In which the bromancer at last makes a return, but sounds about as much of a comeback kid as the beefy boofhead from Goulburn does ...

 

There was the pond, watching the first episode of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan (branding!), seeing how the random aerial bombing of a couple of carefree young boys in the first act led to a couple of dangerously radicalised men going off in the third act.

Apart from the metaphorical relevance to the current King Donald chaos, the pond idly wondered whether reading one smugly complacent reptile column as a first act led to a dangerously radicalised reader by the third column (damn you Chekhov).

Whatever, the pond doesn't care, because salvation is at hand.

The pond has spent weeks mourning the bromancer's absence, MIA for no apparent reason apart from bludging, at precisely the time when his white Catholic nationalism would explain everything for the pond.

And then suddenly he was back.

One of these returning apparitions was a sentimental book review, just a warm up act, of no relevance, and best consigned to the intermittent archive.

‘I’m not me without you’: Bob Carr confronts savage grief in powerful new memoir
Greg Sheridan knew Bob and Helena Carr for almost 50 years. He believes Bob’s book on his wife’s sudden death advances our understanding of life’s joy and tragedy.

But the other was a crucial read, five minutes designed to transform the pond, help this hapless herpetology student to understand the world in the correct reptile way.

It will be remembered that there was never a foreign adventure the bromancer didn't like, from 'Nam through Iraq to Afghanistan, and he spent years hungering for a war with China, preferably before Xmas.

So naturally the pond expected him to be all in, yet again, much like that frog, always willing to give the scorpion a ride across the creek.

But this time the bromancer seemed curiously tempered, with one of those both siderist takes that sounded like the NY Times:

The header: Trump’s Iran campaign aims to reverse the revolution; If Donald Trump produces a more normal government in Tehran the whole world benefits. But every outcome, including the worst, remains possible.

The caption for King Donald: When US President Donald Trump declared, ‘No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,’ he was for once telling the truth. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

The worst outcome remains possible? 

How un-bro could you get?

The bromancer did his very best to sound all the right notes from the get go, but also sounded nervous from moment he left the gate.

The bromancer turned snowflake nervous nelly jellyfish? Spot the clues...

In launching his military campaign against Iran, Donald Trump has made his boldest play at history yet. This is his biggest attempt to bend decisively the planet’s geo-strategic arc.
The instant reactions give you some the clue. Around the Western world, perpetual demonstrators of the left, and pro-Islamist demonstrators, are in the streets denouncing Trump. Ethnic Iranians in the West, long subject to co-ordinated intimidation from Tehran, danced in the streets, as did Iranians at home, at the end of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rule.
Trump has the right enemies, the right friends. That’s not to say he’ll succeed. His operation is intensely risky, involves huge human cost, and is unpredictable in its consequences. Nonetheless, when Trump declared: “No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight”, he was for once telling the truth.
Whether previous US presidents were constrained by wise prudence, or an unwillingness to face strategic necessity, is a matter of judgment.
The Albanese government is right to endorse Trump’s action and deserves some recognition for this. Deciding that in a war between Iran and the US, Australia backs the US, is not exactly rocket science – morally, strategically or electorally. Nonetheless, the government has made the right call. That the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, is strongly opposed to the US action is a further sign that it’s probably more good than bad.

How the bromancer yearned to deliver full-throated enthusiasm, especially as it involved Islamics, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s waves during a meeting in Tehran on February 1. From the start, the ayatollahs had the ambition of leading – morally, culturally and politically – the whole of global Islam. Picture: AFP

The bromancer reached for the broad arc of history and the culture wars, days of the crusaders if you will:

