In which the pond gets back to herpetology studies, with King Donald providing an excuse to ignore the ongoing lizard Oz jihad ...

 

The pond should perhaps have explained yesterday that it will not be offering reptile readings taken from the area of the lizard Oz responsible for the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The pond has been appalled by the reptiles' most recent jihad - the politicisation of a tragedy - and doesn't want to enable, facilitate or otherwise disseminate any part of that jihad. Even pond favourites, such as Our Henry, will be given short shrift.

The pond thinks it's possible to discuss and diss wretched Islamic fundamentalism and the barbaric acts that arise from it, but also to discuss and diss the wretched fundamentalist behaviour of the current government of Israel.

Take for example, the sideswipe offered by Amia Srinivasan in the LRB in a recent outing which purported to be about the unconscious, The Impossible Patient (*archive link) .... but began this way ...

The unconscious​ is back. Why now? Certainly it ruptured into consciousness in the days and months following 7 October 2023, when the Israeli death machine let loose on Gaza, accelerating into a genocide of the Palestinian people that has cost Israel a measure of its international legitimacy and led to the prolonged captivity and death of hostages, increased antisemitism and an exodus of Israel’s educated elite. The Israeli state performs its self-defeating operations under the sign of Jewish ‘safety’, and for that reason with the widespread approval of Jews in Israel and much of the global diaspora. Denials of the reality of genocide mask a deeper, libidinal investment in its perpetration. In June 2024, the right-wing politician Moshe Feiglin took to Israeli television to invoke Hitler:

"As Hitler ... once said, ‘I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it.’ We will not be able to live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi is left in Gaza, and if we do not go back to Gaza and turn it into Hebrew Gaza."

As Jake Romm wrote in Parapraxis, a magazine founded in 2022 dedicated to psychoanalysis and left politics, ‘temporalities and geography mix and collapse in the ruins of the crematoria and emerge, reformed, from the barrel of a gun in Gaza.’
The refusal of genocide’s repetition – ‘never again’ – becomes the mandate for its inverted return: yes, again, genocide. As a consequence, Palestinians are left to excavate the bodies of their dead from the ruins of war and rebury them in the open-air cemetery of Gaza. The difficulty of the task arises not just from its magnitude – how to grieve more than seventy thousand people, a third of that number children? – but also from an ongoing occupation that erodes the psychic conditions necessary for mourning. For Freud, the work of mourning requires time in which the ego can discover the reality of its loss, and then choose its own life, moving beyond the fixation that he calls ‘melancholia’. But under occupation, loss is continuous, the choice of life never a given, and so the time for mourning never arrives. What is occupation, the Palestinian writer Abdaljawad Omar asks, but a ‘perpetual deferral of mourning’?

Well yes, but you won't find any of that in the lizard Oz ...

What you will find is the ongoing jihad, and the pond will have none of it.

The pond will offer archive links, such as ...

The great unsayable: How trendy multiculturalism invites violent anti-Semitism
Anti-Israel progressives created the perfect conditions for the first mass-casualty terrorist attack on our soil.

Timothy Lynch

The pond realises the Lynch mob has a cult following, especially as each outing further ruins the reputation of the University of Melbourne, but he's a vile man, scribbling vile things, and that's not enough of a consolation, or a sufficient reason, to descend into the muck...

Ditto Polonius, let loose on the weekend ...

Bob Carr stokes the fires of anger over Bondi Beach massacre
Bob Carr’s claims about the Bondi attack and his rhetoric on Israel have fuelled anger within Labor, critics argue, blurring legitimate debate and amplifying narratives that risk inflaming anti-Semitism.
Gerard Henderson

The pond might break a little, especially when Polonius invokes the ABC ...

