In which the lettuce loses hope, compounded by the presence of the Lynch mob and the dog botherer ...

 

Amazing really.

The reptiles have sunk so low that early this weekend, there wasn't any "news" - even hive-mind skewed "news" - at the top of the page, but rather a dog bothering opinion piece yammering on about the need to be at one with the hive mind.

Yes, the dog botherer even trumped the little to be proud of saga still giving the lettuce the shivers.

And further down the page came this, which evoked Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts ...

At least that provided a sign of just how desperate the reptiles were to try to get vulgar youff to give the rag a go ...

Oh FFS ...

In a rare move, Ree’s column appears outside The Australian’s digital paywall, a sign of the substantial potential audience for her words.

Talk about pathetic, needy desperation. 

"In a rare move"? 

Sheesh, that paywall model must really be suffering, and as for lowering the demographic of the rag to below sixty? Is that why they stuck the lying rodent, now out of power since 2007 - 2 bloody OO bloody 7 - at the top of the page?

Still, it could have been worse, they could have reverted to Ming the Merciless ...

At the end, the new Nikki Gemmell made a heartfelt plea ...

...I find myself writing about something different. About learning to live inside the tension between what might have been and a tentative curiosity for what still remains possible.
I’d like to explore that some more, here, from time to time. Will you accompany me?

Nah, sorry, sweet Charlotte, you do realise the company you're now keeping? Can't you smell the stench of the sewer as you inspect your navel and gather your fluff?

Regrettably, the chance of the pond ever going near your scribbles again is between nada and nil and nihil and zero squared.

So it was back to Sarah and the devastating news for the lettuce that its hopes for an early win had been reduced to just the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

What was remarkable was the way that the reptiles littered Sarah's piece with snaps of the creationist young earth spawn, who had shown he hadn't got the ticker, but who lingered in the air like a bad smell ...

“An individual of his abilities and principles has much to contribute on the front lines of our fight for the promise of Australia and to ensure that our best days lie ahead.
“My colleague and friend is a great asset to the Liberal cause, with formidable strengths and an unwavering commitment to serving our country.”
While momentum is building towards a leadership challenge, most Liberal MPs who spoke to The Australian said it was unlikely a spill would be triggered by Mr Taylor or his supporters at Tuesday’s partyroom meeting as the former opposition Treasury spokesman did not yet have the numbers.
Mr Hastie said he made his decision after consulting with colleagues and “respecting their honest feedback to me, it is clear that I do not have the support needed to become leader of the Liberal Party”.

See, the hastie pastie was the featured item in the AV distraction, Sky News contributor Jaimee Rogers discusses Andrew Hastie's bowing out of the leadership race for the Liberal Party. “Andrew Hastie has confirmed this afternoon that he won't be contesting the Liberal Leadership as he doesn't have the numbers,” Mr Rogers said. “The Coalition is fractured. The Nationals are no longer formally part of the arrangement. Polling is soft. “When an opposition is distracted by itself, it can't do the job voters expect it to do and that is hold the government to account … Without unity, you simply cannot function as an effective opposition.”

On and on Sarah blathered ...

“On this basis, I wish to make it clear I will not be contesting the leadership,” Mr Hastie said in a statement released a day after he and three other Liberal MPs met with Mr Taylor face-to-face in Melbourne.
The only conservative powerbroker not present was frontbencher Michaelia Cash, who was in Melbourne but has kept her distance from the leadership debate ahead of a looming preselection battle. Senator Cash did not respond to questions from The Australian over whether she was invited or made aware of the Melbourne meeting.
Mr Hastie’s announcement came as Ms Ley – who has fiercely defended her position since the disastrous Coalition split she blames entirely on Mr Littleproud – revealed the interim arrangements for her shadow cabinet.
While temporarily distributing the portfolios left empty by the Nationals who resigned as part of the split, Ms Ley warned she would announce a permanent shadow ministry before the second parliamentary sitting week, starting on February 9.
Several Nationals MPs said Ms Ley’s statement and language was clearly intended to give a “timeline” for the Coalition to reunify, with Mr Littleproud late on Friday declaring he expected the two parties to “discuss the issues in a constructive matter” next week.
The statement was released half an hour after Mr Hastie announced he would exit the leadership race, leaving Mr Taylor as the sole conservative leadership candidate, but Nationals sources said the timing was a coincidence.
It follows Mr Littleproud dramatically declaring that the ­Coalition could not come back together while Ms Ley remained leader, in an unprecedented intervention that sparked concern from Nationals while infuriating Liberals, who agreed the move had hardened support for Ms Ley.

... and once again it was the man without ticker who appeared in the AV distraction, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie has announced he will not be contesting for the Liberal Party leadership. He claims he does not have the support needed to become the leader. This bombshell leaves Liberal MP Angus Taylor as the main running contender.

The lettuce was in full melt down mode. 

