In which the bromancer does over Sir Keir, the dog botherer does over Albo, and Polonius does the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

 

For the first time in many years, the pond decided to strip Polonius of his "first on Sunday" rank.

The reason will become obvious below, but it allowed the pond to catch up on some other items.

Even so, there had to be some also rans, some try hards, some losers and dropkicks and some whom the pond couldn't feign the slightest interest ...

Off to the intermittent archive with them, with appropriate thoughts and prayers, and all the best for anyone sailing on these ships...

This crisis ‘harder than the GFC was’
From GFC to Trump: Jim rates budget degree of difficulty
Jim Chalmers describes next Tuesday’s budget as having a higher ‘degree of difficulty’ than Labor’s big-spending stimulus response to the global financial crisis.
By Geoff Chambers
Political editor

A shift from butter to guns to thrive in a dangerous world
Our defence has relied since 2024 on a ‘strategy of denial’, which means arming up to the point where an adversary believes the cost of using martial force to get what it wants is too high.
By Tom Dusevic
Columnist

‘Rent-a-womb’ industry looms as review pushes for commercial surrogacy in Australia
Commercialising Mother’s Day sentiment is one thing, but what of the commercialisation of motherhood itself? Two law inquiries are attempting to do just that.
By Angela Shanahan

That stern talk of the need to shift from butter to guns (butter? Another reptile stuck in the 1950s) really should have belonged to the bromancer, always a war monger of the first water, but this weekend he turned his attention to Sir Keir's decline and fall ...

The header: Keir Starmer’s leadership in crisis after Labour election disaster, fuelling fears for Britain’s future; The PM is surely finished after the Labour election disaster. Nigel Farage is the new giant of British politics.

The caption for the thankfully uncredited visual mess typical of the lizard Oz style (what on earth is that grey blob?): Keir Starmer, with his 18 per cent approval rating, has comprehensively messed up leadership.

The pond was reminded of the sort of conversation you can have with an angry Reform voter. 

You're angry about the economy and lack of opportunity? You do realise that Brexit did significant damage to the British economy, and continues to do damage? And that Reform led the way on Brexit? So you'll cheerfully vote for the party that did the country significant harm?

Worked for King Donald, didn't it? Go Nige ...we could have a tariff-led, non-European recovery because the rest of the world is wasting away waiting for British products.

It seems it's still hard to accept the realities of the end of Empire.

But enough of the sheeple, it's time for the bromancer to bury the hatchet:

Keir Starmer is a failed Prime Minister, leading a badly failed government, in a failing politics. The drubbing Labour has taken in local council elections on Thursday, losing hundreds of councillors, and in Welsh and Scottish assembly elections, indicates a party and leader in crisis, a nation barely scraping along the bottom of public policy. In a seismic result, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is the big winner.
Starmer, with his 18 per cent approval rating, has comprehensively messed up leadership. His failure is epic. He’s as unpopular as Liz Truss, as chaotic as Boris Johnson, as ineffectual as Theresa May, as isolated as Jeremy Corbyn, his efforts to explain mistakes and scandals as unconvincing as Joe Biden’s were. He has the charisma of Gordon Brown, the campaigning panache of Peter Dutton.

Ouch, fancy including the mutton Dutton in that list.

The reptiles then quickly interrupted with an AV distraction: TalkTV host Peter Cardwell has predicted the UK Labour Party to do “very badly” and Reform to do “very well”. “The pressure is on already on Keir Starmer. The vultures certainly were circling in regard to his own position,” he told Sky News Australia. “Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, he’s going to be a very happy man later on today.”

TalkTV is still a thing? 

