to show off his fluent French.. a chance to épater les bourgeois Labor in his inimitable way ...

“For the rest of their lives,” McMullin writes, “their pulses would quicken whenever they saw or heard replays of the exhilarating St Kilda Town Hall meeting in 1972, Whitlam on the Parliament House steps on Remembrance Day 1975, and, especially, Whitlam at Blacktown beginning ‘Men and women of Australia’ ”.
None of that prevented the more able and ambitious of our enragés from swiftly adopting “Think left, live right!” as their new slogan – or better, rule of life. As thong-wearing radicals matured into gong-sporting mandarins, they crystallised into a “progressive” establishment even more firmly entrenched, enriched and entitled than the conservative establishment they had so intensely despised and so effectively demolished.

« En français, s'il vous plaît... » 

La phrase « En français, s'il vous plaît... » signifie "In French, please..." et est une façon polie de demander quelque chose en français. 

The enragés! The French revolution, the radical sans-culottes, the ultra-radicaux!

All this and Stendhal, and surely Our Henry pleases the most jaded of pond correspondents with his exemplary jeremiad.

And how better, how apt, how fitting to return to Stendhal for the closer, 

And to make things worse, the “progressives” ensured that while narcissism was merely a minority phenomenon in the 1970s, subsequent generations would be drenched in its perverse combination of incessantly asserted fragility and equally unrelenting aggression.
In that sense, the Dismissal was not a constitutional crisis; it was a cultural one, pitting an Australia that prized the values that triumphed in the 1975 election against an ascendant class that loathed them – and still does. Little wonder then that from the Prime Minister’s latest broadside through to these pages, the Whitlam cult’s high priests genuflected on their Holy Day to the idols of the tribe, parading undigested obsessions and venting the rancour the messiah had told them to maintain.
But the truth is that like Stendhal’s Fabrizio del Dongo – charging into history backwards – they absolutely loved it: the tumult, the illusion of greatness, the crazed carnival. There is, nonetheless, a difference. Having decided he had nothing left to say, poor del Dongo repaired to a monastery and retreated into silence. Surely “It’s Time” for the guardians of our oldest grievance to do the same.

You see, climate science prof? All you did was enrage Our Henry.

It wasn't it's time, it's never it's time in hive mind climate science denialist land. They're too busy reviving ancient true crime stories, and blathering on about mean girls.

It's no relief to note that the doddering old fart completely missed the point, in his usual way.

Must the pond keep reminding him? It was the reptiles who completely forgot about the WWI point of Remembrance Day in order to flog ancient Troy's tome ...

That noted, hopefully this will be the very last of it ... 

The pond won't be handing out any more free passes, not even if the bromancer returned from his holydays and embarked on a denunciation of Gough ...

It's time for the reptiles to get on to something more interesting ...

Exciting times, as noted by Andrew Egger in The Bulwark ...

All through this year’s resurgence of the Epstein saga, I’ve repeated one mantra: Trump acting guilty is not necessarily proof of guilt.
Ordinarily, a person who responds to serious accusations by telling colossal, ridiculous lies, trying frantically to change the subject, demanding an end to all inquiries, and trying to obstruct all investigation into the matter is all but telling you that those accusations are true. But that’s less helpful with Trump. He does that sort of thing all the time. Lying and obstructing are as easy and routine to him as breathing. You’ve got to watch out for false positives.
But I have to admit: My resolve in this department is starting to crack. Because as astonishing revelations about Trump’s relationship with Epstein keep piling up, a few simple facts keep getting clearer. Trump has never given and still cannot give a satisfactory account of his friendship with the late sexual predator, about which he continues to tell the most brazen lies. His behavior toward the investigation, about which he has dropped all pretense of impartiality, has grown steadily more frantic. And he is now openly trying to bully individual Republican lawmakers into dropping their support for further Epstein file disclosures...

... something that frequently attracts the attention of the immortal Rowe ...

By golly he's got the likeness down pat ... not that you'd actually want to pat it, what with the dedicated p*ssy groper  (*blogger bot approved) having been up to all sorts of mischief with his chums in his wayward prevert narcissist life ...