Why is Trump’s action so historically important? This is in part because of the nature of the global project of the Iranian ayatollahs. The Iranian revolution of 1979, which brought the ayatollahs to power in Tehran, was an electrifying moment for political Islam the world over.
It would be wrong to think the Iranian revolution garnered majority support among the world’s Muslims, now numbering two billion people. You cannot possibly generalise about such a vast population.
But the Iranian revolution had a profound impact on the nature of political Islamic thinking. Of course this had some pretty serious limitations. Iran is a Shia nation, but the majority of the world’s Muslims are Sunni. Nonetheless, from the start, the ayatollahs had the ambition of leading, morally, culturally and politically, the whole of global Islam. They were also deeply entwined with the other great strain of violent Islamist extremism represented by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood.
Leaders of the Iranian revolution had been involved in translating the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual who was the chief theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, into Persian. Sayyid Qutb spent some time in America and was especially outraged at the licentiousness of American life.
Deeply embedded in the ayatollahs’ world view, right from the start, was a profound view that America was the enemy of Islam, that America, in its materialistic and libertine ways, tried to seduce Muslims away from true Islam. And of course Israel was also inherently an enemy of Islam in this view, because it was Jewish, it was Western and decadent like the US, and it existed on land once ruled by Muslims.

The pond must pause to applaud the way that the bromancer has restrained himself, and resolutely refused to mention either the current ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank or the Trumpstein files, and instead introduced the appropriate Zionist note, Israel’s new ambassador to Australia, Hillel Newman, speaks about the war with Iran, the chance of a new relationship with the Gulf, and a post-Bondi relationship with Labor. 

Apparently the current mess is all the fault of Jimmy Carter and that damned socialist from Kenya, but that had implications for King Donald, shouldering the burden:

The rule of the shah in Iran was brutal and corrupt but it was also modernising and involved substantial economic development. Jimmy Carter abandoned the shah. For a moment, the ayatollahs recruited Iranian democrats, among the shah’s opponents, into a unified opposition. Once they took power, however, the ayatollahs crushed the democrats, and made Iranian life more and more repressive.
The Iranian revolution was also important because of the prestige and history of Persian civilisation. Iran is a big, powerful, consequential nation.
Over time al-Qaeda, and later Islamic State, evolved along separate Sunni tracks independent from, and often hostile to, Shia Islamism. But no single event more heavily accelerated and influenced the spread of violent Islamist extremism than the Iranian revolution.
Trump is now attempting to reverse the Iranian revolution. The idea that he’s doing this because he’s being pushed around by Israel is preposterous. Naturally, Israel rightly sees Iran as an existential threat. Naturally, the interests of Israel, the closest of US allies, is one of the factors Washington considers.
The Washington Post reports that both Saudi Arabia and Israel lobbied Trump to take action against Iran. But anyone who thinks Trump gets pushed into decisive actions of the first order of importance against his own will has not been paying any attention at all these past 12 years.
I don’t think Trump believes he can bring democracy to Iran. Although Iran is a sophisticated society – you only have to look at the films it produces – it lacks the institutional structures for democracy, and almost everyone with a gun in Iran is against democracy in principle.
What Trump seems to want to achieve with his limited military interventions in this term is use precise military action, not involving ground troops, to achieve, in Niall Ferguson’s words, not necessarily regime change – meaning total regime replacement – but rather “regime alteration”.
This is roughly what he got in Venezuela, when he got rid of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. This is more or less what the Americans eventually got in Egypt. Their old ally, Hosni Mubarak, lost credibility. There was a popular revolt. Washington, under Barack Obama, sided with the demonstrators.

Ah, "regime alteration", close companion to "alternative facts" and alternative reality, as the reptiles tried to reassure the bromancer by slipping in a snap of the sort of kit that always gives him a hard on, An F/A-18E Super Hornet, attached to Strike Fighter Squadron 14, makes an arrested landing on the flight deck of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in support of Operation Epic Fury. Picture: US Navy/Getty Images

Not even a fighter in arrested landing mode could sooth the bromancer, and at this point the bromancer's thinking became somewhat existential:

This produced a disastrous Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo. That in turn was overthrown by military leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The Americans have been perfectly happy with him ever since.
I once heard one official express it this way: “What we want is simple – a dictator who won’t commit genocide, won’t go after nuclear weapons and won’t attack us and our allies”. The most likely way something like that could emerge in Iran would be a military leader who would pledge enough fidelity to the Iranian revolution to satisfy basic Islamic identity, but would also promise social reform, for Iran’s young people, and business reform, for Iran’s economy and living standards, while ending Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism in the Middle East and around the world.
Frankly, that’s a pretty unlikely outcome, but it is at least conceivable. And such astonishing transformations have occurred in the past. Egypt changed from pro-Soviet to pro-American under Anwar Sadat. Before Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger made their overture to China, it was almost impossible to imagine Beijing ending its backing for communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia.