Apparently it's online, but the pond remembers the Emeritus Chairman's glory days way back in 2022,  Piers Morgan ratings dive as talkTV struggles to attract viewers:

Flagship show audience down 80% after launch and rating agency detects ‘zero viewers’ for other key slots
Rupert Murdoch’s talkTV television channel has been rated as having “zero viewers” during primetime broadcasts, as the new television channel struggles to attract an audience despite signing up Piers Morgan as a presenter.
The News Desk, the channel’s hour-long political show hosted by Tom Newton Dunn, did not register a single viewer for half of its Tuesday evening broadcast. Although this does not rule out the possibility that some people were watching somewhere in the UK, it means the television audience was so small that it was not picked up by official rating agency, the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board.

The pond loves to remember the Chairman's greatest hits, as the bromancer sank in the knife again:

This election shows British politics shattered into shards of incoherence. The government leaks constantly against itself like Richard Nixon’s administration in its last days.
Sharks are circling Starmer. Angela Rayner, who resigned from cabinet because of tax irregularities, Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who isn’t even in parliament, all think they’d do a better job than Starmer. They could hardly do worse. They’re all challenging from the left, when it’s left policies that have failed dismally. Woeful as Britain’s performance has recently been, it could get worse.
British politics is confused, as polarised as American but less coherent. The worst development is the rise of the Green Party, led by the execrable Zack Polanski. The British Greens, who make Australia’s Greens look like Roosevelt Democrats, won big in some Muslim neighbourhoods on the cause of Gaza (obviously central to British local government). They’re normalising antisemitism and racism. They’re worse than Corbyn.
One Green candidates. (sic, later corrected) posted an illustration of a giant serpent, with the Star of David on its skin, devouring the Earth, and also declared Donald Trump “is owned by the Jews”. Two Green candidates were arrested for antisemitic offence

The reptiles naturally featured a snap of the chief villain... UK Greens Party leader Zack Polanski at the launch of his party’s local government pitch in Deptford, London. Picture: Jacquelin Magnay

We're back in ethnic cleansing denialist territory, a feature of the Australian Daily Zionist News that's so regular the pond can tiptoe by ...

Polanski, a deeply weird person, reacted to the arrest of the Somali-born knife attacker at the Golders Green synagogue, who repeatedly stabbed two Jewish men, by criticising the police. The offender was trying to stab the police and they, unarmed, subdued him. Metropolitan Police commissioner Mark Rowley, who never gets involved in party politics, publicly rebuked Polanski.
Polanski is a preposterous character. He falsely claimed to have been a spokesman for the Red Cross. When previously a hypnotherapist, he claimed he could enlarge women’s breasts through hypnosis.
That such grotesque leadership could command strong support in Britain is a withering indictment of sustained indoctrination by the British education system, and the extremism of some Islamic voters, who presumably don’t care what madness the Greens encompass so long as they hate Israel. There’s a faint whiff of Weimar Germany in all this.
Britain boasted for decades, perhaps centuries, deep political stability and competent government. The two-party system, as Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch argues, is now dead, with five genuinely national parties emerging: Starmer’s Labour, Badenoch’s Conservatives, Farage’s Reform, Polanski’s Greens and the Liberal Democrats led by Ed Davey.

Poor old Kemi, she was expected to fail, so nobody much cared, while everybody from the cracking Crace to Marina handing out a Hydeing were all in on Sir Keir ...

The cracking Crace did spare a thought for Kemi's Tories ...

For the Tories it was James Cleverly who was left to hold the fort early doors. Darling Jimmy Dimly. Reliably half-witted. He thought the Tories had had a mixed night. Mixed if you count becoming of relevance only in London and a few home counties. “We are the only party holding the government to account because we are holding the government to account,” he said. You can’t fault the logic, though you did wonder if what Jimmy D really needed was a long lie down. The results from Essex would soon be in and he, along with Kemi and Priti Patel, would all lose their seats to Reform in a national election.

Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch takes a selfie with supporters on the eve of local elections. Picture: Getty Images

Could Ireland at last be free and united?

