In which the bromancer sorts out everything in his usual way, sundry reptiles are sent to the intermittent archive, and talk of Anglo-Celtic values wraps up the show ...

 

The pond wondered whether the bromancer would ever get back to his theme of a war with China by Xmas, but thanks to the inspiration of that other Jimbo, one time member of the IPA and still a treasured author, he's made a nostalgic trip back to future ...

The header: New defence chief and Trump envoy pick expose deep flaws in national security; A hardline Trump ally becomes US ambassador while Australia’s defence chief lacks military experience – raising questions about readiness as China eyes Taiwan by 2027.

The caption for the orange emperor and his minion: Dave Brat with Donald Trump in 2015 in Washington. Picture: Getty Images

As might be expected, the bromancer was fully on board with a Trumpian tea party ratbag as a way of furthering a deep and warm relationship with the disunited States ...

An ambassadorial appointment, a Mandarin coronation and a strong speech from opposition – three important developments for our national security.
Former Republican congressman David Brat is a good pick to be US ambassador in Canberra. He’s a good choice because Donald Trump chose him.
Brat was a hardline conservative congressman. He rode the Tea Party, the forerunner of the MAGA movement, to a primary victory over the highly regarded Republican incumbent, Eric Cantor, who was then the majority leader in the House of Representatives.
Cantor was pretty conservative himself, Brat much more so.
In the Trump era, Brat has expressed some opinions many Australians would disagree with, such as that Ukraine should concede major territory to Russia, that there was a vast intelligence agency conspiracy against Republicans, and massive voter fraud against Trump.
But guess what? That doesn’t matter a fig. There are only two qualities that count in a US ambassador in Canberra – commitment to the US-Australia relationship, and clout with the president.
Of the two, the second is the more important. Some of the most effective ambassadors the US has sent to Australia have been non-diplomats who were close to the presidents who appointed them. Tom Schieffer was a former business partner and close friend of George W. Bush. Years before, Mel Sembler was a close friend of George H.W. Bush. Schieffer and Sembler were among the best ambassadors.
Australian governments, other Australians too, could get their concerns considered seriously in the White House through the work of these dedicated, influential men.
The bad sign is it took Trump so long to appoint anybody at all. There is, of course, much administrative chaos and delay in the Trump administration. But the fact it took 15 months since Trump’s election to get around to making the Canberra appointment is a sign no one of consequence in the Trump firmament particularly wanted the job, and it certainly didn’t figure as any kind of priority for Trump himself.

Actually the bad sign is that with a stooge and a sycophant on location and paying attention, King Donald might attempt to do more than the odd whine and bleat, and then who knows what carnage might be wrought.

Then came the bromancer on a disastrous appointment, because (a) she's a woman, and (b) she's not the bromancer, Meghan Quinn has been appointed Secretary of the Department of Defence.

See how quickly the bromancer can elide from celebrating King Donald's emissary to sneering lips and quivering disdain...

The second big appointment for Australia was Meghan Quinn, the Secretary of the Industry Department, as the new Secretary of the Defence Department.
Quinn is a distinguished public servant and deserves congratulations and goodwill on her appointment. She also deserves to be judged entirely on results.
However, Quinn’s is the type of appointment which has not been effective in Defence in the past. It’s many decades since a career Defence insider has been appointed Secretary of the Defence Department. Given how poorly Defence has performed for a long time, that might seem fair enough. In fact, it’s been part of the problem.

At this point, the reptiles flung in an AV distraction which sort of did a little undercutting of the bromancer's euphoria about the new ambassador, with him apparently being no better than Junior's old squeeze ... Former acting US ambassador to Australia James Carouso spoke on the newly appointed Australian Ambassador to the United States, former Republican congressman David Brat. “I don't think anyone can expect the type of appointments we have in the administration,” Mr Carouso told Sky News Australia. “We have a former girlfriend of one of Trump's sons as the ambassador to Greece, we have an orthopedic surgeon as the ambassador to Singapore. “This particular ambassador, I think, has more background in government, having been the congressman for two terms, with a background in economics.”

The bromancer proceeded to carry a torch for the disgraced Pezzullo, as so many reptiles do these days ... what with the lizard Oz one of the main locations for his rehabilitation tour ...

