A big, not so beautiful book of reptiles, foreign edition, with the bromancer and "Ned" leading the way ...

 

Inescapable.

Even the local reptiles couldn't look away from the fruits of News Corporation's American endeavours.

A little shiver of delight ran through the pond reading about simpleton Sharri, full, complete and utter disrespect, quailing and wailing, as in the Weekly Beast ...

‘Crushing and terrifying’ midterms result leaves media in fear of civilisation and capitalism crumbling
Caitlin Cassidy

...The Australian, in a frenzy of alliteration, called it the “Donald deflation” and a “MAGA mauling”, brought on by “Trump the trasher”.
The national broadsheet also found room on the front for a piece on Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, headlined “Far out: far-left radical to be first Muslim senator”.
El-Sayed’s victory had some commentators proclaiming the end of western civilisation. Over at News24, Sharri Markson began her program with: “Far-left extremist Abdul El-Sayed wins in Michigan, in a shocking result.
“This is the most crushing and terrifying result of the evening,” she continued, going on to repeat a false claim that El-Sayed has links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“How can Americans vote for an anti-western, anti-American lunatic, as Trump describes him? What does this say about American values, and about the strength of western civilisation? You can’t help but worry that it’s crumbling, and capitalism with it.”
The “extremist” platform of El-Sayed, a former county health official who describes himself as a “capitalist who understands how capitalism works”, includes backing universal healthcare and regulating monopolies, as well as ending US military aid to Israel, while calling its war in Gaza a genocide.

If El-Sayed can carry out another part of his platform - dethrone Chuck Schumer and his imaginary friends - and the pond's delight will be complete ... Chuck Schumer should quit – but would his imaginary friends agree?

The pond will report on a couple of the local jihadists carrying on standard local jihads on the morrow, but for the moment, the pond must go with the flow, and brood about local reptiles brooding about what News Corporation helped wrought.

The pond makes no apologies for length - this is a beautiful bumper book for boy and girl herpetologists - and what better way to begin the flow than with a lengthy urination by the bromancer?

It's in the small print, but warning, the reptiles timed this as a ten minute read, which is way above the time taken for a standard sex act by the average Australian male, so be cautious ...

Good old bromancer, always looking on the bright side of life, but currently the United States hasn't any discernible means of correcting the excesses of a mad king, deep in the grip of dementia, and able to make all kinds of forays into foreign affairs, not least offering covert and overt support to said Vlad the sociopath, while carrying on his own foreign adventures, as the pitiful and the cowardly try to bail out from the adventures they offered their full support for ...

Did the pond mention that there would be cartoons as well as the lengthy and turgid exegesis?

Now marvel at the way that the bromancer can't contain two conflicting thoughts in his head.

Apparently the mad king is a much diminished figure. Apparently at the same time, he'll have the power to attempt spectacular and foolish things ...(oh and the weakness will also be a danger)...

The pond has already covered the couch molester with a cartoon. 

What to say about the bromancer's analysis? Much the same as might be said about former Texas governors ...

Truth to tell, without a few 'toons, the pond would find this a hard ride ...as the bromancer, in classic Australian Daily Zionist News style, does his best to exonerate Benji for his role in the Iran folly ...

Is there anything more shocking than all of that?

Perhaps the way that the facilitators and enablers at Faux Noise - the bromancer's American kissing cousins - stayed loyal right up to the bitter end, and were rewarded by a bigly drop in ratings and rats in the far right ranks rushing to allocate blame ...

The pond would have loved to share more of the infighting and ankle biting, but it's there at Media Matters ...

“A clown show”: The right-wing media blame game over the midterms is full steam ahead
Reeling from Republican losses, conservative hosts blamed each other, the party, and Donald Trump himself
Written by Noah VanDowe & Zachary Pleat

Never mind, the pond is stuck with the bromancer ...almost bringing himself to say that the mad king was almost worse than Biden (as if such a thing could be):

Ross Douthat? Didn't he head off to help ruin CBS?

...Despite being an early skeptic of Donald Trump’s politics and popularity, Douthat has since downplayed the president’s authoritarian and fascist tendencies while attempting to rationalize Trump’s behavior.

He has also criticized Democrats for their “resistance” showcases, spurring condemnation from those on the left that Douthat has been incorporated into a sort of “anti-anti-Trump” persona among the American intelligentsia, apparently ready to castigate Trump’s critics even as he himself scrutinizes the president and his policies.

Good enough to score a sit down with the mad king ...as the reptiles decided to add to the burden of the read with a couple of graphs ...as if wading through fundie tykes blathering on about core Western values wasn't enough to produce a Technicolor yawn ...

"The brilliant Rod Dreher...?"

That lickspittle fellow traveller supinely selling his soul?

...Dreher's experience as a 2021 fellow at Hungary's Danube Institute and his observation of Viktor Orbán's government persuaded him that Christian conservatives could still win and wield substantial political power. "Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture", Dreher told The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz in 2022. "It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it's serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness." Dreher also argued that the U.S. Republican Party needs "a leader with Orbán's vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals' toes." (much more, and even worse, at his wiki)

With all these fundie tykes floating about, it's inevitable that the bromancer would reveal his Islamophobia and turn his piece into a medieval crusade ... with an image designed to terrify and horrify the hive mind ...

The bromancer can never help himself... Trump had many good instincts. 

Yeah, sure ...

The pond shouldn't leave the bromancer's analysis without noting the way that many in the hive mind were determined to stay loyal ...

That's the spirit "C", doing an "O" for the mad king ...

And so to "Ned", and the good news is that this Everest was remarkably short and easy, as if for once words had failed the portentous, pompous pundit ...