But British politics is more fractured even than this. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party dominates; in Wales, the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru seemingly has displaced Labour; in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein won the last election. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will thus all have elected chief ministers who want to secede from the UK, who don’t regard Britain as ultimately legitimate. Imagine Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane with premiers all determined to break up Australia.
Given Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, literally any government outcome is possible at the next election in 2029.
Some of Britain’s worst problems arise from terrible decisions made by Tony Blair as prime minister in the 1990s. Constitutional devolution in Scotland and Wales created the worst type of federalism. Scottish and Welsh governments spend money they don’t raise by their own taxes. So they market every issue as Westminster victimising them by withholding money. In reality the “devolved nations” get huge subsidies from Westminster and receive more money per person than those in England. That then fosters English resentment and nationalism.
Blair also pioneered mass uncontrolled immigration. He misunderstood or misrepresented how many people would come and didn’t establish effective legal or administrative frameworks. He created the anything-goes approach that is proving impossible to get rid of.
Conservative and Labour governments, including Starmer’s, have vowed to change this and failed. Tens of thousands of illegal migrants arrive every year.

Why they arrive in this desolate, failed, comprehensively ruined country - worse than being caught in a war in Sudan - must remain a mystery.

Populist Nigel Farage's Reform party is riding high in polls ahead of elections this week to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. Reform's tough stance on immigration is appealing to more and more Scottish and Welsh voters, but it remains divisive, and might even boost its rivals.

At last the bromancer found hope, albeit in an unlikely form ...

This fuelled Farage’s dramatic rise. He’s more capable than Pauline Hanson but, like One Nation, Reform lives off the leader’s personal following. Many Reform candidates are eccentric. The councils they newly control will likely govern as badly as other councils. This may offer Badenoch, whose personal ratings outshine her party’s and who has mastered Starmer in parliamentary combat, a way back against Farage.
People who want immigration controlled vote Farage, those who want open borders vote Green. Labour is hurt on left and right and losing votes directly to Reform.
Objectively, Britain’s a mess. Economic growth is persistently anaemic. Britain’s less than two-thirds as wealthy, per person, as America. If it were a US state, it would be one of the poorest. National debt is £3 trillion ($5.6 trillion), equal to its national economy. It will borrow more than £130bn this fiscal year.
Starmer can’t fashion an effective economic or social policy response or narrative. He desperately needs to cut government spending. But he’s also committed, in modest recognition of reality, to a big increase in defence expenditure and he can’t cut welfare. It doesn’t add up.

Then came a photo op ... Starmer meets British military personnel in Bahrain in April during his three-day visit to the region. Picture: AFP

The bromancer wasn't fooled, and took time out to assail the wastrels and the bludgers in approved Tory style...

Welfare spending is completely out of control. One million young Brits are neither working nor in education, including hundreds of thousands on “benefits”. Welfare has grown so haphazardly, and is so elaborate, people can end up receiving more than Britain’s average wage in welfare payments. Working hard is a mug’s game.
The British state ballooned during Covid but has never been less effective at getting things done. In Britain now everyone rorts the system. The interaction of work from home entitlements (an economic death-wish policy in Western nations) and flexi-time arrangements have many civil servants claiming 50 days off a year, beyond their generous holidays, sick leave, social leave etc, and sporadic office appearances.
Starmer has no clue how to fix this. He began by cutting pensioners’ winter energy subsidies (like Australia, Britain has excessive energy prices because of net-zero policies) while giving big pay rises to public sector unions such as bus drivers.
On top of all this, Starmer’s judgment is shocking. It emerged shortly after the election that he’d taken £100,000 ($190,000) in personal gifts from a Labour donor, more than £20,000 for suits for himself and clothes for his wife. Yet he was wealthy, he’d been director of public prosecutions, his wife a successful lawyer. This discredits “moral socialism”, even just playing by the rules.

The reptiles then flung in the dog botherer ... Writer and Broadcaster Esther Krakue blasts UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer for having “no judgment”. “If he was so set on having someone like Peter Mandelson, he clearly didn’t seem that swayed by whatever evidence would have come up against him being appointed. What does that say about his judgment?” Ms Krakue told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “It says something very terrifying for him leading the United Kingdom, that he has none; he has no judgment.”

