In which the bromancer goes rabid and bites the mad king, while Dame Slap stays rabid and savages Malware ...

 

This day the lizard Oz jihad on Jimbo cranked up another notch (it's way beyond eleven):

SIGNATURE SPEECH
‘We shouldn’t turn on fellow Aussies,’ says Chalmers but PM undermines Jim
The Treasurer warned left-wing activists not to campaign against One Nation voters from a position of ‘smug moral superiority’, but an Anthony Albanese anecdote undermined his Treasurer.
By Greg Brown

Talk about an easy target for a Brownie bushwhacking...

Jim Chalmers has warned left-wing activists not to campaign against One Nation from a position of “smug moral superiority”, declaring his budget of tax hikes was needed to stem the voter drift to the “far right” as it showed Labor was up-ending the status quo.
Declaring his lifetime in the battler suburb of Logan meant he “carried with me” a “genuine respect and understanding”, the Treasurer said supporters were “mourning a loss of control” and treated “feelings … as real as facts” but counselled that Labor “shouldn’t turn on them”.
The significant speech was delivered minutes before Anthony Albanese publicly admitted to rolling his Treasurer and personally intervening to extend the deadline for businesses to pay their tax bills via credit card.

And so on, and moving quickly along to avoid the sight of roadkill, and with the reptiles having spent the last week pumping up the Josh volume (it was way beyond eleven), it was left to Geoff to chamber a round at him ...

COMMENTARY by GEOFF CHAMBERS
Frydenberg to come riding back? Hold your horses
Is Josh Frydenberg back in federal politics? It’s not a done deal yet in the former Liberal treasurer’s mind
Josh Frydenberg is expected to poll and focus group every nook and cranny across Kew, Hawthorn and Camberwell before deciding to run against his Teal nemesis Monique Ryan in 2028.

Who cares, who gives a FF? Is he attempting some modern version of a vacillating Hamlet?

Beyond the valley of the pallid, the insipid, the ineffectual and the weak-kneed, while over on the extreme far right, the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap was conducting her own personal jihad against Malware...

The pond just had to savour that snap of a preening Malware, jostling up against a man who's out of his depth ...

As for the actual content, thank the long absent lord for the intermittent archive ...

The ‘broad church’ is in ruins. What now for the Libs?
One simple thing would be to expel Malcolm Turnbull from the party. If he wants to play martyr, let him. It can’t be any worse than it is right now.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

As soon as a scribbler insists on "MUST", the pond knows that it must ignore the blather, but the pond is prepared to go as far as a teaser trailer ...

Sigh, not the "climate ideology" again, said by a scribbler without a 'science' bone in her denialist body.

The pond had not the slightest interest in defending Malware, nor in this jihad against him, nor the blinkered bigotry involved in it ... but, as always, Dame Slap managed an astonishing display of projection ...

That screen cap missed the barking mad nub of it ...

Liberals took leadership roles championing the voice was a betrayal of the most basic tenet for conservatives: that every human being must be treated equally under our founding document, the Constitution.
If you didn’t support the dogma on net zero, you were treated as a philistine. If you didn’t agree with the voice, you were likely labelled a racist.
This is how the left treats freedom of speech – agree with it, or it will shame you into silence or submission.
The complete surrender of the Liberal Party on traditional centre-right cultural issues was so abject that some Liberals – even former prime ministers – adopted a deliberate strategy.
Don’t talk about the culture wars, they said. Instead, discussing immigration became racist, expressing gender-critical views was hateful and questioning DEI was straight-out oppression.
The problem for the Liberal Party is its left flank. Can we please stop calling them “moderates”; there is nothing moderate about them. More comfortable shuffling around the left ecosystem of Labor-Green-teals, they cannot avoid responsibility for the cultural and economic carnage under way in this country.

Join with Dame Slap and go further right, beefy boofhead, and soon too you'll be donning a MAGA cap and surrounded by shadowy figures ...

Luckily the bromancer was on hand to save the pond from the madness ...

Watching him cope with what Faux Noise has bequeathed to the world should become a national sport, as the reptiles gave him a big splash...

The reptiles' artwork is achieving new levels of AI brilliance on a daily basis ...

The header: By Greg Sheridan Foreign Editor
Donald Trump’s making the worst decisions of his US presidency

The pleasure of a bot voice read: Listen to this article
5 min

Huzzah, a return of Frank with his usual frankly feeble collage, with a meaning and significance impossible to decipher: Donald Trump stands defiant amid swirling symbols of conflict. Pictures: iStock. Artwork: Frank Ling

The desperate cry from behind the paywall: Make us preferred on Google

Usually the bromancer tries a both siderist tack. You know, King Donald has done some good things, but some of his decisions have been mildly unfortunate.