...It was around this time that Carr began his criticism of what he terms the “Israel lobby” in Australia. This was the focus of Sarah Ferguson’s interview with him on the April 9, 2014, edition of ABC TV’s 7.30. In his diary, Carr also made references to the importance to Labor of the Arab Muslim vote, particularly in the western suburbs of Sydney. As was documented in this paper’s Margin Call column on November 12, 2025, in remarks to an Islamist media organisation, Carr referred to “the Israel Jewish lobby” which he declared was “a foreign influence operation designed to put the interests of Israel above the interests of Australia”.
This is a highly offensive comment implying that some Australians put the interests of a foreign country above their own.
I am a Zionist, of the gentile kind who happens to believe that support for Israel is in the interest of Australian foreign policy. So do most Jewish Australians, along with many Labor supporters – Jews and non-Jews alike.
Like Carr, ABC journalist John Lyons is one of Australia’s most influential commentators. In 2021, Monash University published his book Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s Toughest Assignment. The work is replete with exaggerations, as I documented in the October 15, 2021, issue of my Media Watch Dog blog. Lyons’ thesis is that Australia’s foreign policy in the Middle East is essentially run by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. This is a short step away from a Carr-like reference to an “Israeli Jewish lobby”.
Early last year, Lyons was moved from his position as the ABC’s global affairs editor to its Americas editor post. Both are influential positions.
Neither Carr nor Lyons is anti-Semitic. But unfounded criticisms of Israel along with references to an alleged hypothetical Israel lobby in Australia have the unintended consequences of adding to the cause of the anti-Semites in our midst.

Unfounded criticisms? A hypothetical Israel lobby? Waiter, do you have that level of delusion on tap?

Nah, best leave all that to the Australian Daily Zionist News, and to those who have the stomach for pandering to Benji, rabid fundamentalist and perpetrator of an ethnic cleansing of unholy proportions ...

So too the pond must pass on the Caterist this day ...

PM missed moment to shame left’s new anti-Semites
Anthony Albanese’s refusal to confront anti-Semitism after the Bondi attack reveals a deeper problem: a Prime Minister captive to progressive ideology and increasingly disconnected from middle Australia.
Nick Cater
Columnist

There was no excuse go there. The Caterist didn't manage to drag the ABC cardigan wearers into it, nor offer any kind of Our Henry pomposity, replete with arcane references.

Instead it was just a serve of bog standard Australian Daily Zionist News drivel.

All of them are there in the archive for those who want to follow the jihad, but the pond will look away and graze in gentler pastures ... and thankfully King Donald has come to the rescue with another bout of grandiosity mixed with dementia ...

So the pond could head off to the NYRB to read ...

Trump’s War
David Cole
The invasion of Venezuela is not law enforcement; it is imperialism, pure and simple. (*archive link)

Inter alia ...

All well and good, but what do the lizard Oz reptile pundits make of the proceedings? 

The pond has given up on hoping that the bromancer will interrupt his break, but the pond was swamped for choice.

Speaking of swamps, first a little mood setting ...

Ah, salvation by 'toon, as Ben was packing it once again for the hive mind..

The Donroe Doctrine: America is ‘in charge’ of Venezuela
Donald Trump has threatened military action against Colombia and warned Greenland is in his sights after declaring America is ‘in charge’ of Venezuela following Nicolas Maduro’s capture.
Ben Packham

And a Creel was reeled in from the WSJ to suggest it was all perfectly normal and dinkum legal ...

From Manuel Noriega to Nicolas Maduro: How a 1989 US invasion set the legal precedent for a dictator’s trial

The US capture and prosecution of Panama’s Noriega created binding legal precedent. That same framework now underpins the Trump administration’s case against Venezuela’s Maduro.

Nicholas Creel

All well and good, but as the pond is limiting its new year diet to one reptile, the pond went with ...

The header: Donald Trump puts dictators on notice with Venezuela power play; Critics say Donald Trump’s use of force in Venezuela undermines international law, but history suggests authoritarian leaders from Beijing to Moscow fear US power more than legal norms.

The caption for a king intent on impersonating a cane toad: US President Donald Trump, whose decision to use force in Venezuela has reignited debate over international law and American power. Picture: AP

This Lee found some hope in the imperialist foray, with Xi allegedly trembling in his boots and Putin much agitated ...

Does Donald Trump’s Venezuelan move violate international law and the rules-based order?

In using military force to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, has the US President made it easier for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to intervene forcefully in the domestic affairs of Taiwan and even decapitate its leadership?

The answer to the first question is likely yes. But on the second issue, dictators such as Xi and Vladimir Putin will be feeling far more uncomfortable after last weekend.

In 2019, the National Assembly of Venezuela invoked the Venezuelan constitution and declared that Maduro had usurped power and was not the president of Venezuela. In 2024, he held on to power despite compelling evidence he had decisively lost the July elections.