And now the pond must pick a bone with the bromancer, as he talks of an "inexplicable appointment".

Sadly the desire to get Mandy appointed was all too explicable. 

The hapless mouse (Sir Keir) was terrified by King Donald, and so decided that an affable intermediary of no scruples or competence was needed - two pedophile peas in a pod as it were,  solving the King Donald problem with a quick fix. 

Send in someone who'd have no trouble calling the King a "risk-taker" ...and make it sound like a grovelling compliment.

That worked out tremendously well, and now to the final gobbet ..

Worst of all was the inexplicable appointment of former cabinet minister Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington. Mandelson had twice been dismissed from office in public scandals. He had a well-known love of money and the high life. He had deep Russian and Chinese business connections, and was a friend of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
When the depth of Mandelson’s friendship with Epstein was exposed it led to his dismissal. Starmer, who had insisted on the Mandelson appointment, grotesquely and implausibly claimed innocent ignorance of all the bad stuff.
Starmer Starmer, the Britain harmer, is surely finished. But changing prime ministers is inherently destabilising.
None of the contenders has a credible plan for Britain. The land of Shakespeare and Churchill could do with a regular, competent, John Howard-style prime minister, someone to begin rebuilding.
There’s no sign of one on any horizon.
Greg Sheridan is The Australian’s foreign editor.

All the UK can do is console itself that it might be worse ...

And so on to the dog botherer, delivering a bog standard shellacking, part of the reptile weekend campaign to distract from the great LibNat Farrer apocalypse...

The header: Anthony Albanese’s trail of broken election promises are catching up with him; The PM’s record of broken pledges could reach a tipping point come budget night. Here are some of his greatest hits.

The caption for the wretched cartoon: The Prime Minister’s lack of honesty and almost delusional disregard for truth has developed such a pattern that it is now revealed as a serious character flaw. Cartoon by Johannes Leak

As an aside, the pond should note that it rarely runs Leak Jr. cartoons.

They only turn up in this sort of wretched propaganda outing.

His presence is only a relief in the sense that it stopped the reptiles from doing a Daily Terror and fitting out Albo in a Nazi uniform, the way they did with former Chairman Rudd.

Whatever the pond thought about Leak Sr. - and the pond thought plenty when he rapidly went downhill after that fall - he at least had technical skills and a facility as a painter.

The pond appreciates that the reptiles stayed loyal to the untalented seed of the apple that didn't fall far from the tree, but loyalty isn't the same as rewarding talent.

Now on with the hatchet job:

It is time to judge Anthony Albanese by his own lofty pledges to political integrity and trust. He set himself a high bar and has manifestly failed to meet it, breaking faith with voters as he has sullied his reputation.
The Prime Minister’s lack of honesty and almost delusional disregard for truth has developed such a pattern that it is now revealed as a serious character flaw. It is also a growing political problem that could reach a tipping point come budget night.
When he addressed the Labor caucus after winning power in 2022 Albanese said: “We want to change the tone of politics in this country. We want to be more inclusive. We want to make sure there’s less shouting and more delivery.” And when he first spoke to parliament as Prime Minister two days later he said: “My colleagues and I want to treat every day in this job in this place in government as an opportunity to deliver for the people of Australia, to fulfil our promises and to prove worthy of the trust that the Australian people have placed in us.”
Since then, this career politician has broken prominent election promises, denied his own misdeeds, flagrantly denied episodes we have all seen and heard, and constantly ducked responsibility for his actions.

What do you do when you have a serve of dog botherer? 

Double down, and serve him up again ... Sky News host Chris Kenny says it’s clear Labor’s budget will contain “tax hikes and broken promises”. “You know the pack drill, they lie to you to get elected, they make promises to get elected, then early in the term they take us all for mugs, break their promises, and sock it to us,” Mr Kenny said. “Anthony Albanese has a very loose relationship with the truth.”

Albo can mount his own defence. 