So there's still hope, a good bermbing can lead to transformation and redemption, and even better, with not a single boot on the ground, and look at what a good kidnapping can do to a head of state: Nicolas Maduro is seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad. Picture: XNY/Star Max/GC Images

Incidentally, in relation to all that, John Hanscombe spent this morning in The Echnida outrageously proposing Assassination shouldn't become the new normal (sorry, newsletter, no link). 

Inter alia...

...The 1973 New York Convention lists heads of state as internationally protected people.
As Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in response to the killing of Khamenei, "It is an age-old convention that the heads of state/government should not be targeted."
Aware of this convention, several American presidents prohibited the killing of foreign leaders by the US.
Executive Order 11905, signed in February 1976 by then president Gerald Ford, banned the US government from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassination. The order came after the Senate Church Committee unearthed plots by the CIA to hit the leaders of Cuba, South Vietnam, the Dominican Republic and the Congo.
Jimmy Carter went a step further in 1978 with Executive Order 12036, which strengthened the ban. And Ronald Reagan added his proscription with Executive Order 12333 which forbade people working on behalf of the US government from engaging in assassination plots.
These orders are now meaningless. We know the CIA provided Israel with Khamenei's precise location, facilitating the assassination. Trump even bragged about the agency's ability to track Khamenei during the 12-day war last June.
Albanese's haste in supporting the action might come back to bite him in ways he should have anticipated. The surge in oil prices yesterday could be a taste of things to come, with one energy analyst warning of an oil shock far worse than those of the 1970s should the Strait of Hormuz be closed to shipping.

Hanscombe joined the "if" game ...

The inflationary effect of higher gas and fuel prices would be a disaster. For the government and for ordinary Australians struggling with a cost of living crisis that seems never-ending. That narrow path of defeating inflation while maintaining full employment will become razor thin if we're confronted with an energy shock far worse than the one triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Of course, there's a possibility things could go the other way. Should the regime change objective of the military campaign be achieved and Iran rejoins the international community as a responsible nation, oil prices would plummet as sanctions are lifted.
But that's a big if.

Luckily none of that troubled the bromancer, but waddya kno, the bromancer joined in the "if" game, this time by reverting to the art of the deal, a tome notoriously put together by King Donald's ghost writer:

One central and imponderable question is how widely and deeply the core ideology of the Iranian regime is genuinely believed in by the power elites. The Iranian population plainly hates its government, with very good reason. The Iranian revolution has delivered nothing to the Iranian people. In the past few months the regime has slaughtered tens of thousands of its own citizens who, with astonishing courage, keep protesting.
But “death to America, death to Israel” is core Iranian government ideology. Yet Iran’s whole governing apparatus has become fantastically corrupt. Business operators with decades of experience in Iran tell me Islamist ideology is now less important to elites than money.
You can make deals with corrupt governments in a way you can’t with ideological or theocratic true believers. Trump, reflexively, makes deals. If he produces a more normal government in Tehran the whole world benefits. But every outcome, including the worst, remains possible.

There you go, an epic "if" for the ages, but unfortunately it was followed by that epic billy goat butt ...

But every outcome, including the worst, remains possible.

What a gloomy old sod he's become. Clearly going MIA did nothing for his mental health.

Every outcome, including the worst, remains possible? What happened to the cheerleader of yore?

As for that opening flourish ...

In launching his military campaign against Iran, Donald Trump has made his boldest play at history yet. 

TT had some thoughts... about history remembering the demented one and his demeaned acolytes ...

Oh that poor old couch molesting bearded isolationist, so many exquisite flip flops, it should be an Olympics event.

And there was the pond, so wildly excited by the bromancer's return, so deluded into thinking he'd be able to solve everything, shockingly ignoring all the other reptiles as they beavered away to put together a digital edition for the ages ..

Yes, once again the hive mind was full of it early in the morning...

The pond only included that for evocative atmosphere ... (note the hard of hearing man featured in that opening snap).

Lesser member of the Kelly gang, a certain Joe, was all in on the idea of boots on the ground, because when has that ever gone wrong?