Anyone the lettuce talked to carefully explained that the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way wasn't the brightest bulb in the barn or the sharpest set of shears in the shearing shed, so Susssan had a fair chance of limping on ...and nothing Sarah said could lift the lettuce's spirits ...

Despite this, most Nationals MPs believed a change in Liberal leader was necessary in order reunify the Coalition given the degree of bad blood in recent weeks, but few have even privately expressed a preference for who that might be.
One Nationals MP said a final impasse could emerge before the Coalition reunified, warning Mr Littleproud may make the reappointment of the three Nationals shadow ministers who were asked to resign after breaking cabinet solidarity a condition.
Liberal sources said Mr Taylor – who ran against Ms Ley in last year’s leadership ballot – still needed to peel off two or three MPs who had indicated their support for the current leader, while allies of Mr Hastie warned their colleagues not to expect they “automatically” transfer their votes to Mr Taylor after a bruising week of negotiations.
But moderate MPs said the fact Mr Taylor was the conservative candidate as opposed to the more controversial Mr Hastie paved the way for negotiations.
“Taylor is obviously more ­appealing than Hastie so now that we know Hastie is out of the picture discussions can happen,” the MP said.
While Mr Hastie has previously made clear his openness to taking on the leadership, Mr Taylor has refused to weigh in, citing shadow cabinet solidarity.
Mr Taylor’s supporters believe a leadership spill is increasingly likely to be forced late next week or the following week, after Mr Hastie’s departure allowed the former treasurer to canvass support more openly across the party room.
They estimate the numbers in favour of a spill currently mirror the 25 to 29 votes Mr Taylor secured against Ms Ley in last year’s leadership ballot, but argue momentum will now build around a challenge.
Some Moderate MPs still believe Ms Ley can survive a challenge, but they conceded that Mr Taylor was more likely to peel off votes from the centre than Mr Hastie.
Mr Taylor and his backers have yet to lock in the precise timing of a spill, nor have they settled when frontbench resignations – including his own – would begin to fall into place.
Ms Ley’s performance in the next sitting weeks would also have a bearing on timing, sources said.
“Does Sussan (Ley) stabilise and we get some clean air or make progress on interest rates? Or is it a disaster and the polls get worse and we don’t cut through on the interest rate problem? That’s what will decide the spill and timing around that,” one MP said.
Supporters of Ms Ley and Mr Hastie argued Mr Taylor should resign from the frontbench immediately if he is launching a challenge.
“He was caught red-handed yesterday,” one Liberal MP said.
“If Angus has any honour at all, he’ll resign,” another said.
It’s understood that Mr Taylor’s pitch as leader will be that the threat facing the party from Labor and One Nation is existential and that he will return the Liberals to a centre-right party.
The Liberal party room will meet for the first time since the Coalition split last week and the subsequent Liberal leadership speculation on Tuesday.

That's it? The lettuce will have to wait until Tuesday, and even then it's likely to be a dud, and little to be proud of will have even less to be proud of?

To be fair, Sarah - in the spirit of the reptiles' relentless recycling program - also got a column out of it, best dealt with in a couple of gobbets ...

Why did the pond bother? 

It was just more titillation, and the vague hope that the beefy boofhead would pull it off, and thereby consign the coalition to the wilderness for years ...

Good luck to the lettuce, the pond says, with the help of the immortal Rowe ...

And now a comedy item from Crikey ... (sorry, paywall)

Hopeless romance: Could you imagine a more romantic Valentine’s Day activity than this? One Nation’s newest parliamentarian Barnaby Joyce, together with One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, is hosting a New England branch dinner on February 14, promising “an evening of good food, strong company, and straight-talking politics about Australia’s future”.
The MP’s new party even wrote a little poem to go along with its Facebook invite: “Roses are red, violets are blue, this Valentine’s Day, New England has a date lined up just for you.”
Tickets are $95 per person, and if you don’t have a date, don’t worry: the post specified it’s okay to “bring your partner, bring a mate, or come solo”. —AN

They even had a poster ...

Will Tamworth's shame never end? 

Not Westies, not the once proud home to the greatest tower of ice that ever was?

It's going to be a tough weekend, with the likes of the bromancer and nattering "Ned" no shows, so the moment the pond saw that the reptiles had tried to slip the Lynch mob through on a Friday arvo - like a dump of Epstein documents - the pond knew its weekend duty.

No stone must ever be left unturned in defaming the academic reputation of the University of Melbourne, and so the pond celebrated yet again at the sight of this splash... 

Huzzah, because no matter who turned up in the weekend hive mind, room had to be found for the Lynch mob ...

The header: Two dead Americans and a fractured right: why Minneapolis could be Trump’s breaking point; The unfolding Minneapolis drama can be seen as a sign of the robustness at the heart of the US experiment.

The caption for the wisely uncredited, remarkably hideous collage, deployed in the splash and then unfurled in the full column: How Donald Trump lost conservative America.

Only the Lynch mob could perform the mental gymnastics and sleight of hand required to turn murder in the streets into a triumph of American democracy, and spend a bigly nine minutes in the performance ...