What's interesting is the way that the dog botherer thoughtfully outlines attack points for the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way ...

“My word is my bond,” he told Mark Riley on the Seven Network’s Spotlight program in July 2022 in an interview testing Albanese over whether he would break his promise to deliver the Coalition’s legislated tax cuts. “I’ve always been a man of my word, and I believe that when you go to an election, and you make commitments, you should stick to them,” he pronounced. He then broke that very promise. See what I mean? He broke his word over the issue he said he would never break his word over.
Let me walk you through more of Albanese’s greatest hits to flesh out this problem. No doubt there would be more.
Albanese on energy policy

For no particular reason, the reptiles interrupted the walk and the sub-heading with a frankly awful piece of Frank ... Artwork by Frank Ling.

The pond thought it remembered this as being distinctly shop worn, and indeed it was ...

Who knew that the reptiles were keen environmentalists, always busily recycling?

The reptiles then allowed the dog botherer only one par...

In December 2021 Albanese declared that under Labor’s energy policies electricity bills “will be $275 for the average house lower in 2025 than today”. It was a promise he and his frontbench colleagues repeated ad nauseam until election day and beyond.

... before inserting another video ...

That represented a desperate attempt by the reptiles to escape the hive mind and be seen and heard on YouTube.

But they've lurked for so long in a paywall ghetto that their attempts at social media are ludicrous and inept. 

It was two days old, and the pond won't be providing a link. Instead the pond ploughed on ...

Five years on it has morphed from a central campaign promise to a sick joke; power prices have moved only in the other direction, with costs increasing three or four times more than the promised reduction. When Albanese was cornered over this failure last year he duckshoved the broken promise, telling journalists repeatedly that it wasn’t a promise but “it was RepuTex’s modelling based on circumstances at the time”. Did he really expect voters to accept that obfuscation? Does he really want to insult voters’ intelligence in that way?
Albanese on antisemitism

The same thing just happened. There was the sub-heading and then the reptiles were off to show another insufferable outing by the lesser junior Leak ... Nothing to see here. Cartoon by Johannes Leak

Even for a standard bit of reptile slopaganda, that 'toon really lowered the tone ...

When Albanese doggedly refused to call a royal commission into the Bondi terrorist attack five months ago, pressure mounted. He resisted escalating calls from a wide range of people for weeks and was still rejecting a royal commission in early January. But when he caved in, on January 8, Albanese pretended he had been working on a royal commission all along. “We’ve also been working through – these recommendations and the terms of reference weren’t done this morning, they were done over a long period of time,” he told the ABC.
We were asked to believe he was preparing a royal commission at the same time he was publicly dismissing the idea. Sure thing.
Some of the less consequential lies from Albanese have been telling, displaying a brazenness that is breathtaking. Even though we have seen and heard episodes with our own eyes and ears, Albanese has tried to reconfigure these events to provide more palatable versions of reality, presumably to suit his narrative.

Time for another victim of a popular reptile jihad ...

Grace Tame, domestic voilence (sic, so and thus) and ‘The Fall’

And then the Joe Biden angle came into play ...

Television cameras caught him plunging dangerously off the back of a stage while campaigning in the Hunter Valley last April. But in Albo’s world it never happened: “I stepped back one step, I didn’t fall off the stage, just one leg went down, but I was sweet.” Got it. I guess we were supposed to believe the cameras had lied.

The reptiles were keen to provide the visual receipts of a crime which almost having a sheet of toilet paper attached to a shoe: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has fallen off a stage while posing for photographs after delivering a speech in Lovedale in the Hunter region of New South Wales. Mr Albanese is fine and has not been injured from the fall.

The dog botherer maintained the rage ...