Not so this day. The bromancer was beside himself, quivering with indignation, though the sight of a jelly thinking it had a spine might unnerve some...

Under the twin pressures of looming mid-term congressional elections, and the physical and intellectual decline which almost always begins to afflict men in their ninth decade, Donald Trump has in the last few days made the worst decisions of his presidency, if not his entire life.
One of the worst things Trump has ever done as president is to reverse course on Russia and Ukraine and reward Vladimir Putin for nearly five years of murderous aggression against Ukraine.
Trump has suspended US sanctions against Russia so that it can sell several hundred thousand barrels of diesel to the US and other parties. This suggests how desperate Trump is politically. He says this will reduce US fuel prices. In fact the Russian supplies are probably not big enough to affect US retail prices, certainly not before the mid-terms on November 3. Trump desperately wanted something to announce.
Consider the strategic cost of the incoherence of US policy and the shocking strategic betrayal of Ukraine. Barely five minutes ago Washington was going to levy punitive sanctions against India for buying Russian oil and thereby contributing to Moscow’s war effort.
Now that Trump needs the fuel, all that’s thrown in the trash can.
Not to mention that this is a morally indefensible and contemptible way for the US to treat its ally, Ukraine.

Not before time there came an AV distraction ...

Next video thumbnail
Trump fumes over the ‘ridiculous’ war as Putin and Zelensky ‘don’t know how to make a deal’
US President Donald Trump expresses frustration against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for ‘not knowing how to make a deal’ over the ongoing war. “Last month, they lost 32,000 people mostly soldiers … it’s ridiculous that war,” Mr Trump said. “I settled eight wars … I thought this would be one of the easier ones but it’s not. “We’re going to get that deal done.”

The bromancer carried on ranting ...

Russia invaded Ukraine without any cause or justification. This is black and white. Ukraine fought back heroically and received help from the US and Europe. An American leader with one scrap of decency would help raise the cost of Moscow’s aggression and persuade it to agree a ceasefire.
Trump’s only effort to exert leverage, instead, is against Ukraine.
Trump wants Ukraine to give up territory within the Donbas, and beyond, which Moscow has been unable to take by military force. Putin has apparently told Trump that if Ukraine does that, he’ll end the war.
But this would leave Ukraine gravely at risk strategically, behind not only reduced but less defensible borders, and open to subsequent Russian invasion after the Kremlin has a few years to recover and digest its winnings.
The single most repellent factor in Trump’s political persona is his sycophancy towards powerful dictators – Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un. He’ll act against weak dictators like Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and he thought he could get a quick victory in Iran. But strong man dictators get nothing but servile deference from Trump, interspersed with very occasional bouts of fatuous bluster.
Perhaps nothing more fully indicates his increasingly erratic mixture of hubris, ego, miscalculation and personalised magical thinking than Trump announcing that Russia and Ukraine had agreed on a ceasefire of strikes against each others’ energy infrastructure.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky had no warning of such an announcement. If Putin made some kind of nod to Trump in a private telephone conversation, the Russians nonetheless showed the contempt in which he holds Trump by bombing Ukrainian energy targets hours after Trump’s announcement.
Putin humiliated Trump, so naturally Trump lashed out at Zelensky. Trump demanded Zelensky be replaced as president, a demand previously made only by Putin. Trump’s officials threatened to refuse even to allow European governments to buy US weapons for Ukraine, and to cut off intelligence from Ukraine.

Say what? If Putin made some kind of nod to Trump in a private telephone conversation...

WTF?

Still pandering? Still unable to cope? 

He lied, he made it up, he's in the grip of sundowning dementia ...

"Well, they agreed. You know why? ... 'I said you agree'" 

He was talking to himself in the wee witching hours, while between Truth Social posts.

Cue a snap of the demented king ...Trump wants Ukraine to give up territory within the Donbas, and beyond, which Moscow has been unable to take by military force. Picture: AFP

All the same, the bromancer's turning continued in a most satisfying way ...

Trump is intimidating US allies, fawning over US enemies. It’s ugly and counter-productive.
This is Trump behaving much worse than in his first term – indeed undoing allied co-operation projects he prosecuted in his first term – much worse even than in the first 18 months of this term. Can Trump no longer handle pressure? Is frustration with the way the world refuses to co-operate with his delusions now leading him into policy by wild temper tantrum?
These are gravely worrying times for US allies, which should nonetheless keep the alliance structures in place in the hope that Trump settles down, and alliance mechanisms can be fully revived after Trump’s gone.
But in some ways the most grotesque Trump move in recent days was allowing Pete Hegseth, who has no business being US Defence Secretary, to announce that Washington would livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of a terrorist mass shooting at a US military base in 2009.
Australians, most Western citizens, no longer support the death penalty. However, it has wide support in the US; 27 US states still practice it. Bill Clinton authorised executions when as Arkansas governor.
However, to conduct an execution publicly is immoral and profoundly offensive. It will make the executed terrorist a hero among jihadists everywhere and provide them with priceless propaganda footage. It also gravely coarsens American life. And it’s a fundamental abuse of human rights.
Even a prisoner to be executed is a human being and deserves to have his human dignity respected. Civilised societies like the US do not, as a matter of policy, taunt, torture and publicly humiliate prisoners. This is just sick, a graver offence to civilised values than anything Trump has come up with previously.
If this is what the next two years of Trump look like, we’re entering dark times.