If someone goes to Defence without a deep background in defence it takes months and months just to get across all the information, much less to work out how all the defence tribes interact, where the bodies are buried, how the distinctive Defence culture militates against speed, effectiveness and accountability.
There’s a strong case, if you really want to break the mould, for appointing someone from the top of private industry who is accustomed to bringing big, complex projects to completion and actually getting things done.
The Morrison government totally squibbed its one opportunity to make meaningful change at Defence when it declined to appoint Mike Pezzullo as the head of the department. There was a feeling that such an appointment would have led to a lot of distress in senior defence circles. Good. That’s just what was needed.
When you appoint a senior mandarin without much direct defence experience you can easily end up with the worst of both worlds, you get a mastery of bureaucratic process, broad concepts, eloquent position papers, government bureaucracy gobbledygook. Every strategic challenge is lovingly described, every problem deeply admired from all angles, and nothing actually happens, or at least not on a timescale relevant to the country’s needs.

If Pezzullo's the answer, forget the ethical questions ... and now for a little fear and anxiety, Military personnel attend the ceremony as Chinese President Xi Jinping welcomes Uruguayan President Yamanda Orsi at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in February. Picture: Getty Images

That's the cue for the bromancer to jump the shark and nuke the Chairman Xi fridge ...

China’s Xi Jinping has told his military to be ready to take Taiwan by force, should its government decide to do so, by 2027. The British Spectator noted this week that in 1930 Britain spent 2.5 per cent of its GDP on defence (well above our level now of 2 per cent), but by 1938 it was 7 per cent.
Australia has not remotely responded to the security challenges we face with the requisite urgency. Nothing in Quinn’s background suggests this will change. She worked on the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper which was a fatuous document with little predictive or policy value at all.
A dose of something closer to realism came in the first National Press Club speech delivered by Senator James Paterson, the opposition’s defence spokesman. He rightly demanded much greater openness from the Albanese government on basic defence information, rightly lambasted its failure to deliver expenditure or capability, stressed the centrality of the US alliance while acknowledging the difficulties posed by the Trump administration, and rightly called out the strategic danger of China.

Jimbo's the answer to getting ready for a bit of biff and a stoush by 2027? His profound insight?

Why it was a pitch for buying up big on the B-21 Raider stealth bomber.

This might have gone down well with the Sky News mob (still no rebranding?),  but sounded completely clueless and desperate, what with the first of these planes to be delivered to the US air force in 2027. 

What are the odds that the Yanks will immediately make them available to us as submarine substitutes, a kind of AUKUS pacifier?

Even the bromancer couldn't hack it, and he's still desperate to take on Chairman Xi.

When you've lost the bromancer, you're in trouble ...

His one mistake was to go down the road of proposing the acquisition of a fleet of B21 strategic bombers. When we’ve made such a pitiful investment in small, swarming drones, and when our defence budget can’t remotely keep even the feeble kit we have in proper working order, the last thing Australia needs is another giant, wildly expensive, technologically complex platform to cost endless billions of dollars and take forever to come online.
Dysfunctional defence culture, persistent and seemingly ineradicable, rears its head in the most unexpected places.

Grim times when even the bromancer can't be made to swallow Jimbo's massive stupidity ...

The lizard Oz editorialist chimed in on the matter of the ambassador for the disunited states, hoping against hope ...

AUKUS is in desperate need of a confidence booster?

Brat for sedulously promoting? Brat for demanding workload?

Likely he'll have a hard time explaining how to play the game ...

And so to what the pond won't be covering this day.

The pond won't be encouraging Dame Slap in her familiar bout of black bashing. The intermittent archive is a safe home for that sort of thing ...

COMMENTARY by Janet Albrechtsen
Welcome to country: is it time to take a vote?
A divisive response to welcome to country ceremonies raises deeper questions about meaning, timing and whether Australians ever truly agreed.

There's going to be a lot more of this bigotry emanating from the reptiles as they discover new ways to divide the country, but damned if the pond will help them in their mission.

The pond did at least have a couple of 'toons handy that evoked the Dame Slap spirit ...

The pond was also disinclined to feature a standard bit of Albo bashing, as Geoff chambered a far too familiar round:

Who’s fairest of all? Albanese holds the mirror up to history
Anthony Albanese has revealed his government will return to Labor’s political basics in next month’s budget, echoing the same big-spending, anti-business themes from his maiden speech delivered 30 years ago.
By Geoff Chambers

Political editor

The pond did however think that a teaser trailer was worth it, if only because it featured a novel new form of pictorial attack.