In a public word association game in February Albanese described Grace Tame as “difficult” and soon copped criticism from Tame and feminist supporters. The following day, instead of merely brushing it off or apologising, Albanese recast what he had said. “Grace Tame you can’t describe in one word,” he revised. “She has had difficult life, and that’s what I was referring to.”
That story would have been difficult for anyone to swallow. I guess we should be relieved that it wasn’t RepuTex’s modelling again.
In 2024 when Albanese took the stage in Canberra at a protest against domestic violence, he said his earlier request to speak had been denied. Event organiser Sarah Williams called this out immediately as a “full out lie” and later appeared on the ABC doubling down on her accusation that Albanese had lied (he argued it was a misunderstanding).
Albanese was booed and heckled in ugly and threatening scenes at Lakemba mosque in March before being led away under tight security. He didn’t like the media coverage and said the event had been misreported.
“Overwhelmingly, the reception was incredibly positive,” he said the next day. “I walked through the crowd to the mosque and not a single person heckled. There were a couple of hecklers inside.” Again, it must have been those lying cameras.
Albanese’s personal political rise

It happened again. First the sub-heading and then a distracting snap... A young Anthony Albanese, left, leads students in a protest atop the University of Sydney clock tower.

That's a reminder of how the reptiles like to live in the past, and brood for all eternity ...

You might as well hold the onion muncher to account for his pugnacious ways...

On with the axe-grinding...

One of Albanese’s problems is that his entire political persona as Prime Minister is an exercise in deception. He is a Labor radical, a leading light of the Socialist Left faction, pretending to be a centrist so he could win the leadership and then present an electable face to mainstream voters.
We are talking about a man who attended anti-Israel protests even as a federal parliamentarian. He was seen yelling, “The response of Israel has been to meet children throwing rocks, with helicopter gunships, with tanks and with missiles.” Yet now as Prime Minister he has tried to argue that “Australia has stood with the people of Israel” when all his actions have done the opposite.
This is emblematic of his life of political contortions. A lifetime in the Socialist Left, for instance, and Albanese must now pass himself off as pro-business; a lifetime of “fighting Tories” and now he pretends to desire bipartisanship.
This shapeshifting must be exhausting and confusing. And perhaps it smooths the path to untruths. Betrayals in politics are so common that the phrase “political lie” is almost tautologous. Yet the degree matters; successful leaders need an element of trust with voters, some plausible link between words and actions.
Kevin Rudd sealed his demise by walking away from his pivotal emissions trading plan; Julia Gillard torched her leadership by breaking her carbon tax promise; and Tony Abbott broke election pledges in a standard “things were worse than we thought” formulation. In Albanese’s early days in office all the heat was on the other side because of the stunning revelations about Scott Morrison’s secret ministries.
Negative gearing and capital gains tax

Not another sub-heading and another distracting collage of a frankly pitiful kind? Albanese with his Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Artwork by Frank Ling

Consider the hatchet well and truly planted, consider the dog botherer in the noble tradition of Lizzie Borden ...

Now Albanese’s record of deceit is starting to register. Turning his back on clear pledges about negative gearing and capital gains tax (policies that helped kill off Bill Shorten’s career) risks a moment of voter reckoning – come Tuesday night the scales could fall from their eyes.
As a minister, Albanese was exposed for plagiarising a political speech from a Hollywood rom-com, The American President. It is surprising this humiliation did not do him more damage.
Now Albanese and his ministers claim to have made $114bn in budget savings while in office. Yet all their budgets have spent more, and spending as a share of GDP has increased by more than 2 per cent – so what are they spinning?
Albanese and Jim Chalmers have made the mistake of believing their own publicity. They claim to be helping young voters but are saddling them with $1 trillion of debt. Albanese has supported the use of punitive taxes to reduce carbon emissions, tobacco use, alcohol consumption and gambling. Yet now Labor seems to suggest that extra taxes on housing will increase supply – it does not compute.
Albanese was interviewed by Seven’s Riley again last Sunday and was pushed on the question of election promises and integrity. “What you’ll see in the budget is a range of measures consistent with the values we took to the election,” said Albanese.
Ah yes, Prime Minister, we should forget your promises and rely on your values. And what, pray tell, would those values be? “It will be a responsible budget that will be consistent with Labor values,” Albanese said this week. It was perhaps the late Graham “Richo” Richardson who described Labor values best with his phrase, “whatever it takes”.

