In which the pond opens with the bromancer, does a dismal dismissive survey of sundry reptile jihads, and ends with a bout of ancient Troy celebrating the head prefect ...

 

The keen desire of the reptiles for Australia to be aligned with a demented, narcissistic king took centre stage today in the lizard Oz ...

Amazing really that there was absolutely no room at the reptile inn for a little bit of Xmas joy ... Tamworth's undying shame, its eternal disgrace ...

Sorry, no guessing from the reptiles about how long the affair will last.

Instead Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, kept busy steaming ahead with the shame of the disunited States ...

AUSMIN
AUKUS to go ‘full steam ahead’ Washington vows
Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth have provided strong assurances about the future of AUKUS, arguing the Pentagon’s review was aimed at strengthening the security partnership so it works ‘for Australia, the US and UK’.
Joe Kelly

EXCLUSIVE
How Morrison, Rudd and Marles forced Pentagon rethink on its AUKUS review
Senior US officials and leading Australians helped steer the Pentagon’s AUKUS review away from threatening the landmark security partnership.
Joe Kelly

The pond ignored Joe's work to cut to the chase, the drum, the good oil, the right stuff, from the bromancer ...

The header: Harsh truths in Trump’s foreign policy ramble, but hardly a word on Russian aggression; The US President’s National Security Strategy is a strange mix. It’s an extremely personal distillation of his world view, which tries to make ‘America First’ a coherent doctrine.

The caption: US President Donald Trump waits for the arrival of Crown Prince and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, DC.

Remarkably in his 4 minute report card, the bromancer didn't sound entirely convinced ...

Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy is a weird mixture of the compellingly true, the somewhat reassuring and the deeply disturbing. Regarding Australia, the NSS repeated the strong call that we should spend more on defence. Australia is paired, oddly, with Taiwan.
Despite Trump being nice to Anthony Albanese recently, the US view of Australia is clear-eyed and accurate. When it comes to defence, we are bludgers, living off US security guarantees. In words so explicit even a government as impervious to reality as the Albanese government couldn’t misunderstand them, the NSS makes plain that allies, explicitly including Australia, must take primary responsibility for their own security if they want to benefit at all from the US alliance.
Overall, the document is a strange mix. Nothing like it has ever served as a US national security statement. It’s an extremely personal distillation of the Trump world view, which tries to make “America First” a coherent doctrine. As such, there’s a lot of MAGA rhetoric and political critique.
This is not to condemn it altogether. Much that it says is true, some parts sensible enough, some parts even reassuring. But, like the MAGA movement, like Trump himself, it’s self-contradictory.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap of the King and Kegsbreath ... Trump alongside Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth holds a cabinet meeting at the White House.

The bromancer did his best to like the result:

It provides what is really its overall intellectual view of American foreign policy: “President Trump single-handedly reversed more than three decades of mistaken American assumptions about China: namely, that by opening our markets to China, encouraging American business to invest in China, and outsourcing our manufacturing to China, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called rules-based international order. This did not happen. China got rich and powerful, and used its wealth and power to considerable advantage. American elites – over four successive administrations of both political parties – were either willing enablers of China’s strategy or in denial.”
That’s a reasonable interpretation of history, and also goes to Trump’s core view of America, politics and the world. The elites and their policies are hopeless. They stabbed America in the back in pursuit of ideology and vanity. Ruthless Trumpian pragmatism, transactionalism and national selfishness is the only chance to recover America’s position. But the passage above is almost the only passage in the entire document in which China is explicitly criticised. This is even more true for Russia, which is not criticised at all.
The document is in a sense delicious, as rich in quotable epithets – Europe risks “civilisational erasure”, and lapidary formulations such as: “The era in which the United States, like Atlas, upheld global order has ended” – as the best PG Wodehouse short stories.
I therefore recommend people read the whole thing. It’s only 30 sparse pages. But for analytical purposes you’ve got to try to see it as a whole.
The document has two quite startling qualities. It makes no criticism of Russia and says only that it wants to rebuild strategic stability with Moscow. Let’s be clear what this means. Russia, without provocation, justification or cause of any kind, brutally invaded the independent, sovereign nation of Ukraine in order to increase Russian territory and population, and re-establish as much as possible the giant territorial footprint of the old Soviet Union. Russia now poses a direct military threat to the smaller Baltic nations. It’s reasonable for Trump to try to bring the war to an end through negotiations and indeed to aim for a stable relationship with Moscow.

Delicious, Wodehouse, and the stabbing of Ukraine in the back?

It's all a jolly joke, a complete lark, amongst chums?