Someone must have been telling lies about Martha K’s housekeeper, for one morning she disappeared without doing anything wrong. Martha K, my mother-in-law, lives in a Texas independent living facility. A few months ago, Marcella, her housekeeper, vanished. Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were cruising.
An instinctive, mostly non-voting (Americans have the right not to), conservative all her life, Martha K now had a lived experience of Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. She didn’t like it. The federal government, under Republican control (all three branches), has rarely felt more present in her life.
The progressive potential to ­exploit this disquiet, as Trump goes into his political twilight, is enormous. Democrats are mostly failing to do this; Kamala Harris, to my mother-in-law’s bemusement, remains popular. Instead, it is elements of Trump’s base, especially among MAGA-leaning intellectuals, that are starting to query their leader’s approach.
Minnesota has been Texas on steroids. The Trump team has nursed a grievance against the blue state for its stoking of violence following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Within two years, nearly half of its capital city’s police department had quit. So much for Democrats having their back. Instead, they campaigned to defund the cops and turned a blind eye to massive welfare fraud among the state’s Somali community.
Trump still blames Xi Jinping (for Covid) and Governor Tim Walz (for post-Floyd riots) that ­ruined his election prospects.

Note the clever way that the Lynch mob makes it personal, as the reptiles slipped in a snap of one of the victims, but preferred a dumpster dive to a snap of the lesbian victim (who after all was just a woman of the wrong kind): Alex Pretti was shot by a federal officer in Minneapolis last week. Picture: Michael Pretti via AP; People gather on top of dumpster in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Picture: Stephen Maturen / Getty Images via AFP

The Lynch mob warmed to the cleansing task at hand ...

Minneapolis is hardly the centre of illegal immigration. Los Angeles County has an estimated 1.1 million illegal immigrants, New York 600,000. Minneapolis has a paltry 34,000. All are deep blue but this small midwestern city – about the size of Canberra – has form with Trump.
Trigger-happy ICE agents, deployed to Minneapolis by the President, have met iPhone-happy progressive activists and killed two of them (Renee Good and Alex Pretti).
Trump loyalists have defended ICE’s “self-defensive” actions. Jacob Frey, the city’s mayor, has told ICE agents to “get the f..k out of Minneapolis”.

Now in the best NY Times both siderist style, there are always two sides to every issue, two ways to interpret anything. 

See how the Lynch mob handles the job:

There are two ways to interpret these events. The first sees in them signs that the Trump presidency is now in decline. That all second terms loose crisis and end in failure. That any two-termer will experience the rejuvenation of his opponents and fracturing of his base. This latter phenomenon is especially important to grasp.
The second, which I will come to, sees in this Minnesota winter less evidence of a fading administration, and more a reassertion of competition, sometimes violent, but recurrent and unavoidable given America’s foundational character.
This is not a reason to be cheerful, more a reason to be realistic.
Minneapolis and cracks in the MAGA ICE
Even before Alex Pretti died, Republicans were beginning to question the wisdom of Trump’s targeting of Minneapolis. With the 37-year-old male ICU nurse now dead, fissures have widened. Some GOP politicians have gotten twitchy: ICE agents have now killed two US citizens (not illegal aliens) who were exercising their First Amendment right to assembly. Aren’t Republicans proud defenders of such rights against their federal abridgement?
How far the deceased were peaceable in the moments before they were shot remains hotly contested. For what it is worth, I believe my own eyes on this: both were victims of excessive force, by agents of the national government. America’s 250th birthday this year will feature prominently the brave rebels who targeted invading British red coats. Minneapolis has put the GOP on the wrong side of that history and its impending commemoration. Alex Pretti was shot for exercising his Second Amendment right to bear arms.
The more intriguing response on the right has come from its intellectuals. To some, Trump has imbibed a version of the identity politics he condemns in his progressive opponents. This disquiet has been forcefully directed against senior White House aide Stephen Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who have backed ICE as warriors in a culture war against “domestic terrorists”.
“Fire Kristi Noem into the Sun,” declared the conservative Jeffrey Blehar at National Review. “At a minimum, the DHS secretary should immediately become the least visible member of this administration.” “No, no, Noem,” pleaded Commentary magazine.
For sure, there are still MAGA activists who will admit no doubt. They continue to caste the crisis in the language of identity politics. The ideological transitioner, Naomi Wolf, who started left and has now moved right, was especially critical of female protesters: “The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: white women long for all out combat with ICE – who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men – because the conflict is a form of physical release for them.”

The reptiles, still ignoring the first victim, slipped in a snap of ICE Barbie, and never mind the cruel way that King Donald snubbed her in his usual North Korea style cabinet meeting, as a sign he was displeased with his minion: Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Picture: Al Drago/Getty Images/AFP

The incredibly realistic Lynch mob carried on ...

