The tax-dodging foreign-owned, foreign-controlled corporation was at it again this morning, with its minions giving poor old Susssan a hard time and boosting the lettuce's chance of a big win no later than the new year ...
The bouffant one was given bigly space to mouth off, and while the archive missed his AV presentation of Alex losing the plot, there was a general plotlessness in the air ...
WATCH | Badly written questions, pointless points of order and a lack of understanding of the parliamentary standing orders weaken Sussan Ley and make the Coalition look leaderless.
By Dennis Shanahan
National Editor
Recent Liberal leaders and masters of question time John Howard, Tony Abbott and Peter Costello could all provide leadership and impact in parliament that was reflected in success and boosted morale in their ranks. The position of Ley and Hawke is that if one falls so will the other and perhaps that is adding to the sense of desperation at 2pm in parliament.
Ancient Troy was still promoting his tome ...
Kerr failed by not warning Whitlam: Fraser
In never-before-revealed papers, Malcolm Fraser came to the view that John Kerr was wrong to dismiss Gough Whitlam without warning and should have consulted him ‘more freely’ during 1975.
By Troy Bramston
That might appeal to the rag's aged demographic, but more news of the currish Kerr is as dulling as an early morning shot of rum.
Ben managed to pack in a standard bit of alarmism ...
Defence cuts ‘leave nation exposed’
Defence chiefs warn Australia’s military readiness is at risk as budget constraints force cuts to F-35 fighter jet maintenance program.
By Ben Packham
A quailing brown out managed yet another EXCLUSIVE...
Miners in appeal for a deal on environmental approvals
Mining giants are pressuring the Coalition to strike a deal with Labor on environmental approvals before Christmas, warning against any alliance with the Greens.
By Greg Brown and Jack Quail
Over on the extreme far right, the usual suspects trotted out the usual denialism ...
Petulant Peta was in full bitch mode ...
If Labor can dump the first female prime minister, then the Liberals can surely dump anyone driving them off a cliff, wearing high heels or not.
By Peta Credlin
Columnist
One line was all the pond could summon up the strength to offer ...
You’re either ready to stand up to the global climate alarmists or you’re not.
Poor Susssan, but then the pond has backed the lettuce, so the cavorting of petulant Peta is just a morning spray to keep the lettuce feeling fresh for the fight.
All that did was remind the pond of John Hanscombe in The Echnida this morning proposing Divorce is tough but a bad marriage is worse ...
Do it now. There's no future in this relationship. Everyone sees that except you, who cling to the vain hope that things will improve. That this is just a rough patch. That the good old days will return.
They won't.
It's not about whether the Liberals will drop their commitment to net zero. Or whether Sussan Ley can hold on to her leadership after a string of self-inflicted injuries. Or whether the tail is wagging the dog.
It's about whether reasonable people see a future partnered with neanderthals. Not just in the Nationals but in their own ranks as well.
Bit harsh, you say?
Then perhaps you didn't see Barnaby, beet red and blustery, fronting the cameras to claim credit for the chaos, frothing himself for setting the agenda from the far back paddock. This was the bloke who signed up to net zero in the first place in an opaque deal with Scott Morrison, triumphant about making the Coalition more unelectable than it already was.
Or you missed slippery Ted O'Brien withdrawing his support for the Paris Agreement and net zero. Hardly helped his leader who was backed in with support from moderates who want the party to stick to its climate commitments.
Or maybe you missed the gang of Coalition silverbacks - Barnaby among them - trying to link reforms to paid parental leave, that would give grieving parents time off after a stillbirth, to late-term abortion. That stunt appalled a lot of people, none more so than the women in the Coalition. Labor didn't have to voice outrage. The Liberal women did it instead... (sorry, newsletter, no link, but free to subscribe)
The fact is, if the Liberal Party isn’t National Party-lite, it’s time to prove it – if it’s not already too late.
By Simon Holmes à Court
All that did was pile more pressure on the hapless Susssan ...
Of course she'll roll over, but will that help her beat the lettuce?
Stewie did note the dread arrival of terrifying Islamic communism ...
Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York mayor is a triumph for the American left but Donald Trump will be itching for the fight with his ‘little communist mayor’.
By Cameron Stewart
Chief International Correspondent
All that did was make the pond wonder what had happened to the bromancer.
He was last heard of, according to reptile records, back on 28th October, scribbling...
Albanese is having a solid series of bilateral meetings in Southeast Asia – and that’s useful. But Australian policy is running on autopilot, with no sense of what’s ahead.