Well you must take your pleasures where you find them if you're a bromancer; not so happy if you happen to be the head of an invaded and betrayed state ... President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky looks on before his meeting with the President of Cyprus in Kyiv on December 4, 2025.

Then the saucy doubts and fears began to bubble to the surface...

But the idea that the NSS can’t even mention Russia’s aggression because this might disturb negotiations tells you that negotiations are so fragile as to be nearly worthless, or that Washington plans to make massive concessions to Moscow and conceding basic truths is part of that.
At the same time, the NSS is overcritical and dismissive of America’s European NATO allies. No Australian should take comfort from this on the basis that the US will abandon Ukraine and European security generally in order to focus on Asia. Alas, weakness begets weakness. The US is providing virtually no material support to Ukraine. It sells weapons to the Europeans, who provide them to Ukraine.
The NSS reads as though the US is the independent umpire between two squabbling football teams – Russia and Europe – and is completely neutral. It says that after peace is declared Washington can help rebuild Ukraine and assist its viability as a state. But that’s the only statement that could remotely be seen as pro-Ukraine. Ukrainian freedom, European democracy, a barrier to Russian militaristic expansion – none of these figures as an objective of the NSS.
No one could accuse this column of being a starry-eyed admirer of the European Union or establishment European politics. But the fact remains that the leading powers of Europe remain, after Japan, America’s most powerful and consequential allies. It’s true that the European NATO allies have been partial free riders on America, spending far less of their respective GDPs on defence than the US did. But lately they have massively increased their defence effort.

And to be fair, Europe's finest, devotees of the ugly game, did contrive to reward the King ...

At this point, the reptiles introduced a snap of a warmonger, Vladimir Putin attends his ceremonial reception at India's presidential palace, Rashtrapati Bhavan, in New Delhi on December 5, 2025.

Weird times, with the bromancer discovering the King and his minions might be dangerous and dumb ...

However, Europe remains a central part of the global economy and power structure. The EU, Britain and Norway together are a bigger economy than the US. Europe is underperforming woefully economically (like Australia) but has the power to recover. Even underperforming, it’s still wealthy and powerful, and increasingly capable militarily. In the long economic and political arm wrestle with China it’s a key swing bloc. It’s as if the NSS thinks America will still be able to mobilise Europe politically no matter how it treats it in the security sphere.
That’s extremely dangerous. And dumb.
There’s another shift that Australian commentators have not got hold of. This is not an Asia-first document, though it says good things about military deterrence. Rather, it’s a Latin America-first document, saying the US will reduce effort in Europe and the Middle East, not to focus on Asia but to focus on Latin America.
This is combined with a weird passage saying all great powers have their spheres of influence. Taken to its logical conclusion, this morally equates the US with Russia and China. Yet the US has not invaded Cuba as Russia has invaded Ukraine.
The NSS is internally inconsistent in countless ways. For example, it talks of transforming allies into an economic bloc, but how is this consistent with punitive and capricious tariffs, especially on nations such as India?
It talks of US military dominance but the US military budget is barely keeping pace with inflation and could drop below 3 per cent of GDP.
America remains indispensable, especially to Australia. But this challenging, confusing document points up the utter folly of our characteristic Micawber-like view that “something will turn up” to make things better.

Meanwhile, the King goes on his merry ranting way, with a pardon here and a pardon there ...

Deeply, deeply weird ... but hey, who doesn't love a crook or a drug runner?

Finding a bonus to accompany the bromancer was difficult. 

With Tamworth's shame apparently banned, rather than focus on what Anika Wells' was trying to do to the intertubes, the reptiles carried on with the usual about her expenses indulgence ...

EXCLUSIVE
Wells best on ground for largesse as Farrell joins saga
Anika Wells bills taxpayers $9000 for husband’s flights to three AFL grand finals as Don Farrell joins entitlements saga
It has been revealed Don Farrell logged more than 200 publicly funded family reunion flights, including a sunset dinner at Uluru, after earlier revelations Anika Wells billed taxpayers to take her husband to three AFL grand finals.
by Jack Quail and Noah Yim

Pox on pollies riding well-oiled gravy train
The Prime Minister faces mounting pressure to review parliamentary travel rules after Anika Wells’ expensive overseas trips sparked outrage among struggling Australian families.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

That's all Wells and good, but tomorrow the big ban kicks in, and the reptiles were silent about all that, what with their desire to have their enemies stymied, and so the gravy train woman suddenly becomes their ally.

There was a follow up to Jimbo's outing yesterday ...