The pond always finds it piquant when a band of liars, thieves and cheats take to hectoring others about values and morality.

It was, after all, News Corp where Richo found a rewarding later life. How they loved the Swiss bank account man. How they made a home for him, how the then Chairman religiously followed his teachings ... 

Congratulations, dog botherer. Your relentless lurch to the extreme far right, your dissing of Sussssan, your support of the hapless beefy boofhead and his minions, and reptile raging about furriners and the white Anglo-Celtic, Judaeo-Xian tradition has finally achieved its dream result - the LibNat apocalypse in Farrer.

And so at last to Polonius ...

The header: Malcolm Roberts’ dangerous equivocation on Bondi conspiracy theory; A senator’s refusal to firmly reject a ‘false flag’ claim raises fresh concerns about antisemitism, political judgment and media failure.

The caption for the snap: Senator Malcolm Roberts faced criticism after declining to unequivocally dismiss a conspiracy theory about the Bondi attack. Picture: Martin Ollman

First of all, pond send Polonius to third place because this is a pitiful straw man exercise. 

Take a certified loon, climate science denialist and conspiracy-inclined theorist, and almost anything sounds sane by comparison... even an outing in the Australian Daily Zionist News.

As correspondents have noted, Polonius is clearly off his oats, and this was yet another reminder.

Secondly, Polonius uses the prize loon to smear others who might want to make a point about the current government of Israel's inclination to ethnic cleansing, continuing to this day, and currently expanding in to Lebanon.

The reptiles thought so little of it that they didn't bother interrupting Polonius with visual distractions, and the pond will mostly  follow suit:

It was May 1, the day after commissioner Virginia Bell handed the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion interim report to the Governor-General, that senator Malcolm Roberts made the news.
The One Nation senator for Queensland was interviewed by online comedian Lisa Jane Spencer for her social media channels. A young (gentile) friend drew this to my attention and there was a brief report on the matter in the Daily Mail.
Early on, Spencer asked Roberts whether he was “worried about foreign influence into our politics”. When the senator answered in the affirmative, he was queried about “One Nation’s thoughts, particularly when it comes to, you know, say, AIJAC or even being involved in the Iran war, Israel and all that”.
AIJAC is the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council headed by my friends Mark Leibler (chairman) and Colin Rubenstein (executive director). Spencer was running the line popularised by John Lyons, the ABC’s Americas editor, in his book Dateline Jerusalem. Lyons named AIJAC as having too much influence over Australian foreign policy.
As I documented when reviewing Lyons’ work in The Sydney Insti­tute Review Online in November 2021, his account of the alleged influence of Jewish Australians in this country is grossly exaggerated. It is not clear whether Spencer is aware of Lyons’ book but his polemical conspiracy theory about AIJAC and all that is capable of having an impact beyond the written word. Which may explain her question to Roberts.

One small interruption.

You see? Polonius has no clue about whether Spencer is aware of Lyons' book, but how easily she can be slotted in with Roberts as a conspiracy theorist, which "may explain" why Polonius felt so free and easy in his defaming of Lyons ... it being a matter of observable (Minns) opinion as to wether certain members of the Jewish lobby hold sway over governments, and that opinion in no way a conspiracy theory when the totality of examples are considered.