CRUSH THE THREAT
Trump vows to crush Iran’s threat: no boots ruled out, more attacks ahead
Trump won’t rule out US ground troops in Iran
In his first public appearance since the strikes started, Trump said Iran posed a ‘grave threat’ to the US and flagged a bigger wave of attacks.
By Joe Kelly

Crush that tin can:

In his remarks at the White House, Mr Trump provided an assurance that he would not “get bored” and move on from the conflict.
“There’s nothing boring about this,” he said. “I never get bored. If I got bored, I wouldn’t be standing here right now. I guarantee you that.”

Here no boredom, no boredom here, and if you read the opening rolling coverage, you might have stumbled across cowardly Keir ...

Keir Starmer says the UK will not join the US and Israel in its offensive strikes against Iran, telling the House of Commons his government “does not believe in regime change from the skies”.
The British Prime Minister said his party had learnt from the “mistakes of Iraq” and that any UK military action “must always have a lawful basis and a viable, thought-through plan”.
He said he decided to allow the US to use UK military bases, after initially refusing Donald Trump’s request, in order “to prevent Iran firing missiles across the region” and killing civilians.
“I say, again, we were not involved in the initial strikes on Iran and we will not join offensive action now. But in the face of Iran’s barrage of missiles and drones, we will protect our people in the region and support the collective self-defence of our allies,” he said.
“That is our duty to the British people. It is the best way to eliminate the urgent threat, to prevent the situation spiralling further.”

What a gormless knob, and the infinitely wise King Donald would have none of it ...

Donald Trump told The New York Post that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary” — adding that Operation Epic Fury was “way ahead of schedule” by taking out dozens of Tehran’s top officials.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Mr Trump said after launching strikes Saturday to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership
“I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”

So the isolationists assembled around the couch molester, or listening to poor old Marge, have been soundly defeated.

Whither MAGA now? Wither away?

On the domestic front, you had to look way down the page for a treat, and it seemed that the yips were out and about in force...

LIBERAL REFRESH
‘Hit job’: Peter Dutton slams suppressed election review, Angus Taylor targets ISIS brides’ return in first sitting day as leader
Peter Dutton has warned Angus Taylor he can only succeed if he totally reforms the federal party headquarters.
By Sarah Ison

Turning to that epic disaster, that compleat dropkick, for his thoughts is a refresh? Off to the intermittent archive with him.

As for the rest, the pond did really go in search of the Caterist, but it seems he also went MIA this week, and so the pond's studies on the movement of flood waters in quarries had to be postponed.

That left ... not much.

Where have all the political giants gone?
Why today’s politicians can’t match Howard, Keating or Hawke for leadership
Leaders have failed to match the conviction and courage, governing skill, policy boldness and electoral success of the Hawke-Keating and Howard eras.
By Troy Bramston
Senior Writer

Waste time with ancient Troy doing the old "golden age" routine? 

Nah, might as well just go period folkie ...

Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone?
The reptiles have picked them, every one
Oh, when will they ever learn?

What a pity the intermittent archive is so intermittent ... sometimes the pond feels guilty at sending the reptiles off there, as it's often a fate worse than ending up in the cornfield.

On the other hand, what a way to escape the musings of simpleton Simon:

Farrer by-election to test credibility of One Nation polls
While the Liberals worry whether Peak Pauline has passed, Hanson faces a critical challenge to convert support in the polls to bums on seat in parliament.
By Simon Benson
Political analyst

The pond will concede it's a cunning ploy, making the by-election a test of One Nation rather than a test of the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, allegedly in charge of the major alternative government party.

A sample of the bleat will suffice:

...Farrer is not the seat it once was. It has two major centres that make up almost 70 per cent of the voters in the seat, but one that is dominant – Albury. Albury has an increasingly young demographic and has had a significant growth in public sector jobs. Ironically, decentralisation, a policy once championed by the Nationals (and Barnaby Joyce no less), has imported workers who are less likely to vote conservative. Water rights and an upgrade to Albury hospital seem to be the main concerns beyond cost-of-living pressures.
Unless the combined Liberal-Nationals vote can stay ahead of One Nation, the Liberal candidate – whoever that may be – won’t even be in the race. It’s a scenario that would have been unthinkable even a year ago: that the Coalition could lose this seat, which has been in either Nationals or Liberal hands since its formation.
The legacy of the fight between One Nation, the Liberals and the Nationals may well be gifting this seat, once held by Nationals leader Tim Fischer, to an independent and see Farrer go the way of Indi.
While Farrer poses a significant challenge for the Liberals to retain in the current circumstances, perhaps the more significant test will be One Nation’s ability to convert support in the polls to bums on seats in parliament.