More than 50 countries, including the US and those in the EU, subsequently refused to recognise Maduro as the country’s head of state.

Even so, the existence of an illegitimate and corrupt leader does not itself provide legal ground for another country to use military action to capture the head of a regime or effect a change in who leads that country.

That was the case when John F. Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and is probably the case now. There was no treaty that permitted the action and no appropriate international court authorised it.

For this reason, international lawyers are scathing.

This legal perspective leads to the further assessment that by ignoring or violating international laws, rules and conventions, Trump is relinquishing the high moral ground for the democracies. China building and militarising artificial islands in the South China Sea was found to be illegal in a binding decision by the Court of Arbitration. Beijing didn’t care but at least the law was on our side.

Here the reptiles interrupted with a video clip, given an extensive summary...

Demonstrators gathered at the US Embassy in London on Saturday, January 3, in condemnation of Donald Trump’s military intervention in Venezuela. Footage filmed by Papua Militant International shows the crowd parading down Nine Elms Lane. Protesters could be heard chanting, “¡Viva, viva Venezuela! (long live Venezuela!)” and “hands off Venezuela,” and were seen holding up Venezuelan flags as well as anti-war and anti-imperialist signage. “We stand unconditionally with Venezuela against this unprovoked imperialist aggression on a sovereign Latin American nation,” Papua Militant International said. The rally was reportedly organized by members of the Communist Party of Britain after the US launched nighttime strikes against Venezuela and captured President Nicolas Maduro. In a statement published on X, UK Prime Minster Keir Starmer expressed support for a “transition of power” in Venezuela. “We regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime,” Starmer said. Credit: Papua Militant International via Storyful

Splendid stuff ...

Lee was keen to pour oil (preferably acquired cheap from Venezuela) on troubled waters ...

Has Trump just made aggression easier for revisionist dictators around the world? I don’t think so. Leaders in countries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, sometimes referred to as the CRINKs, systematically use or violate international law whenever it suits them.

For regimes in these countries, the first and most important question they ask when deciding on a course of action is whether they will feel pain, and how much.

In the contemporary global environment, the question for them is even simpler: how will America respond? This is because the involvement, or at least approval, of the US as the sole superpower is required to impose prohibitive material costs on the revisionist actions of these countries.

It should be clear by now that Trump’s America First does not mean retreat or isolation. It means doing what it takes to maintain US primacy in the Western hemisphere and project power and influence in other parts of the world.

To achieve that end, the Trump administration believes almost any means are justifiable.

This is not the restrained and cautious America of the Barack Obama or Joe Biden eras. Some lament this. But it was also during these two eras that China intensified its coercion and harassment of Taiwan and accelerated its activities in the South China Sea; that Iran greatly increased its support for and funding of proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas; and Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine in 2022, with Putin making the calculation that Obama and Biden respectively were unlikely to oppose him.

The first countries to condemn the capture of Maduro were Russia, China, and Iran. This is because under Maduro, Venezuela was becoming a military and economic beachhead for these authoritarian countries in the Americas. The reason allies are anxious about Trump is obvious.

But in observing what he has done rather than said, Trump has deployed military force against the Islamic State in Somalia, Iraq, Syria and Nigeria, the Houthis in Yemen and nuclear sites in Iran. These are not formal allies of any of the major authoritarian states but they share the common purpose of challenging the interests of the democratic countries.

It may be that Trump’s plans for Venezuela are ill-conceived and he finds himself unable to extricate the US from a military and political morass.

It may be? 

What sublime understatement, as the reptiles interrupted with another video distraction:

US President Donald Trump addresses a wide range of issues and operations he is currently conducting around the world. In a wide-ranging discussion on board Air Force One, President Donald Trump spoke about the US military operation in Venezuela, plans for restoring the country's oil infrastructure, as well as threatening action against Colombia. “It was a very dangerous operation,” Mr Trump said. “Amazing talent and tremendous patriotism. “We’re in charge.”

The pond felt the need for its own distraction.

Just as the pond predicted, Bill Kristol, Iraq war hawk of the first water, turned up in The Bulwark, profoundly amnesiac, and offering A Foreign Policy of Failure and Dishonor ...