On with this entry in the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

But then the matter became more serious. Spencer said: “I was going to ask one more question on the Israel thing. Do you think that Bondi was a false flag?” The Britannica website defines a false flag operation as a “harmful, often militant, event perpetrated by someone other than the person or group responsible for it”.
In other words, false flag operations occur when a group wants to attract sympathy for itself. The implication in Spencer’s question is that Israeli operatives and/or Jewish Australians organised the Bondi massacre in which 15 individuals died, most of whom were Jews, to generate support.
This was a despicable implication. The obvious answer to the question was an emphatic “No”. But Roberts could not quite bring himself to do so. His immediate response was to say: “I haven’t got the evidence. I doubt whether it’s a false flag, but I could be” – following which he was interrupted.
Then Spencer said it was all a “bit suss” when legislation on guns and hate laws followed the Bondi massacre. Roberts responded: “You asked me if I thought it was a false flag. If I make a statement, it’s got to be backed by fact. I don’t have the facts yet. I’m not ruling it out – you’ll notice that.”
Yes, it was noticed. Now, Roberts shows no evidence of being antisemitic. But he is at best naive. Or perhaps he did not want to disagree with Spencer. In any event, it was an unwise and dangerous comment to make. Especially since the Queensland senator is well qualified for his position – except for the fact he lacks judgment.
However, to be fair, Pauline Hanson has demonstrated support for the Jewish Australian com­munity, as has her fellow One Nation parliamentarian Barnaby Joyce.
There has been some unjust criticism of the royal commission following its interim report. Some commentators have suggested that it has downplayed the significance of antisemitism in Australia. This is not so. There are close to 200 references to Jew/Jewish/Jewry etc and 350 references to antisemitism/antisemitic in the interim report. There are only a couple of references to Islamophobic or Islamophobia.
Moreover, it is only now that the royal commission is hearing evidence of the experiences of Jewish Australians with respect to antisemitism. This has increased dramatically in Australia since Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, and the antisemitic and anti-Israel protests that took place in subsequent days, especially in Sydney.
The interim report focused primarily on examining the circumstances surrounding the anti­semitic terrorist attack on December 14. However, the royal commission’s letters patent refers to “the necessity for the inquiry to be conducted in a manner that does not occasion prejudice to current or future criminal proceedings on national security or undermine social cohesion”. That’s understandable. It is in Australia’s interest that any accused person receives a fair trial.
What the interim report makes clear is that in August 2024 ASIO upgraded the chance of a terrorist attack in Australia from possible to probable. ASIO also warned in early December 2025 of the “terrorism threat to crowded places and religious events over the 2025-26 holiday period”. In 2024 ASIO warned of attacks on Jewish and Christian celebrations.
It is also clear that NSW Police did not anticipate the risk of a terrorist attack when Australians were celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach on December 14.
The royal commission’s interim report documents that the response by NSW Police to the request by NSW Jewish Community Security Group for assistance with security was for a command inspector to “take a car crew or two with you and provide a HVP (high visibility policing) presence”. The instruction continued: “No need to stay the entire duration, but your presence will ensure the community feel safe.”
The NSW police officers who attended the Bondi celebration acted with considerable bravery when the massacre began. But they were outgunned before reinforcements arrived. It is not an act of hindsight to state that the warnings of ASIO in general and the NSW Jewish community in particular were not acted upon.
Why was this so? The answer seems to be that the relevant authorities did not take the pre-December 14 attacks on the Jewish community seriously enough. Here the media should take some responsibility.
As Michael Gawenda wrote on these pages last Saturday, the mainstream media – the ABC, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Guardian Australia – downplayed the reality of violent antisemitism in Australia. For example, Four Corners did not cover the issue between October 2023 and December 2025.
It is this form of denial that makes possible Spencer’s bigoted conspiracy theory and Roberts’ foolishness in not taking a stand for evidence over prejudice.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Ah, Michael Gawenda. 

What a pathetic source for Polonius to cite, but it does give the pond a chance to bookend the weekend.

Thanks to the venerable Meade, the pond started with Journalism in decline: a response to Michael Gawenda

That evoking of a notoriously incompetent member of the Jewish lobby gives the pond a chance to close proceedings with Jeff Sparrow's opening ...

They can rail, deflect, deny and downplay all they like, but what's happening in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank is there for all to see ...

A reminder: like minds flock together when it comes to the killing fields ...

It's great days in King Donald's America, what with Iran so docile and the bonespurs-clad warrior ready to take a triumphal march through his new arch ... and even better days for Scottish independence...