"Entering", bromancer? 

It's been dark times these past ten years, thanks to you bloody Murdochians ... but as a result of the bromancer's turning, the hive mind began to show a dangerous tendency towards splitting and schism ...

The pond almost fainted when QLA replied to Ian with a dire heretical answer: "Yes"!

What a relief to see a few of the hive mind stayed solid, even as it came to this in the lizard Oz. 

Relax Ian, settle back for a fun reversion to Roman times:

What else?

Well there was Nick, but the pond is always inclined to think he should get nicked...

The Greens denounce US-style ‘imperialism’… then embrace it
They need the kind of politics capable of speaking to people outside activist group chats.
By Nick Dyrenfurth
Contributor

It was just the usual serve of Zionism, servicing the needs of the Australian Daily Zionist News, and a reminder of how John Curtin must be revolving in his grave at a furious pace ...

Oh and the reptiles found space for Jane Hume, but she would say this, wouldn't she?

Labor’s climate red tape is a killer for small business
Australia’s businesses should be building our prosperity, not buried in paperwork.
By Jane Hume
Contributor

Climate change? Climate science? The impact of the changing climate on all forms of business, long, short, and tall?

Go whistle at the wind ...

And while embracing AI and bots and importuning Google to pay attention, the reptiles felt brave enough to serve up a little AI bashing, apparently unaware that refusing to use "SI" made them the enemy of the people ...

I’ve worked in AI for years. The tech giants are taking us for a ride
What the government is proposing is extremely unpopular, with virtually no supporters but the AI companies themselves.
By Ed Newton-Rex

There was an infallible Pope for that ...

Eric was also briefly over on the extreme far right, a rare concession to the lizard Oz's business coverage ...

‘Shotgun wedding’: Inside the ASX’s bitter biotech stand-off
Two companies united by the goal of saving lives are at war with each other in an ASX power struggle involving billionaires, a fund manager kingmaker and a mystery stakeholder.
By Eric Johnston
Associate Editor

The pond rushed through that mob, but the least the pond can do is reassure the MAGA-fied lizard Oz hive mind that some things were still normal, in their usual abnormal way ...

Know who else isn't a member? Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and North Korea, fine company for the reptiles ...

And with that noted, and as the pond will shortly be signing off as it makes a move to Pixie Paddocks (aka Fairy Meadowns), the pond wanted to save a little space in order to point of a few Fintan O'Toole moments.

The pond has always had a soft spot for Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB, a way to recover some brain cells after hard days hitting the lizard Oz books.

Gulliver’s Warning
Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak. (*intermittent archive link)

In celebrating one of the pond's favourite books, Fintan also managed to put in the boot ...

...The reactionary politics of today is a politics of the sublime—pain invoked, pain distanced, pain rendered politically delightful. This was true of Brexit, which depended on invoking an idea of Britain (in fact a free and prosperous country) as enslaved and oppressed by the European Union. And it is true of Trump. Before him American political rhetoric (including conservative rhetoric) had a grammar of uplift—the American Dream, Kennedy’s New Frontier, Reagan’s Morning in America, Obama’s arc of history bending toward justice. But Trump, from the beginning of his campaign in 2015, went for the full sublime. He created a vision of America as a hellhole—what he called in his first inaugural address “American carnage.” He imagined it for his fans as a country on the verge of obliteration. But he also presented, of course, a dramatic denouement: the appearance of what Gulliver called “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World” to transform this abjection into its opposite—greatness.

And he was in fine form when the hard copy of the magazine arrived in the letterbox early this week ...

