In which the war consumes the reptiles, but the pond finds relief with the Lynch Mob, the lizard Oz editorialist and Major Mitchell ...

 

The pond had to spend the weekend explaining the world to snowflakes and pussies.

Just look at the amazing track record, there for all to see and celebrate. 

After the war, Vietnam was transformed into a vibrant democracy, while Iraq has been a stunning success - it's the new home for ISIL - and just look at the way that Islamic thinking has been banished from Syria. 

The Taliban were given a sound thrashing, which improved the mood of neighbours such as Pakistan, while Afghani women have been left counting the many benefits.

As well as sorting eight or nine wars - the count varies - the current US administration solved the invasion by Vlad the sociopath of Ukraine on the first day in office; persuaded North Korea to give up nuclear weapons; made China give up its designs on Taiwan; and turned the western hemisphere (so some call it) into a paradise for democracy free of any perverted thinking about the Trumpstein files, with Venezuela in hand, Cuba next, and Canada destined to be annexed as the 51st state no later than Xmas.

Truly as the King once noted, there's nothing like skilled diplomacy over weakness:

 (found here)

Truly this man deserves a dozen FIFA peace prizes - peace through war - and what a shame he wasn't elevated to sit beside Henry Kissinger, and instead had to be content with stolen valour and a purloined medal.

Thanks to the Bulwark mob, the pond was pointed to news of yet another business triumph:

For 2025, TMTG had a $712.3 million consolidated net loss, most of which comprised unrealized losses stemming from a drop in the price of digital assets and digital asset related securities. This included non-cash losses related to changes in the fair value of digital assets and digital assets pledged ($403.2 million) and non-cash losses stemming from the fair value mark to market of digital asset related securities ($178.8 million). The figure also includes $59.2 million in non-cash stock-based compensation and $27.0 million in non-cash interest expense on outstanding debt, leading to consolidated adjusted EBITDA loss of $664.4 million. The Company posted $3.7 million in revenue for the year. (here)

Revenue of $3.7 million against a $712.3 million loss?! 

Put that in your Truth Social trading pipe and smoke it.

As for the current imbroglio, the pond had to gingerly step past news of saucy doubts and fears at Faux Noise:

Fox News Turns on Trump for ‘Dangerous’ War Mistake

Inevitably the reptiles at the lizard Oz were full of it early this morning, and no doubt will be full of it for days to come.

There was no way the pond could cover all of it.

The pond can at least note the sniping at the cardigan wearers:

Media Diary
ABC reporter brands PM’s Iran statement ‘political propaganda’
The ABC’s so-called star reporters seemingly have a secret insight into what the nation’s political powerbrokers truly believe.
By Steve Jackson

Awkward, what with the reptiles being forced to defend Albo's mob against the unruly mob at the ABC (you can see Lyons make the unexceptional point that Albo was craven and King Donald has been played by Benji at YouTube - the pond gave the video a "like", an extremely rare thing when it comes to the ABC on YouTube).

And the pond should note the visual triumphalism made explicit in the opening collage in the lesser Kelly gang member's report:

Say what? No credit for that visually compelling compile? Never mind, fish and chip wrappings as events overtake the reporting.

Cam was also on hand ...

A weakened Iran will have ripple effects across the Middle East 
The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei marks the beginning of a brazen military offensive that could reshape Middle East power dynamics foreve
Chief International Correspondent
By Cameron Stewart

A ripple effect? Who would have thunk it?

And Saba Vasefi closed off her bout of triumphalism with a somewhat curious phrasing ...

'Mouse Ali' was a murderous tyrant – good riddance to him
The paradox of this moment is that the celebration is smothered in smoke; the jubilation is happening under bombardment. But it cannot silence the joy Iranians now feel at home and across the world.
By Saba Vasefi

...For 47 years, Iranians endured dictators who seized every space, hoarded all wealth and turned life into a living hell. With the linchpin now gone, the regime teeters. The end is closer than ever – not just for Iran but for the world.

The end is nigh for the world?

Folks in Minnesota will probably know the feeling...

Jennings of the fifth form introduced a note of uncertainty ...

Winners, losers and hope for quick end, ‘but this will be bloody’
We should hope for a quick US and Israeli victory in Iran, but it’s early days
If regime change in Iran succeeds, it will be a rare show of decisive Western military intervention in an era of perceived strategic drift. But a lot could still go wrong.
By Peter Jennings

The pond stumbled, choked a little, on that "If" ... that If was bigger than a Lindsay Anderson or a Rudyard Kipling If.

Pipes also piped up, but sounded problematic:

President Trump’s Iran gamble must be all in or nothing
Whatever happens now in Iran, Trump will claim victory. But for those of us who are not Trump, what lies ahead? There are seven hurdles to winning. And what does winning even mean?
By Daniel Pipes

All in? Feet on the ground, boots and all, for General "Taco" Bonespur?

At the very end of his listicle, he offered a pipe dream ...