What better way to diminish comrade Albo and make him feel tired, weary and aged than by starting off with a snap showing him in his vulgar youff days?

It was too cruel, it was deliberately unkind in the reptile way ...

That's about as low a blow as the reptiles have ever managed in their war on comrade Albo, but anyone wanting more of the faux outrage must resort to the intermittent archive, while praying its still working.

Another item that was sent to the archive was this angle on the dire straits the world is in thanks to King Donald embarking on a jihad ...

West pays a price for Iran’s global cartel economy
Rather than relying on conventional statecraft, the Islamic Republic regime combines geopolitical positioning with financial resilience to extract economic consequences from disruption
By Sara Rafiee

At the end of her piece, Sara came up with a splendid proposal ...

...Western enforcement systems are designed for linear transactions. Tehran’s networks are layered, transnational and structured to pass formal compliance checks. What is required is a shift to intelligence-led enforcement: forensic accounting, network analysis, digital asset tracing and blockchain exper­tise, cross-border data integration and co-ordinated action across financial regulators, law enforcement and intelligence agencies. That means strengthening anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing frame­works to trace ownership, identify networks and disrupt financial flows at scale.
The West has exposure and agency. As a network of rules-based financial systems integrated into global markets, it is directly affected and capable of driving enforce­ment.
The Islamic Republic is sustained not by ideology alone but by access to capital, markets and financial infrastructure. Remove that access and the system weakens. Leave it intact and the cost is externalised through fuel prices, inflation and balance sheets.
The choice is clear: remain reac­tive and be at the mercy of the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and give in to their demands for ransom and extortion or act proactively to dismantle the financial architecture that sustains them once and for all.
The question is not whether the West pays but whether it chooses to stop.

So not just a complete blockade but also even more extreme sanctions, so that 90 odd million people can be made to suffer, while the regime skates along over their suffering.

If they chose not to stage a revolution, well let them starve, stuff 'em, serve 'em right.

It seemed an odd strategy given how Sara chose to describe herself ...

Sara Rafiee is a human rights advocate. The views expressed are her own.

Must be human rights advocacy of the King Donald kind ...

And so to a final offering ...

The header: Stop chasing nostalgia, start defending principles; Australia’s conservative movement often reaches for ‘good old days’ instead of asking: what made those days so good in the first place?

The caption: Demonstrators gather in Canberra to protest the impacts of immigration and cost-of-living pressures. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman.

Immediately the pond's ears were on high onion muncher alert.

Was this tosser going to diss "Anglo-Celtic values", thereby undermining the entire edifice of the lizard Oz and the hive mind?

Last weekend’s March for Australia rally in Canberra drew scores of people from across the country, united by a deep frustration at what mass immigration is doing to their daily lives.
Housing is out of reach, rents are soaring, grocery prices are crippling and infrastructure is buckling under the weight of demand. These are legitimate concerns and Australians are right to be angry that government policy has left them worse off in their own country.
But alongside those concerns a familiar strain of rhetoric resurfaced. Once again, the language of “Anglo-Celtic values” and questions about who really belongs in Australia found its way into the debate.
Worse still, many on the right turned a blind eye or echoed their rhetoric, as if the way to channel public anger is to pine for a cultural purity frozen in the past. That isn’t just lazy, it’s destructive. Cultures evolve.
The things we prize about being Australian – our irreverence, our egalitarianism, our suspicion of authority – may have sprung from Anglo-Celtic origins, but over time they became distinctly Australian, shaped across the past century by the millions of migrants who made this country their home.
My own family has been here since 1946 – 80 years and five generations strong. At what point do families such as mine count as Australian? To keep insisting that the character of this country is Anglo-Celtic alone is to write millions of patriotic Australians out of the national story.
Even the so-called Anglo-Celtic values were never purely Anglo-Celtic. They were the product of centuries of evolution – first forged in ancient Greece, refined through Rome, filtered through Christianity, revived in the Enlightenment and finally embedded in British institutions.

He was, he was, and the pond was outraged on behalf of the lizard Oz. 

How did this miscreant get into the mix? Where was Our Henry to box his ears and teach him a lesson?