The “conservative truth-teller” Erik Erickson posted on his social media that “An AWFUL is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her. Progressive whites are turning violent. ICE agents have the right to defend themselves.” In this twist on left-wing intersectionality, an AWFUL is an Angry, White, Female, Urban, Liberal.
Elon Musk, quite used to firing things into the air, drew a long bow on Minneapolis. “Liberal women,” he wrote on X, “will divorce their husband and only let him see his children once a month, then cry about how ICE hurts families.”
Isn’t the reduction of all human phenomena to race and gender the preserve of the progressive left? Shouldn’t conservatives prioritise individual rights and liberties and relegate the salience of group identity?
The usually Trump-sympathetic blogger Richard Hanania, one of the architects of MAGA’s anti-DEI push, found all this exasperating. “So we’ve already tossed individual liberty and federalism out the window. I thought conservatives were also against attacking people on account of their race, or at least not attacking white people on those grounds.”
Yuval Levin, the most incisive conservative commentator in America today, has been clear: “Trump and his team are beginning to pay a price for their wilful blindness to both the dynamics of American public opinion and the logic of the American constitutional system.”
Lyndon B. Johnson dolefully said, “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite (on Vietnam), I’ve lost America.” I think the same about Levin, Trump and Minneapolis. The popularity of Trump’s election pledge to get the Mexican border under control, and his great strides in doing so, has been squandered in the snow and ice of this midwestern city.
This has less to do with the seemingly inevitable violence of ICE’s pursuit of illegals than it has with the adoption of a psychological approach grounded in identity rather than of law and order. The latter should be the right’s bread and butter; leave grievance and victimology to your left-wing ­opponents.
This column has long argued that Trump has little interest in building a lasting, new kind of conservatism. He doesn’t think in left-right terms. Despite the endurance of a left-right spectrum, as old as the French Revolution, to help us understand political differences, in the Age of Trump, a horseshoe might be more accurate.
Donald Trump has always tested the traditional spectrum: a rich man who speaks for a working class, right-wing on lots of cultural issues but with no real feel for conservatism, wants a restoration of American greatness without building a durable majority to do it, demands Greenland be decolonised, while toppling a left-wing dictator in Venezuela.
Where do we locate these characteristics on the left-right axis? How about his embrace of identity politics? Here, we need a horseshoe. Trump and too many of his lieutenants have become identitarians. In their urgency to beat opponents, they have adopted their tactics and psychology. This portends an intense period of intra-GOP conflict as Trump’s presidential clock ticks down.
Conflict is basic to American political development

Conflict?

That's an incredibly polite way to refer to civil war and murder in the streets and racism, but never mind, as the reptiles slipped in an AV distraction, Joe Kelly is on the ground in Minneapolis as protests continue against the presence of federal border control agents in the city.

The Lynch mob, keen to maintain his status, dragged in "identity politics", as well as said civil war ...

This gloomy interpretation of what Minneapolis portends – a resort by both sides to, rather than a transcendence of, identity politics, the fracturing of Republicanism, and the squandering of Trump’s electoral capital – needs a wider context. This does not rely on the “well, they had a Civil War, so how bad can this episode really be?” question. But the greatest bloodletting in American history is hard to ignore in any assessment of contemporary turbulence.
Abraham Lincoln’s Union forces killed close to 300,000 Confederate rebels between 1861 and 1865. Trump will fall some way short of this. He will likely not match Bill Clinton either. In 1993, the Democratic president sent the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms into a religious compound, killing 76 US citizens. The bloody end to the Waco siege makes ICE depredations today seem small.
Ilhan Omah, a US congresswoman from Minnesota, was attacked while denouncing ICE at a town hall on Tuesday. Charlie Kirk died at the hands of a progressive assassin last year. In 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina brutally beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane on the US Senate floor. 1963: JFK blown away. What else do I have to say?

It seems that violence is cleansing and cathartic, and all to the good. If, for example, one of the Lynch mob's students went plumb loco and plugged the dude, why it would be just an experiment in American democracy. 

On the other hand - there are always two interpretations to hand - it might just be a senseless murder, much like two people gunned down in the streets by faceless masked goons roaming the range.

Pick your poison, the pond is sure the Lynch mob will treat it as an excellent academic exercise.

And so to celebrate violence as the way forward:

Violence has always been a feature of American political development. The experiment that has been run since 1776 is enduringly ideological – the United States is an idea. Conflict over what the idea is and how it is to be realised is unavoidable. Indeed, the wonder is how little violence infects the system given its ideological character.
The ideological experiments of the 20th century, from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR to Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, killed millions of their own people. For all its faults, America remains a better power than any alternative.
Autocratic regimes fell, while America’s disputatious democracy became the greatest power in world history. The separation of powers, on which the US constitution is built, gave it a durability, taking it from global irrelevance at its beginning, to the system on which the world turns today. When the various crises of the moment interpose, we should remember that longer record of success.