...Sixth, this conflict contradicts an iron law: air power alone has severe limitations, so initiate war only if prepared to deploy the infantry. In a democracy, that requires confidence that voters support the use of ground troops.
For the US President, that translates into winning congressional authorisation, something Trump ostentatiously did not seek. Accordingly, he stands exposed to the political winds.
Finally, our ignorance as outsiders impedes prediction. Did the allies co-ordinate with opposition forces within Iran? Did they provide money, intelligence and arms? Netanyahu mentioned Iran’s non-Persian minorities that make up more than half the population; were they invited to join the process? Did the allies work out contingencies with the Persian Gulf states? Have they assured China’s acquiescence?
Aware of the chaos that surrounds decision-making in the Trump administration, not to speak of Trump’s monumental inconsistency, I expressed doubts before Operation Epic Fury began. With it under way, I fervently hope policymakers in Washington and Jerusalem know what they are doing. Much hangs in the balance.
Terminating the Islamic Republic of Iran promises nearly 100 million Iranians the possibility of freedom and prosperity. It offers 500 million Middle Easterners a reduction in sabotage and violence. And it substantially releases two billion Muslims from the poison of today’s most vibrant totalitarian ideology, Islamism.
So, bravo to Trump for finally responding to two generations of warfare against modernity and humanity. May he now not leave the battlefield and declare victory until the job is complete.

— Daniel Pipes is founder of the Middle East Forum and author of Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated.

Bravo, and raise a glass to celebrate endless war.

Luckily the Lynch mob was on hand to explain it all to the pond, and as always the pond never turns up a chance to defame the reputation of the University of Melbourne...

The header: For Donald Trump, attacking Iran has always been about avenging 1979; That was the year he realised America was not up to the challenge of defending itself.

The caption for the flag-waving: People wave US and Iranian pre-1979 Islamic Revolution flags during a rally in support of US and Israeli military action against Iran’s Islamic Republic government on February 28.

The Lynch mob decided, for reasons best known to him, that it was best to turn the clock way back as a way of avoiding any consideration of the present or the future.

Luckily the pond took the opportunity to see what King Donald was actually up to in 1979, courtesy CNN: The time Donald Trump wasn’t worried about the ‘history and culture’ of sculptures

Ah yes, always a builder.

So what did he learn?

...Trump later said that taking down statues like that would fundamentally alter history.
“You’re changing history,” he said. “You’re changing culture.”
Trump is not shying away from a debate over Confederate monuments and his top White House aides are pushing the debate on Twitter and in interviews.
“The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ‘em. I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, the White House’s top strategist, said in an interview with the progressive magazine the American Prospect. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
That Bannon’s theory that any discussion of Confederate monuments is politically beneficial for Trump has striking similarities to the lesson Trump took away from the Bonwit building controversy.
“Ironically, the whole controversy may have ended up being a plus for me in terms of selling Trump Tower,” Trump wrote, noting that future stories would not draw “a tremendous amount of attention to Trump Tower” and help sell apartments.
“I learned a lesson from that experience: good publicity is preferable to bad, but from a bottom-line perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all,” Trump wrote. “Controversy, in short, sells.”

And so does a bloody good bombing, what an epic distraction, but the Lynch mob had an entirely different luncheon takeaway, as the Lynch mob always does, as he plunged back to 1979:

For Donald Trump, it is always 1979. That was the year he realised America was not up to the challenge of defending itself.
Jimmy Carter was in office but not in power. The Soviet Union used this vacuum of leadership to march into Afghanistan. China launched a border war on Vietnam, a nation abandoned by the US four years earlier. And Iranian students attacked the US embassy in Tehran, beginning a 444-day humiliation – lasting nearly half a century – of the United States.
The year 1979 was the nadir of America’s Cold War power. It had rarely in its entire history looked weaker. At home there was a partial meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. An oil crisis sent pump prices soaring. The Deer Hunter, a gloomy lament on American decline (with a great theme song), won best picture at the Oscars.

The reptiles helped out with this wander down mammary lane, so much more pleasant than the obdurate present, Iranian students climb over wall of US embassy in Tehran, Iran, in 1979.

The Lynch mob was determined to stay stuck in the past:

America’s enemies seemingly ascendant, all the hapless Democrat president could do was blame his people for the malaise. In a national address that badly backfired on him, Carter lectured Americans that they had got greedy, had prioritised consumption over civic obligation and needed to sacrifice more. While Ronald Reagan was the immediate beneficiary of Carter’s misdiagnosis, winning a stonking majority in November 1980, it was Trump, then in his early 30s, who watched, took mental notes and, across his five years plus in the office weakly held by his Georgian predecessor, determined to do the opposite. Trump is the anti-Carter President.
This means he is also the anti-Iran President. Trump is inescapably a product of America’s five-decade failure to confront Iran’s revolutionary regime. Indeed, there has been much in Washington’s mishandling that burnished rather than negated the hold of political Shia Islam on Iran.

Again the reptiles helped out with the time travel, American hostages wearing blindfolds and paraded by Iranian militant captors on the first day of occupation of the US embassy in Tehran.