So the simpleton's work is to set up the beefy boofhead for failure? 

He's likely a loser, so let's see if the lesser mob bomb out too?

Weird times, and so for a little relief, the pond took in a brief two minute draught of a depressed bouffant one ...

Poor bouffant one, unhappy times, unhappy scribbler ... but the pond became strangely cheerful at the sighting of freedumb boy, and the smirking beefy boofhead, entirely unaware of the bouffant one's lament, as he carried on ..

Albanese worked it so that he was the only MP to say anything nice about the departed Liberal leader – she acted with “grace and dignity” – and left Taylor only enough room to say nice things about the winter Olympians.
But the real problem for Taylor was that the tactical mistakes were built on a strategic failure.
Worse still, the strategic failure was a result of trying to recapture the wrong lost voters for the wrong reasons.
For the entire question time, the Coalition – Liberals and Nationals alike – did not ask one question on the economy. Not one, as new opposition Treasury spokesman and bright spark Tim Wilson was benched.
All the questions were about the so-called ISIS brides and Labor’s “plan to repatriate them”, including one question that was so poorly phrased Albanese simply dismissed it without the need to answer.
Facing a Labor government that is contributing to rising inflation, interest rate rises, increasing housing costs, a retreat into negative real wages, a lift in food prices and a massive surge in energy costs, Taylor asked only about 11 ISIS supporters and their children in a camp in Syria.
Taylor was determined to appeal to people who have shifted their support from the Coalition to One Nation with an appeal to “shut the gate” and “close the door” to the ISIS supporters.

Just to add to the bouffant one's woes, the reptiles flung in an AV reminder, The price of oil has surged on Monday after Iran shut down a crucial chokepoint — and experts warn Aussie households will not escape the fallout.

Now there's a delicate problem, which might be a tad tricky for the beefy boofhead, always a knife short of a good sharpening. 

Get on board with team MAGA and celebrate a cost of living disaster (unless you happen to have an EV, said the pond in a tone suffused with insufferable gloating) ... or deplore King Donald's adventurism, attack Albo and Wong's shameless attempt to duck and weave in a word salad of fellow travelling, and sound remotely sane ...

The bouffant one decided it was all beyond the beefy boofhead, intent on a culture war while the world moved on ...

It came after a press conference before question time during which he explicitly declared he would show respect to people thinking of voting for One Nation but wanted to convince them to “trust the Liberal Party again”.
Taylor said he wanted “to restore Australia’s standard of living and protect our way of life, shutting the door on ideologies that are unacceptable in this country, making sure that housing is affordable and that we have home ownership as a centrepiece of our economy again, making sure we’ve got affordable energy without Labor’s net-zero ideology”.
But in parliament Taylor and his team didn’t mention anything about the economy and let Labor set the agenda on tax, superannuation, wages and cost of living while batting away questions on the ISIS brides.
A narrow focus on ISIS brides as an appeal to Liberal supporters moving to One Nation misses the point that fears about high immigration are based on the belief that it is pushing up prices, particularly of rents and house prices, which is the real concern.
Introducing a bill to stop 20-odd mothers and children connected to ISIS is not going to alter the view that the real problem is the rising cost of living. Since October last year, while the Coalition has been tearing itself apart and completely missing in action, satisfaction with Albanese has dropped seven points to 40 per cent in the latest Newspoll.
Taylor needs to realise quickly that it’s about the economy and if Albanese’s support can fall so drastically when the Coalition is doing nothing, imagine what it could achieve by asking real questions about living costs.

And that's it for the day. 

No careening Caterist, no floodwaters, no epic Groaning, and as the pond has been hitting the reptile books way too hard, it was time for a rest ... and for the next bermb to go off in the third act ...