Eventually the reptiles managed to get in both victims, though only by way of posters, Posters of Alex Pretti and Renee Good who were fatally shot by federal agents in recent weeks. Picture: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images/AFP; A man stands at the memorial site for Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Picture: Jaida Grey Eagle

It turns out that killing someone is apparently just a form of "moral contestation":

We are too quick, especially in Australia, to indict moral contestation as culture war. An America unwilling to fight over its culture would be an immeasurably smaller place. This writer has not spent his entire adult life studying a Canberra-style technocracy. The United States is the working out of the human condition. It is meant to be messy, sometimes bloody, unwaveringly compelling.
This is not an excuse to wallow in Minneapolis as some sort of blood sacrifice for a contested idea. It is a request to place the tragic dynamics of that city in a wider context. Two large forces are in tension: the power and appeal of immigration as basic to American national character and the forces seeking to make that immigration subject to the rule of law. It would be more remarkable were there no geographic locus to this conflict. It just happens to be in Minnesota.
Finally, consider that, rather than Minneapolis representing the failure of American federalism, we may be witnessing an intense moment of its fulfilment. Competition between branches and levels of government is not a flaw but a feature of the US system. Edward S. Corwin, the famous constitutional scholar, said the constitution was “an invitation to struggle” over who controls foreign policy. Why does this city implicate foreign policy? Because the progressive ideology and activism of Minnesotans intends to alter how the state attracts and assimilates immigrants. Minnesota has a de facto foreign policy – forbidden by the constitution – but one which it is in competition with the federal government over.
Governor Tim Walz’s parallel diplomacy (or “paradiplomacy”) has become a feature of how American federalism invites a struggle over immigration policy. The formal levers of power are in the president’s hands, but he must adapt them (and there are signs this week that he will) for local consumption. Federal supremacy is something that must be fought for rather than assumed. It creates an environment for competition which, at its worst, spills blood on American streets. But, at its best, represents an enduring American capacity to argue over where power should lie.
Neither my mother-in-law, nor any of her neighbours, ever heard from Marcella (32) again. A woman desperate to contribute to American society, who cleaned the bathrooms of Americans when their fellow citizens would not, is now, in Martha K’s conservative mind, emblematic of Donald Trump’s overreach.
That Trump inhabits a system that will allow him to recalibrate is, again, evidence of a systemic robustness, rather than of existential crisis, at the heart of the American experiment.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

And there you have it. 

It's all splendid evidence of "systemic robustness" for a country that keeps its colonialism and fascism to a decent level ...

As for that "invitation to struggle"?

What a pity that the name Mein Kampf is already taken. 

It would have been the perfect title for this piece, as the Lynch mob's struggle helped the University of Melbourne maintain its reputation for academic excellence, in a Germanic sort of way ...

And so inevitably to the dog botherer, if only because the reptiles made such a feature of the wretch so early in the weekend, with the lying rodent front and centre.

But before turning to the dog botherer - a rough equivalent of having to fix a blocked toilet - the pond would like to recall yet again Liam Kenny's howl of pain in Junkee way back in 2013:

Chris Kenny is my dad. On one of the Sky News political analysis programs he hosts, he has replied to the Chaser joke, lamenting that if his children were ever to Google his name in the future, this is the kind of filth we would stumble across.
Heaven forbid.
Kenny is a staunchly neo-conservative, anti-progress, anti-worker defender of the status quo. He is an unrelenting apologist for the Liberal Party. He was one of Alexander Downer’s senior advisers at the time of the Iraq War. He’s been known to argue for stubborn, sightless inaction on climate change. He spits at anyone concerned with such trivialities as gender equality, environmental issues or labour rights from his Twitter account on a daily basis. Recently, he characterised criticism of the lack of women in Tony Abbott’s Cabinet as a continuation of the Left’s “gender wars”. He is a regular and fervent participant in The Australian’s numerous ongoing bully campaigns against those who question its editorial practices and ideological biases. The profoundly irresponsible, dishonest, hate-filled anti-multiculturalist Andrew Bolt has recently referred to Kenny on his blog as “a friend”.
And it’s a jokey picture of a bestial embrace that I should be afraid of discovering online?

Sorry Liam, absolutely nothing's changed, and he's still blathering on endlessly, as in this tedious ten minute outing ...

You see sweet Charlotte? This isn't the rag for you, this is a rag dedicated to dinosaurs ...

The header: How can Australia be ‘one and free’ again?; How did we get here? Since October 2023, Australia has been riven by hate, anger and violence – and we urgently need leaders to turn the tide and restore our unity.

The caption for the wisely uncredited collage, featuring an uncredited lying rodent: As Australia’s social cohesion splinters, grievance politics is tearing us apart.

Anyone expecting anything unifying should leave the room immediately.

This is just another dog botherer litany, a set of whines and moans, deeply pathetic, and only remarkable in that the reptiles were so desperate that they put this at the top of the "news" section ...