Difficult decisions’ in Chalmers’ fiscal test
Labor should be watched like a hawk for all its claims of improving fiscal management. It has to manage debt levels, not just ­deficits.
By Matthew Cranston
Economics Correspondent

Watch him like a hawk? Doesn't he turn up to frolic in the lizard Oz pages?

Then there was another weird example of the reptiles giving space to dictator Xi's minions ...

EXCLUSIVE
Chinese envoy Xiao Qian blasts Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi over Taiwan call
Beijing’s top diplomat in Australia has cast Japan as an aggressive power after the country’s Prime Minister warned a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could trigger a Japanese military response.
By Ben Packham

That was followed by the source of the EXCLUSIVE ...

A warning on the rise of Japanese aggression
Once Japanese militarism revives, it would seek ruthless revenge, and the peoples of the Asia-Pacific would be the first to suffer.
By Xiao Qian

Are the reptiles trying to turn the lizard oz into the People's Daily?

Then there was the war on TG folk ...

In sport, trans guidelines deny women a chance
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s trans sports guidelines are an activist document, designed by and for the transgender lobby.
By Stassja Frei
Contributor

Stasia's claim to fame? Apparently she's the force behind a podcast with a meaningless title ...

Stassja Frei is the writer and producer of the documentary podcast series Desexing Society.

it sounded like Riley Gaines bleating about coming fifth.

The pond wouldn't have bothered with the podcast, and saw no reason to bother with the scribbles.

There was also an EXCLUSIVE in this jihad ...

EXCLUSIVE
‘Astonishing’: Judge slams hospital puberty blocker case
Royal Children’s Hospital faces claims it breached legal duties in child gender treatment case
A former Family Court judge has delivered a scathing assessment of the Victorian government’s dismissal of claims the Royal Children’s Hospital breached its legal obligations in a landmark gender case.
By Rachel Baxendale

And the lizard Oz editorialist joined in ...

ABC takes up transgender cause
The national broadcaster wastes taxpayer funds meeting ACON’s ridiculous workplace demands while failing to report growing medical challenges to gender-affirming care for children.
Editorial

Nah, so much energy expended to demonise and hurt a small minority, no reason for the pond to help the reptiles in their peculiar obsession.

That other ongoing jihad attracted yet more attention ...

VALIDITY DILEMMA
Reynolds’ bankruptcy push against Higgins could rewrite legal precedent
A Federal Court judge weighs whether bankruptcy papers can be served through lawyers rather than directly, as former senator Reynolds pursues almost $2m from Higgins.
By Paul Garvey

And there was another chance for the reptiles to get upset at uppity, difficult, pesky blacks ...

FEDERAL COURT
Secret bee business: judge rules Indigenous law trumps open justice in Blayney mine case
Federal Court judge has imposed extraordinary suppression orders burying key evidence from Tanya Plibersek’s $1bn gold mine decision for up to 30 years.
By James Dowling

Secret bee business?

Fully sick, and after doing that survey the pond did feel nausea, but at least correspondents could pick and chose, and fill their chunder bucket as they liked.

Dammit, and after all that, all that was left was ancient Troy examining the Fraser years, as if the pond hadn't had enough of the head prefect way back when ...

Yes, the slack pond had decided on one of its notorious emulations of Billy Burroughs' cut and paste method, partly as a way to beat the bots currently swarming all over the site, and partly because this was just another ancient Troy rehashing of ancient history ...

The next gobbet was blessed with a portrait of the head prefect ...

It's good the head prefect has ancient Troy in his corner, because all the pond can remember of those days is a sense of torpor ... with the head prefect not half as interesting as jolly John, who had at least seen a little military action as a way of roughing up his face ...

The last gobbet started off with Billy, a man famous for his going, as recorded in his wiki ...

On 26 June 1987, just hours after attending John Howard's election campaign launch, Snedden suffered a fatal heart attack at the Travelodge motel in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, while having sex with an ex-girlfriend of his son Drew, identified only as "Wendy". Melbourne newspaper The Truth headlined its report "Snedden died on the job", while the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Snedden was wearing a condom and that "it was loaded".

You won't get any of that in the final gobbet - why does ancient Troy always cut out the juicy bits? -  just talk of how his Gough guilt saw the squatter from Nareen turn more left than the lefties ...

Ah, at the very end, look there, it turned out that all this had just been a promo for another ancient Troy outing ...

Once again the reptiles had turned the pond into an all day sucker.

The pond might have been better off doing a deep dive into other Wells with the immortal Rowe ...

Now there's some dinkum ancient history in the details ...