Eek, it's Bond ... Caleb Bond ...

Well he's not going to be the new one ... so on with "Ned", with Hannity making a guest appearance, to remind the pond of the many ways and means the Murdochians helped stuff the Unites States...

Stop right there. Full marks? The excesses of progressive culture? Suck on it "Ned" ...

Cruelty has always been a feature ... and the pond was reminded of a couple in recent readings...

Why Immigration Agents Don’t Quit in Protest

How a culture of dehumanization and denial keeps ICE and Border Patrol personnel “at war with an enemy that does not fight back.”(*intermittent archive link)

By Francisco Cantú

...In early 2026, after the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during Operation Metro Surge, in Minneapolis, the journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that many immigration agents were “getting seriously paranoid” about the public backlash to the shootings. The operation was so unpopular with the rank and file that Border Patrol and ICE struggled to find personnel for the deployment. By July, morale among immigration officers had dipped below its nadir during the Biden Administration, with agents now complaining of being overextended, inundated with novice recruits, and undermined by inflammatory rhetoric from on high. Agents said that they had previously found motivation in their jobs by “being able to stop bad people and narcotics from coming in,” and expressed frustration that the Administration’s political posturing was distracting from their duty to “protect the public” and to focus on “the very worst of the worst.”

The sociologist Irene Vega, in her 2025 book “Bordering on Indifference,” draws on a series of interviews with Border Patrol and ICE agents to analyze the “moral economy” of the immigration-enforcement workforce. From the moment agents arrive at the federal law-enforcement academy, she writes, they “are trained and socialized as police officers, and taught that their raison d’être is to protect America by preventing the entrance and executing the removal of noncitizens deemed unwanted by the state.” The inherently bureaucratic nature of enforcing immigration law has always been at odds with the paramilitary image that is sold to most recruits. Agents prepare for violent criminal encounters and cultivate a “warrior mentality” despite the fact that they are most often, as Vega writes, “at war with an enemy that does not fight back.”

Many agents who have quit for moral reasons cite this tension. In a 2019 article for The American Scholar, Brendan Lenihan, a former Border Patrol agent, wrote, “The federal government taught me how to shoot an assault rifle from a moving vehicle and how to fast-rope from a hovering helicopter, but never did anyone explain how to go home at the end of a shift and forget about the migrants I’d apprehended and their stories.” As with Childress, the accumulation of nonthreatening encounters eventually made his job untenable. “I left the Border Patrol because I was exhausted by the tragic stories,” he wrote, “and because the more I saw, the less affected I was by events that had once seemed shocking.”

How is it, then, that so few agents seem to arrive at this moral breaking point? Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown. It has become customary for agents to mask their faces from public view—D.H.S. maintains that this is to prevent doxing, but it is also emblematic of a growing perception of this work as shameful. In off-duty social situations, agents often obscure what they do to avoid awkwardness and scorn, even hiding the nature of their employment on dating apps. “We can’t always support what happens just because it’s one of us,” a Border Patrol agent had told a private group chat in the wake of Pretti’s killing. And yet, even as their work has grown increasingly cruel, there has been no exodus of agents who reject it.

And so on, and now the mad king has replaced Wildes with Stephen Miller so that the cruelty can continue, while over in The Bulwark Anderew Eggers noted the routine casual cruelty directed at TG folk, something the reptiles at the lizard Oz also have an appetite for ...

...Which is exactly why the issue proved so useless for Trump and Republicans in 2026. They forgot that the whole implicit promise of their own anti-trans stuff in 2024 was about building a case that they were better equipped than Democrats to deliver on affordability—a case that they then spent two years blowing up. Instead, Republicans somehow got it in their heads that what voters wanted was a bunch of gratuitous cruelty against trans people just for the sake of it: We can say “retard,” “pussy,” and “tranny” again! Use AI to put James Talarico in a dress in ads and dub Annie Andrews “Tranny Annie”—that ought to do the trick.

What a shock, in retrospect, that it blew up on them so spectacularly.

And yet Stephen Miller is now the CoS. There's cosplay for you ... and then came relief. A final short gobbet ...

Again the pond should note the deep ambivalence in the hive mind, shown in a sample of comments attached to "Ned's" outing ...

And so to the lizard Oz Editorialist, with quirky opening snap ...

The lizard Oz editorialist was ambivalent ...but as they've got their caps-hating AI bot well trained ...

... why should the pond think the lizard Oz editorialist would be any better? 

Dissemble away ...

And now Stephen Miller is the CoS ...and maybe it wasn't an election, so much as a jail break ...

The pond realises that it's now officially way over length, but as he's thematically related, the pond should give Stewie a break, even as he rabbits on at great length ...

The point is that perversely Stewie manages to offer a spotlight on the incredible futility and gigantic waste involved in the AUKUS scheme...

Well yes, all that and more ...but the reptiles preferred to fling in a gif of a missile on the move ...

Stewie was on the side of the subs... (and a war with China, though perhaps not by this Xmas) ...

Um, maybe disentangle those bases? Or should we experience Musk Ukraine syndrome?

The reptiles flung in a reminder ...

Stewie had just a couple of shorter gobbets left in him ...

The pond interrupted there so it could admire the billy goat butt dressed as an "However"... as Stewie reluctantly admitted a few saucy doubts and fears ...

The pond isn't too worried about "people power", not when the subs show promises to be the new Snowy 2.0 of defence projects ...

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is the new CoS, and just as in the failing days of the Roman emperors, what a spectacle there'll be for the next few years, with Australia tailing along behind, ready to suck up whatever kicks come our way ...

And the kicks keep on coming ...