Just five years ago, in response to claims that referring to our country as “young and free” insulted Indigenous Australians, then prime minister Scott Morrison officially changed the second line of our national anthem to “for we are one and free”.
Given unprecedented levels of hatred, divisiveness and even violence in our national debate, we are faced with the confronting question of whether the new line is even more misleading than the original.
Since the atrocity in Israel on October 7, 2023, we have seen more than two years of vicious antisemitism coming initially from Islamist extremist elements before reanimating neo-Nazi groups. After 26 months of threats, graffiti, vandalism, and firebombings of Jewish homes, businesses, childcare centres and synagogues, as well as regular political protests chanting for the annihilation of ­Israel, we saw the worst terrorist attack on Australian soil when 15 people were shot dead at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration last month.
One and free? Ask the parents who send their children to Jewish schools to spend their days behind razor wire and armed guards.
One and free? Ask the families who gathered in Hyde Park last Monday to celebrate Australia Day only to be abused by a man in a T-shirt showing an Indigenous flag modified to include the clenched fist of a black power salute. “I hope the white genocide does happen,” he said, “because you guys are c. ts, f. k your flag, f. k this genocidal country.”
On the same day in Melbourne a young woman with a small Australian flag responded to taunts by saying, “I can be proud of my country.” A man wearing a keffiyeh shouted that this country is “funding a genocide” in Palestine.
“What about all the Indigenous people that are still dying in custody?” he shouted. “What about the fact that this country is built on stolen land? You don’t give a f. k? What does that mean? You’re a f. king piece of shit racist, good thing you’re standing in the shade because I know that you’re so white you don’t belong here, you’re European, this is Indigenous land, you’ll f. king burn.”
Toxic, divisive stand-offs
This is more than an isolated incident. It reflects the grievances, divisions and erroneous self-flagellation that has become commonplace in our country, mirrored not just in radical protests but also in our national debate, especially on publicly funded media.
Indigenous affairs, the Middle East, #MeToo feminism, transgender activism, climate change, the renewables rollout – a range of topics trigger toxic and divisive stand-offs.
In Canberra, hyper-partisanship has fuelled personal (and false) attacks against leading figures, numerous parliamentarians have left their parties, the Coalition split twice inside a year, and the tone of debate sinks ever lower.
A true public square no longer exists, media is polarised, and social media algorithms constantly reaffirm prejudices. The Adelaide Writers Week became so confuzzled about who could and could not speak that the whole event was cancelled.
Despite a national cabinet process during the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw an each-state-for-themselves mentality prevail, with citizens barred from crossing state borders even for urgent medical treatment or to see their dying loved ones.
Illogical restrictions, lockdowns, curfews and vaccine ­mandates were imposed, and protesters were hit with brutal policing – in Victoria they fired rubber bullets.
In my lifetime I have not seen more division, or a greater lack of social cohesion. Many of us wonder what national values or symbols our country can unite around.

Here's one thought.

Any notion of cohesion won't come via the dog botherer, the hive minds at the lizard Oz, or the ratbags at Sky Noise down under - the entire business model relies on division - nor will it be the relentless desire to return to little Johnny's era ... Former PM John Howard arrives at a candlelight vigil in Bondi late last year, a week after 15 innocent people were gunned down. Picture: Tom Parrish

Every so often, the pond wonders why it bothers, then perks up at the thought that tomorrow might bring prattling Polonius and fresh bouts of climate science denialism.

In the meantime ...

“I am not as pessimistic as that,” former prime minister John Howard told Inquirer. Howard sees the fissures, but offers a broad, his­torical perspective, and one that stems from first-hand experience through crises such as the Port ­Arthur massacre, 9/11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the Bali bombings.
“I think the biggest single failure of the past several years was the failure of the government to give moral leadership after the terrible antisemitism displayed at the Opera House after October 7,” Howard critiques. “If the Prime Minister had responded strongly, say by ringing (then opposition leader) Peter Dutton and suggesting a joint press conference to ­condemn antisemitism, I think the nation would have responded ­better. The government failed to give the moral leadership. Governments can always give the lead, they can always set the tone.”
There can be little doubt the Opera House debacle shamed Australia, and the soft response from politicians and authorities gave tacit encouragement to subsequent escalation.
Police made much of expert advice that at the Opera House nobody chanted “gas the Jews” – yet they failed to comprehend that “f. k the Jews” and “where’s the Jews?” amounted to the same vilification and hate speech.
At that protest we also saw an Israeli flag burned, and “Allahu Akbar” chanted along with, tellingly, “shame, shame, Australia.”

All par for the Australian Daily Zionist News, with appropriate images designed to set off the hive mind, An Israeli flag is burned on the forecourt of The Sydney Opera House in Sydney following the outbreak of war between Israel and Palestine. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

It was the reptiles that let clap happy fundie loon SloMo back out of his bag, with the inevitable results ...

But that's the reptile business model.

Fear, hate, loathing, anger, division and then doing the Orwellian thing of making it sound like that's what they deplore ...

Unity through hared, two minute hate sessions directed at the common enemy, creating a forced communal ecstasy ...