It was a brew rich in irony and cognitive dissonance and entirely lacking in memory or self-awareness ...

...The case against Trump’s foreign policy isn’t a difficult one, and it can be made by a broad coalition of people. They may differ on what a responsible foreign policy would look like going forward—whether it should be more or less interventionist, more or less democracy-promoting, more focused on Europe or Asia, more reliant on hard or soft power, etc. But judging from public opinion polls and congressional support for, for example, aid to Ukraine, a broad coalition opposes a foreign policy based on bullying and greed, and would support a foreign policy of strength used responsibly, in line with American principles, and on behalf of both our own well-being and that of others.

The case against Trump’s foolish foreign policy is easy to make. It’s pretty obvious that boasting that we “we are going to run” Venezuela, as Trump did on Saturday, doesn’t mean we are in fact going to be willing or able to run Venezuela. Repeating last night on Air Force One that “we’re in charge” of Venezuela doesn’t in fact put us in charge. Claiming American oil companies are soon going to reap great profits from Venezuela won’t make that unlikely eventuality a reality (about which more below).

But Trump’s empty boasting and self-congratulatory bullying aren’t cost-free. They have consequences. Either they can lead us into reckless actions that will ultimately weaken us, or they can make us look weak when we back off from doing what Trump has said we’re going to do.

Last night, on Air Force One, Trump threatened military action against Colombia, Mexico, and Greenland. There is no legal or prudential case for military action in any of these instances. But the case of Greenland—a semiautonomous territory of our NATO ally Denmark, with whom we’ve had a very cooperative and constructive security relationship—is most instructive.

“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,” Trump said last night. A couple of weeks ago, Trump said, “We have to have it.” And in a phone call earlier yesterday with Michael Scherer of the Atlantic, Trump said that “we do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense.”

This is a bizarre fantasy. But the danger that Trump’s vanity and grandiosity will lead him to try to seize Greenland is real. Early yesterday, before Trump’s latest comments, I received a text from a friend and occasional Bulwark contributor, Michael Wood: “Dark horse prediction for 2026: US will shoot at or seriously threaten to shoot at Danish troops.” I don’t know that Wood is wrong. And this would of course mark yet another sign of the end of an already tottering NATO, and of an alliance system that is the basis of any international order somewhat friendly to liberal democracy.

I’m tempted to close by denouncing Trump’s hubris. But to use that term would be to dignify him too much. Hubris implies a certain grandeur of purpose. Trump has no great ambitions to shape a better world or even a better hemisphere. With him, it’s all boasting and bullying and lying, greed and narcissism and vanity. If we permit Trump to go down his chosen path—if we permit him to lead us down this path—the legacy will be one not just of policy failure but of national dishonor. That will be Trump’s legacy. But it will be ours too—unless we stop it.

Whatever his Iraq war hawk past, Bill makes a good point about Greenland, entirely ignored by the variant Lee (the pond can't stop thinking of Robert E. and the night they drove old Dixie down and the bells were ringing).

You didn't have to look far to see why ...take in this Graudian yarn ...

US attack on Greenland would mean end of Nato, says Danish PM

Mette Frederiksen criticises Donald Trump’s ‘unacceptable pressure’ as Greenland counterpart condemns ‘fantasies’

An attack by the United States on a Nato ally would mean the end of both the military alliance and “post-second world war security”, Denmark’s leader has warned, after Donald Trump threatened again to take over Greenland.

Fresh from his military operation in Venezuela, the US president said on Sunday the US needed Greenland “very badly” – renewing fears of a US invasion of the largely autonomous island, which is a former Danish colony and remains part of the Danish kingdom. Greenland’s foreign and security policy continues to be controlled by Copenhagen.

Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, warned on Monday that any US attack on a Nato ally would be the end of “everything”.

“If the United States decides to militarily attack another Nato country, then everything would stop – that includes Nato and therefore post-second world war security,” Frederiksen told Danish television network TV2.

Her comments came after Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, made a bracingly direct statement in which he urged Trump to give up his “fantasies about annexation” and accused the US of “completely and utterly unacceptable” rhetoric, declaring: “Enough is enough.”