Devils in America
The lessons that Donald Trump learned from Roy Cohn—lie, cheat, engage in unlimited corruption—now shape official government policy in the US. (*intermittent archive link)

The book reviewed:

American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump
by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark
Scribner, 509 pp., $32.00

Fintan provided a timely reminder that the rot in American politics goes way back to the 1950s, and to the deeply closeted Roy Cohn (shades of the parrot),, the mad king's McCarthyist mentor:

...In 2017 Trump famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The answer stares at him from the mirror: he is his own Roy Cohn. Though the influence of his lawyer and fixer on the young Trump is common knowledge, not the least of the virtues of Bird’s punchy, racy, and appropriately nauseating new biography is the renewed force it gives to this cliché. There is something eerie about the thoroughness of Trump’s mimicry of Cohn’s way of dealing with the world: lie relentlessly, refuse to pay small bills, respond to all criticism with smears and threats, claim all defeats as triumphs, sue everybody all the time, weaponize the law and, when you can, the entire justice system, learn from the Mafia, use the phone to avoid leaving a paper trail, always present your highly privileged self as a victim of the elites, divide the world into allies to be used and enemies to be abused, into the winners who must be flattered and the losers who are there to be exploited in every imaginable way.
Trump’s language is Cohn’s language (always preface a big lie with “if you wanna know the truth”) and so is his whole style of public speaking—Cohn taught him to ad lib everything. Above all, Trump learned one very big thing from Cohn: that the veneer of morality in the American upper class is very thin. Cohn proved conclusively that there is no limit to its tolerance for corruption. Trump got that message—and so did Jeffrey Epstein.

These were just a few of the delicacies served up ...

...Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, makes Cohn a full-on deconstructionist who tells the young Trump that “there is no right and wrong. There is no morality. There is no Truth with a capital T. It’s a construct. It’s a fiction. It’s manmade…. You create your own reality.” And, one might add, your own unreality. More than anything else, Cohn was a swindler, and like all good con men he knew how to disappear from the domain of hard facts. Bird writes that “he left behind no private papers, not even an archive of his legal career. He had destroyed just about everything.”

...Just as Cohn defied the distinctions between reality and unreality and between life and death, he also broke down the divisions between fame and infamy. He grasped with remarkable clarity the truth that American celebrity has no moral content. When Trump claimed in the 2005 pussygate tapes that “when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” he was merely stating the facts as Cohn had shown them to be. Cohn made himself, first and foremost, a star. After that, none of his crimes ever really mattered, except in the sense that notoriety was even more valuable than adulation.

...For the rich and famous, Cohn thus combined the magnetic attractions of both obscenity and obscurity. Everyone knew at some level that he was a very nasty piece of work but everyone believed that, like some black magician, he was able to command the forces of darkness. It was always better to have Satan in your corner—even if the devil was as likely to defraud you as to help you.
And “everyone” means an astonishing range of the rich and famous: from the Catholic archdiocese of New York (Cohn was close to Cardinal Francis Spellman and his successor, Cardinal Terence Cooke) to Mafia hoodlums like “Fat Tony” Salerno and Carmine Galante; from his great friend Si Newhouse, the owner of Condé Nast, to Bianca Jagger (whose divorce from Mick he handled); from Rupert Murdoch to Estée Lauder, from the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to the owners of Studio 54, the nightclub at which he himself was a fixture. Nancy Reagan called him often from the White House because he could supply a fix of her favorite drug: gossip. Cohn became the connective tissue of New York society: at his parties Andy Warhol could meet Trump (whom he called “really good-looking…. He’s a butch guy”) or Chuck Schumer.

And this was the closer ...

...The gay community in Provincetown was disgusted by the sight of Cohn with underage boys on his yacht. Disturbingly, Bird, ignoring the dynamics of sex trafficking, refers to these children as “hustlers,” a term he would surely not apply to Epstein’s victims. But he does give a shocking account of the experiences of Richard Kerr, who from the age of eight was incarcerated in the notorious Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast, which was run by pedophiles with alleged links to British intelligence. Kerr says that when he was sixteen he was trafficked to have sex with Cohn in Venice.
The account is entirely credible, but it will fall back into the category of rumor, gossip, innuendo. Even if it is true, how could the rich and famous and the righteous Republicans for whom Cohn is still a patriotic hero possibly have known such things? For them, it was enough to know that Cohn’s unscrupulous brutality was at their service. In everything he did, he confirmed for them the only truth they ever really wanted to know: that, in the end, there is only power. In his all-inclusive depravity, he liberated them from the nagging burdens of morality. A world in which Cohn could thrive was a world in which truth and justice were indeed mere constructs.
Bird’s horrifying biography makes the ultimate political triumph of this malevolence seem far less surprising. In Angels in America, Kushner has Cohn ascend, after his crucifixion, to heaven and then return “dressed in a fabulous floor-length black velvet robe de chambre.” He must surely now come down from wherever he is and enter the President’s Bedroom on the second floor of the White House, in the early hours when the Truth Social posts have stopped, to sit quietly by the bed and relish his vindication. He is the founding father of the rotten republic.

And that's just the beginnings of why the Unites States doesn't want the scrutiny of an international court, but does want to stage public executions ...

The pond revisited that movie recently, and decided it was inclined to be tortured and overwrought, but with some tidy performances ...

And now, as talk of public executions is all the go, and stonings in the square is the thing du jour in federal parliament (well played Liberal MP Angie Bell), why not go the full Old Testament hog?