...a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting ...

And here's how it's done ...

Here was a gathering threatening Jews, celebrating the slaughter of innocent Israelis by the bloodthirsty Islamist terrorist of Hamas, and denouncing Australia – yet it was met with relatively mild ­condemnation and led to no police charges.
The only arrests police made were to take two men parading Australian and Israeli flags out of harm’s way. Surely this is a case study in how inaction can ­foster hatred and undercut social cohesion.
On Australia Day most people were at the beach or at a backyard barbie celebrating the day in our traditionally laconic fashion, but the protests for and against the day were increasingly strident and hateful, uniting on only one point – antisemitism. The “Invasion Day” rallies were infused with pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli aspects, a bizarre concoction of grievances that saw chants about “always was, always is Aboriginal land” interspersed with chants for “intifada” and the elimination of Israel.
At the opposing “March for Australia” protests, far right activists and neo-Nazis took control, and one man was arrested for allegedly declaring that Jews are the nation’s worst enemies.
Authorities seem to have no trouble arresting alleged extreme right antisemites (and nor should they) but they seem very timid when it comes to arresting Islamist hate preachers or those demanding intifada.
This is particularly disturbing given we have seen the human cost of a globalised intifada at Bondi. There is a sense of a two-tiered justice system, which undermines public faith and further threatens cohesion.
Speaking on antisemitism in ­Israel this week, former prime minister Scott Morrison explored the origins of the angst, and he pinpointed the replacement of individual moral agency by grievance and identity politics.
“When failure is moralised as systemic injustice, liberal norms collapse. Individual responsibility is excused in the name of grievance and institutions – universities, cultural bodies, media and even religious organisations – that become infected with this culture become seeding grounds for those who wish to destroy the very liberal society they are supposed to nourish and protect.”

Then came an image to remind correspondents that Dame Groan has been screeching about the weevils of furriners for years in the lizard Oz, Protesters join the March for Australia in Sydney on Australia Day. Picture: NewsWire / Christian Gilles

And so to the rest of the litany, and if it wasn't bad enough that the lying rodent had featured, the dog botherer made sure the demographic stayed well over 70 by dragging in Blainers ...

This is an acute observation that applies to many of the hot-button issues that have metamorphosed into toxic debates.
When grievance and identity trump all, even the facts seldom matter, as the abusive protester in Melbourne articulated – if you do not see the systemic injustice that he does, then you are less than human, you are ripe for hatred.
We see this absolutism in so many debates. Protesters still yell for Indigenous land rights decades after the Mabo decision and resultant legislation have delivered rights so powerful that 45 per cent of the continent is under native title administration.
So what is it that the protesters want, all of Australia ceded? It is absurd, of course.
Esteemed historian Geoffrey Blainey agrees about high levels of divisiveness and the toxicity of public debate, and points to the role of education.
“The universities have much to answer for,” he told Inquirer.
“My opinion is that probably social cohesion has been low and the maladies you define have been high on previous occasions,” Blainey assesses, referencing the turmoil and drought of the 1890s, and also the Depression years.
“We won’t know for years whether this is the worst of times, but it could well turn out to be true.”
Overall, Blainey, like Howard, looks to history to keep pessimism at bay. “Human crises of one kind or another sometimes carry the seeds for a period of revival, whether we see the seeds at present I doubt,” he said.

Keep pessimism at bay? 

The entire business model of the lizard Oz - of the dog botherer in this outing - is to dwell on pessimism, gloom and doom, and brood about difficult, uppity indigenous people, Elders burned an Australian flag as thousands of protesters gathered at Queens Gardens in Brisbane to protest against Australia Day. Picture: NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

How soon before the litany turns to climate science denialism?

Soon enough, though some might think too soon, with so much more division and hate to offer ...

“Political parties, left or right, usually revive after periods of trauma, our political history since the 1890s tells us this.”
Politicians are often their own worst enemies, undermining trust with the public, and this is only ­getting worse. Many voters have become highly sceptical of government following the Covid pandemic overreach, the refusal to call a royal commission, and the clear double standards where authorities were heavy-handed in enforcing intrusive laws and shutting down vaccine mandate protests in ways they never countenance for an anti-Israel or anti-Australia Day protests.
When voters are told repeatedly by both sides of politics for many years that renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy while electricity prices rise to record levels and the renewables rollout creates enormous pain for regional communities, it does not build trust.
I noticed a Sydney public transport bus this week sporting the ­signage, “This is a zero emissions bus” – a blatant lie given this ­machine is about 20 tonnes of metal and plastics fuelled by electricity that often comes from coal-fired generation.
Howard sees climate change as a dividing line. “There is a lot of extravagant language being used about climate change,” he said, “but I think more and more people, and I’m one of them, are starting to wonder why we are giving away natural advantages that providence gave us, for diminishing returns?

So tiresome, and so predictable, March for Australia and Invasion Day protesters clash outside Melbourne’s Parliament. Picture: Brendan Beckett

Will "zealots" get a run?