By Greg Sheridan
The pond had wanted a word with the bro, give him a little feedback after his Media Watch cameo, and is getting tired of waiting ...
So many bigly events happening stateside, and the bromancer goes MIA?
And it's left to Stewie and the WSJ to pick up the pieces?
Oh, and the immortal Rowe too ...
Funnily enough, the reptiles wanted the pond to provide some feedback this day ...
The 20th century corporation, still trying to make the business model work in the 21st century, andtheuy want the pond to tell 'em what parts are working, and where they need to improve?
The reptiles must be feeling the heat because this also popped up ...
"Trusted"?
Always the class clowns, always mucking about, anything for a laugh ...
Consider this the response.
Not good enough, reptiles, not nearly good enough.
After all that dross, after surveying all this morning's drivel, how else to explain the pond being forced to end up with the Lynch mob, discussing shotgun Dick?
The header: Five myths about Dick Cheney – the man who gave us Trump, What Cheney never understood was how far his botched occupation of Iraq and cheerleading of globalisation helped expand Donald Trump’s base. Cheney gave us MAGA.
The caption: Dick Cheney poses with some of the US Army troops stationed in southern Iraq in May, 1991.
The Lynch mob only managed a three minute obit, more than enough, and did it in dot form, so it went down more easily for the hive mind ...
He was basic to my experience of American politics. A friend of Wyoming, I am saddened by his death. But, like any significant leader, he has been subject to mythmaking. Here are my five.
● Myth No.1: He was Bush’s brain.
Oliver Stone’s 2008 movie W. popularised this idea. The 2018 movie Vice, starring Christian Bale in the titular role, cemented the myth that Cheney was Bush’s brain. The president from Texas was a dim frat boy, a nepo baby with dad issues. His vice-president was a Machiavellian bureaucratic knife fighter who pulled his strings.
To help with this point, the reptiles flung in a snap, Cheney gets a tour from then-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani at ground zero of the World Trade Center ruins 18 October 2001 in New York.
In reality, Bush was a cannier operator. He came to trust his vice-president less and less. The president pointedly refused to pardon Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for obstructing a federal investigation. (It was Donald Trump who eventually offered a full pardon.)
Bush had his own brain; Cheney had no finger in it.
To be fair, George W. had a bigly brain ....
Do go on ...
● Myth No.2: Cheney was wrong about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.
But neither did Cheney escape his association with the Iraq war. He deserves some of the blame for how things went pear-shaped. He sold the idea that the discovery of weapons of mass destruction was inevitable.
This was a tactical misstep. The wider strategy, however, was sound: that after 9/11, any US president had an obligation to be sure about the WMD capacity of his nation’s enemies. Invasion was the only way to be sure.
Cheney helped construct a Bush Doctrine that first freed Iraqis from a terrible regime and, second, helped prevent a second 9/11 with worse weapons.
Ah, the myth that the Iraq war had something to be said for it.
Do go on ...
● Myth No.3: Cheney was a neo-conservative.
I have taught my students to treat sceptically the claim that the Bush administration had a neo-conservative foreign policy. Raised in the global war on terror, these young men and women often think in binary terms about its character and purpose: it was bad and it was a neo-con plot.
He has students? Why did he have to remind the pond that there were real life consequences to the University of Melbourne continuing to defame its reputation?
As if to quickly distract the pond from thoughts of tortured souls sitting in a dimly-lit lecture theatre, the reptiles offered a snap... Cheney watches as George W. Bush speaks during a press briefing.
Cheney was not a neo-conservative. He was a national conservative, a natcon, not a neo-con. Despite their political enmity, he agreed with Trump far more than he disagreed on foreign policy priorities: a big military, geopolitical supremacy, energy independence. If you want a template for how Trump might handle Venezuela, look no further than Cheney’s toppling of Panama’s Manuel Noriega in 1989 (when Cheney was secretary of defence under president George HW Bush). Cheney was Trumpier than Trump. Neither is a neo-con.
Then came a tricky moment ...
● Myth No.4: He was right about Trump.
What Cheney never understood was how far his botched occupation of Iraq and cheerleading of globalisation helped expand Trump’s base. Cheney gave us MAGA. He didn’t change; America did. The Age of Trump was forged in the fire of government failure. Cheney was a key figure in that government for four decades.
September 11, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the onset of the Great Recession – Cheney was vice-president during all of them. Each disaster, separately and collectively, remade America’s partisan allegiances.