“Threats, pressure and talk of annexation have no place between friends,” said Nielsen in a social media post. “That is not how you speak to a people who have shown responsibility, stability and loyalty time and again. Enough is enough. No more pressure. No more innuendo. No more fantasies about annexation.”

Greenland, he said, was “open to dialogue” but it had to come through the appropriate channels and be in line with international law, “not random and disrespectful posts on social media”.

He added: “Greenland is our home and our territory. And that is how it will remain.”

Frederiksen said her government was doing all that was possible to prevent an attack on Greenland and accused the US of applying “unacceptable pressure”, describing it as an “unreasonable attack on the world community”.

“You cannot go in and take over part of another country’s territory,” she told Danish broadcaster DR, adding: “If the US chooses to attack another Nato country, everything will stop.

“I have said from the beginning that I unfortunately believe the American president is serious about this. I have also made it very clear where Denmark stands. And Greenland has repeatedly said that it does not want to be part of the USA.”

She had been “very clear” to Trump, in public and private, said Frederiksen, adding that she would “do everything … to fight for the fundamental democratic values and the international community we have built.”

Nielsen and Frederiksen were backed by the EU, which on Monday said it would not stop defending the principle of territorial integrity, particularly when it came to a member of the 27-member bloc.

“The EU will continue to uphold the principles of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders,” the EU’s lead foreign policy spokesperson, Anitta Hipper, told reporters. “These are universal principles, and we will not stop defending them, all the more so if the territorial integrity of a member state of the European Union is questioned.”

But pressure is growing on Frederiksen, who faces a general election this year, to go beyond diplomacy and lay out more concrete plans for how Denmark would respond if Greenland were invaded.

Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic member of the Danish parliament and representative of the Inuit Ataqatigiit party, said although she did not believe an invasion was imminent, Greenlanders should “prepare for the worst”.

“We should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. That’s the way I see it right now. We are in a situation that is concerning.” Chemnitz said Trump’s latest remarks were “the worst and most serious” of his threats to Greenland and marked the emergence of a “new world order”.

“Just a few months ago many of us were seeing the political world as we used to see it, which is that you can have a dialogue, you can have collaboration … and so on,” she said. “But the way that the US is talking about Greenland and trying to ‘collaborate with Greenland’, it’s a totally new world order that we are looking at.”

Chemnitz added: “The future of Greenland is completely up to us. I understand that he [Trump] might be interested in having Greenland, but Greenland is not interested in being part of the US.”

And so on, and yet what's to stop a mad king, caught in the vale between narcissistic grandiosity and steadily growing signs of paranoid dementia, ever eager to acquire more stuff (did someone mention oil?) while keen to distract everybody from the Epstein affair, from having another go?

Why the mad king might feel emboldened, and once in the grip of distractions, might feel the need to keep feeding the distraction machine. .

One of Kristol's correspondents caught this mood by referencing Shelley's England in 1819 ...

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,

But leechlike to their fainting country cling

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;

An army, whom liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;

Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;

A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—

Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

None of this troubled the lizard Oz Lee, determined in his final unctuous gobbet to celebrate the joys of raw power...

This is something he promised the US would not suffer under his administration. But assessments that Xi will be emboldened to use force to decapitate the leadership in Taiwan or speed up plans for an invasion after last weekend seem wide of the mark.

It is true that Trump’s military actions have been against smaller or weakened countries with minimal American casualties and risks. But Trump’s preparedness to use force and take political risks is something that has the leaders of the CRINKs worried. It is US geopolitical timidity and caution that embolden them.

There is an uncomfortable truth about any international order no matter how benign or hostile. It is primarily shaped and ultimately maintained by the accumulation and exercise of power. The degree to which one is comfortable with the US pushing and crossing the boundaries of international laws and conventions for geopolitical gain depends on how seriously we take the threat of the revisionist authoritarian powers.

The more profound we believe the threat to be, the more the exercise of raw power will take precedence over legal obligation and restraint.

Indeed, indeed...

Now for the credit, even if no credit is due ...

John Lee is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC. From 2016 to 2018 he was senior adviser to the Australian foreign minister.

No wonder we've been stuffed for some considerable time.

Meanwhile, TT saw the vision, embraced the future ...

And as the pond has been starved of its usual 'toon supply, why not a few more, just for fun ...