How did you doubt?

“Why should we give up the advantage of cheap energy, why should we deny to poorer nations of the world the abundant energy resources we possess?”
The hard left maintains its climate catastrophism, but Howard is right – increasingly mainstream and regional Australians see only lies and the infliction of pain for no discernible gain. Yet protest groups such as Extinction Rebellion feel sufficiently emboldened to blockade train lines and disrupt coal ports, preventing companies and workers from going about their lawful business. They also feel no compunction about blocking traffic across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and elsewhere, creating enormous inconvenience for tens of thousands of fellow citizens.
The doomsday scenarios that inspire these zealots are often mouthed by politicians from the governing parties; political rhetoric has consequences.
The Indigenous voice debate created a schism in 2023 with both sides of the argument failing the honesty test at times (some on the yes side claimed this was only a minor constitutional change, while the no side pretended the Uluru statement was 26 pages long). And over the past five years the Brittany Higgins case and the #MeToo campaign stretched credulity, eroded faith in authorities, and ended careers long before the truth began to come out.
This is the Americanisation of our political debate, the descent into personal attacks. It is amplified by a postmodern disdain for objective fact – “your truth” being all that matters; and as with most detrimental aspects of public debate, it is worsened and coarsened through social media.
It is daunting to contemplate where all this is heading. We need to remind ourselves that the sound and fury often comes from a radicalised few, and the mainstream disposition can be very different.

 Oh FFS ... the Americanisation of our political debate?

He's writing for an American owned corporation, with its owner caring so little for Australia that he gave up his citizenship for a mess of shekels.

Then came a snap of a man who sounded very much Nick Fuentes, and so King Donald, and so Faux Noise adjacent, Brandan Koschel, arrested and denied bail over alleged hate speech at Sydney’s March for Australia rally on Australia Day earlier this week.

Then it was back to the litany, with more little Johnny, more climate science denialism, and more SloMo, and by this stage, the pond just wanted it to end ...

Howard makes this point about our increasingly fractious national day. “I think the most significant thing about Australia Day is the polls, and how there is a massive increase in support of the current day,” said the former prime minister. “You are seeing the silent majority, the decent middle, revolting against the noisy opponents.”
If that trend continues, dare we hope for a “relaxed and comfortable” Australia Day in the future? Tony Abbott’s optimistic history of Australia is a runaway bestseller, so maybe there is a growing appetite for the national story.
Might we again celebrate what unites us? Might we dare to be proud of a nation that is the envy of most, and which works hard to right its wrongs and provide fairness for all?
Can we find away to re-establish a pluralistic public square, even when the media is polarised, people disappear into digital media silos, and the ABC is increasingly a plaything of the green Left? Democracy depends on informed debate, so it is hardly surprising that the degradation of our national debate has coincided with the splintering of our political class, the disenchantment of voters, and a decline in support for the major parties.
We used to come together to help each other in national disasters. When Cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin at Christmas 1974, people in the southern states took Territorian refugees into their homes.
Now, when bushfires or floods destroy homes and lives, we regularly endure the grotesque and inane spectacle of climate alarmists pretending Australian policies have worsened the impact, even as volunteers risk their lives in the aftermath. Such heartless nonsense should be argued out of the conversation but too many unthinkingly amplify it.
This week, when Morrison made a timely and thoughtful contribution to the debate about tackling Islamist extremism, he was denigrated by the National Imams Council as reckless and Islamophobic. And Labor’s Anne Aly accused him of using the Bondi massacre to sow discourse (she meant discord).
It is a bleak outlook and there is a distinct shortage of intellectual integrity and moral clarity.
If the benign and successful ­nation of Australia cannot find common cause for pride and celebration, there can be no hope for any sovereign entity.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese talked the talk on Australia Day. “A nation built with care and compassion, aspiration and determination,” he said, “A nation whose strong heart beats with courage, kindness and that abiding Australian instinct for fairness.”
Easily said, but what has he done to foster than purpose? What has he done to make us “one and free”?
The entire country got behind Australia II in 1983, when every landlubber professed some knowledge of winged keels and spinnakers. And perhaps the high point of national cohesion and self-regard came in 2000 when the Sydney Olympics were spectacularly efficient, entertaining and friendly.
Perhaps we could aim to nurture a resurgence of national cohesion and purpose by 2032 for the Brisbane Games.
Six years to find some common ground and shared aspiration, to root out the extremists, the disrupters and the aggrieved.
It can be done. History shows it should be done. But it will take leaders, and none of them yet are standing up.

Actually if the dog botherer wants a spirit of unity, via sport, here's a thought ...

Boycott the World Cup ...

History shows such boycotts can be done ... but it will take genuine willpower to tackle a truly damaging Faux Noise cult by giving up a football cult ...

And so this day's reptile studies are done, and the pond can only offer one consolation.

There could be worse ways of wasting time and money ...