The principles we talk about today – rule of law, liberty, civic equality – trace back to Athens as much as to Westminster. To pretend they belong exclusively to one culture is to misunderstand their nature: they were always meant to be inherited, adapted and lived by anyone who chooses to uphold them.
Worse, it’s politically self-defeating. You cannot build a broad conservative movement while telling half the nation they don’t belong. America, for all its flaws, actually gets this right.
The US came from Anglo-Celtic stock, too, but you won’t hear conservative Americans demanding the return of “English values” when things go awry.

Steady, steady, in fact in the early days, there was more than a fair sprinkling of Dutch, German and perfidious French settlers, and even worse by 1790 almost 20% of the population was of African descent, though it took some time to count them as human.

But the pond digresses, do go on ...

They talk about American values. Anyone who embraces the principles of liberty, independence and self-government, honours the country and respects its laws is accepted as American. That inclusiveness is what made America strong.
If conservatives in Australia cannot make the same leap – if they cannot stop confusing ancestry with principle – they will condemn themselves to irrelevance. The future will not belong to those peddling nostalgia. It will belong to those who can articulate a creed called Australian values, open to anyone willing to live by them.
After all, the instinct is already there: when something goes wrong in this country, we don’t say it’s “un-Anglo-Celtic”; we say it’s un-Australian.
Unlike our American cousins, Australia never had the clarifying moment of revolution. We were not born in blood. We inherited institutions rather than forging them in struggle and so we were never forced to chisel our values into stone. In the absence of a creed, we leaned on character – and for a long time, that was enough.
Stoicism, a larrikin irreverence, a practical egalitarianism and a work ethic that prized reward for effort. “She’ll be right” was more than a shrug; it was a philosophy of proportion, resilience and perspective.
But if you never articulate your strengths, you never learn to defend them.

Dammit, if the onion muncher gets to read this sort of heresy there'll be hell to pay ...

Over time, the habits that made this country work have been crowded out by bureaucratic creep, cultural risk-aversion and an ever-expanding politics of grievance. Instead of protecting the ideas that sustained our way of life, too many on the right reached for the easier script: bring back the old days. The result is a movement that sounds like a museum tour.
Nostalgia cannot save a nation. Principles, however, can. If Australia is to succeed in the 21st century, we need to stop chasing the shadows of yesterday and start identifying, clearly and unapologetically, the values that made us strong in the first place.
So which principles? Freedom of speech: not as a slogan but as a social norm that tolerates offence because truth requires friction. Reward for effort: the moral right to keep more of what you’ve built and the expectation that contribution precedes entitlement.
A “fair go” earned rather than allocated. Institutional humility: rules that bind government before they bind citizens. And an unembarrassed larrikin spirit that resists control and laughs at pomposity, including its own.
None of that requires a revolution. It requires articulation, prioritisation and courage. Articulation because we must say plainly what we stand for. Prioritisation because governments stuffed with committees can smother a culture without firing a shot. Courage because defending principles will be noisy, unfashionable and – at times – personally costly. And yes, that means fewer glossy slogans and more stubborn substance.

The pond could almost get on board, but what about Dame Slap's desire to put pesky, difficult, uppity blacks back in their box?

The less we see of them, the more of a fair go there'll be for all the whites slaving away at the lizard Oz?

Whatever, best wrap it up ...

But the purpose of that effort isn’t to look backwards. The point isn’t to sell nostalgia for a different decade or to cosplay as America. It is to recover the foundations of an Australian life that worked, then say them out loud, codify them in policy and live them again.
The debate we need is not about what we used to be. It’s about who we intend to be – and what we’re willing to defend to get there.
Damien Costas is the author of What Happened to the Lucky Country?

And speaking of equal opportunities for all, and rights and all that jazz, let's celebrate the ways of two noble monarchies, with wretched republicanism at last put back in its box ...

Finally those interested in the state of Vlad the sociopath's Russia might be amused to see the way that the country's chief Lord Haw-Haw, the nuking sociopathic Solovyov attempted to retrieve his most recent dismal situation by inviting lips-loaded Victoria Bonya on to his show, all the way from Monaco, the latest in a seemingly endless dance between the pair.

Only on Russian state media:

Vlad the sociopath must be beginning to feel the heat ...