Trump was not the aberration Cheney claimed him to be after January 6, 2021. Rather, Trump was the logical consequence of a derelict political establishment that had forgotten how to represent the battling middle class, those Americans whose lives and livelihoods were extinguished in causes Cheney championed.
That left the pond a tad puzzled.
If Shotgun Dick was the disease, then King Donald is the cure?
The Mango Mussolini is a logical consequence?
No wonder the pond failed its course in logic.
No wonder the reptiles threw a curve ball distraction, Cheney throws out the ceremonial first pitch of the home opener baseball game between the New York Mets and Washington Nationals at RFK Stadium, April 2006.
One last bit of suffering ...
● Myth No.5: Cheney stands for a conservatism that will return after Trump.
In 2022, I lived in Laramie, Wyoming, and watched the Trump-backed campaign to oust Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney’s daughter, from congress. Pro-Cheney lawn corflutes were a rare thing. His daughter’s political career ended that cold November.
As went Laramie, so went the nation. The anti-Cheney Trump controls all three branches of the federal government – a machine Dick Cheney supposedly had been a master at manipulating.
So, perhaps the final myth is to see Cheney as the great Machiavelli of American politics.
Rather, he was a key catalyst of Trump’s rise, which he died in antipathy toward, not unlike Nicolo, exiled from power in Wyoming.
Oh won't someone think of the suffering students ...
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
So went the nation, but so didn't go New York, turned terrifying Islamic Communist ...
Luckily TT was on hand this week to explain why King Donald is rampant.
Quivering jelly fish, without a spine, atrophied into sullen compliance, the same stripe as University of Melbourne academics attempting to blame King Donald on hapless Shotgun Dick, now gone pheasant hunting in the sky, perhaps hoping to find a duck willing to apologise for getting in the way of his shot, as his hapless friend once did ...
Reading an offering from the Lynch Mob is always a distressing experience. Can nothing be done to help the poor suffering Melbourne University undergraduates? Perhaps some form of crowdfunding to support an alternate Professor of American Politics? Is the Vice-Chancellor aware of the risk of the University eventually facing some sort of class action case?
ReplyDeleteToday’s attempt by the Mob to say something profound about the bloke who had “other priorities” during the Vietnam War appears a combination of pure bullshit and synonyms.
“Bush’s brain” was a term originally applied to Republican strategist Karl Rove; it was even the title of a 2003 book about his role. If the term was eventually also applied to Cheney, it didn’t require popularisation via a 2008 film; it had been speculated right from the time of Bush’s nomination that Cheney would likely be in the driving seat of any Bush2 administration, and this was obvious from its early days.
You can only be certain that a country has no Weapons of Mass Destruction by invading it? Brilliant strategy, Mob! Send that one to the Cantaloupe Caligula - he might like to use it to justify invading Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria and anywhere else that catches his fancy. And didn’t everything just turn out absolutely fine in the region in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq?
What the fuck is a “national conservative”, and just how does it differ from a neo-conservative? The Mob doesn’t manage to make much of a distinction. You say too- mar-toe, I say tuh-mate-oh…. Nice bit of condescension towards your thicko students, too.
Of course, the Lynch Mob interpretations have a n additional authenticity because, as he repeatedly reminds us he lived in Wyoming. Whacko. I think the more important issue is why the University of Melbourne felt impelled to offer a presumably prestigious position to some bloke working in an obscure US State that’s most notable for being rectangular in shape?
I will give the Lynch Mob some credit though - I haven’t previously seen the term “the Australian metro left”. Is this an attempt by the Mob to publicise some new euphemism for inner-city ‘leets?
Anony: "[Wyoming] ...an obscure US State that’s most notable for being rectangular in shape".
DeleteWell I didn't know that. And not only Wyoming, but Colorado too":
https://ontheworldmap.com/usa/state/wyoming/wyoming-location-on-the-us-map.jpg
I confess I hadn’t noticed the Bromancer’s absence; now that DP has mentioned it, it’s true that the hysteria level on the Lizard Oz homepage had dropped a little. Surely he’ll reappear shortly, if only to froth at the mouth regarding this new Sharia law-imposing Commie who has somehow occupied the Big Apple? Sure, it’s got nothing to do with defence issues, and is only vaguely relevant to foreign affairs (it’s still just a local government position, dealing with garbage collection, housing, public transport, dog licenses and the like), but when has the Bro ever bothered to stay in his own lane? I’m looking forward to a few thousand words of mounting hysteria claiming that Zohran Mamdani’s election is the end of Western Civilisation and demonstrates the need for Australia to raise its defence spending to at least 5% of GDP.
ReplyDelete