Curiously the Lynch mob seemed entirely unaware of the way that Benji's mob had actively helped fund and support Hamas. It had its own wiki, and could even be found in The Times of Israel ...For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces; The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.

Not in the Lynch mob's world ...

The Iraq war was lost by the US; it was won by the Islamic Republic of Iran. It remains the single greatest influence on the post-Saddam Hussein era in that Arab nation. As the CIA got out, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps moved in.
The consequence of this unexpected victory for Tehran was its creation of a series of proxies funded and designed to weaken Israeli power and spill Jewish blood.
Iran has been the chief sponsor of the 3-Hs: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza. Again, for Trump, this axis of antisemitism had its genesis in 1979. It was symbolic of American retreat, of a refusal to use overwhelming force to secure its interests, of a reliance on international law to do a job that was the proper preserve of military power.
The October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel were devastating evidence of America’s failure to deal with Iranian machinations.
There was no lack of trying; it just was all ineffective. Under Carter’s Democrat successors, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, America’s Iran policy became one of sustained appeasement. These Democrats were prepared to loosen financial sanctions on the regime in return for its promises to not build a nuclear bomb.

Perhaps those blindfolds were a metaphor ... as the Lynch mob stayed stuck in the past, Then-US President Jimmy Carter faces reporters at the White House.

This is what his hapless students are fed by way of analysis?

The 2015 deal (agreed by the five UN Security Council permanent members plus Iran) actually afforded Tehran a path to a nuclear weapon if it played by the rules. Iran retained the expertise, infrastructure and equipment needed to rebound rapidly once restrictions expired.
US officials visited my campus to assure us that this was a tough measure that would bring the Iranian theocrats into line. Yeah, right. I always suspected this was, at best, an exercise in Sartrean bad faith. Iran’s deepening subversion of the Middle East, its cold war with Saudi Arabia, its complicity in the rise of Hamas – these were a direct response to the freedom of action Obama’s agreement granted the Iranian regime.
Trump tore up this piece of paper early in his first term. He ended that term with the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s chief enforcer of anti-Israeli terrorism. A few months into his second term, Trump launched one of the most powerful airborne assaults since World War II on Iranian nuclear reactors progressives hoped international law would shutter.
He now has followed through by assassinating the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei. This is an event of truly global, history-making proportions. It may turn out to dwarf in historical significance the 1979 revolution itself.

It might even dwarf the CIA-inspired coup of 1953?

There go more decades of glorious stability, as the reptiles flung in yet another reminder that the past is more relevant than the present ... Freed American hostages step down from a US Air Force medical rescue plane after arriving in Algiers in 1981.

The Lynch mob then showed off his academic sources:

As of March 1, according to Wikipedia, the supreme leader “position is reported vacant, following widespread reports that Ali Khamenei was killed during joint US-Israeli military strikes”.
To deepen the chagrin of his opponents, the MAGA-America First President has allied this hard power with soft. The Abraham Accords in 2020 established formal normalisation of relations between Israel and several Arab or Muslim-majority states that further isolated Iran. Trump has used violence and blandishments to advance US interests. This was a calibration Carter never achieved.
President Obama toured the Middle East apologising for American power; President Trump has made recurrent war and peace there, burnishing that power. “My fellow Americans,” he asks, “which approach do you prefer?”

At this point, for no particular reason, the reptiles flung in a force comparison, a graphic which turned up in many places in this day's coverage...

Who'd have thunk that the imperial United States had more clout than the allegedly imperial Iran?

Meanwhile, the Lynch mob reverted to childhood, or perhaps dotage:

Trump has been able to claim, plausibly, that “America is back”. He did this in his State of the Union address last week – when we can assume plans for the air war were already in place. It is the opposite of any claim Carter ever made, with a common source: Iran.
I was 10 years old when Iran fell to Islamists. The television images of this terrible transformation – of a rising middle-class society turned into a medieval darkness – are among my earliest political memories. The misery of the mullahs’ dominion has been a shadow cast across my life, and countless others’, ever since.
America, which had defeated Nazism and then communism, seemed incapable of rolling it back – until this weekend.

So it's all been swept away?

The reptiles interrupted with another much used graphic:

And so to the suffering of the poor prof, endlessly persecuted by minorities and women:

A campus left that postured on the liberation of the oppressed ignored the plight of women in revolutionary Iran. For all the DEI training programs to which professors like me have been subjected, after all the acknowledgments of country we have been obliged to recite, it was not progressives who just freed 45 million women and girls from Islamist patriarchy – it was Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A failed air mission doomed Carter. Trump determined his air campaign would have the opposite effect. Carter plotted to free 52 hostages from an Islamist theocracy. Trump has made possible the liberation of more than 90 million. That seed was sown nearly a half-century ago. For Trump, it is always 1979. For the Iranians liberated by him, it may turn out to be always 2026.

Women have been freed? Like they were freed in Afghanistan? Like they're free to follow orders in Xian fundamentalist communities in what passes as the current version of The Handmaid's Tale?

Pull the other one Prof.

For the record, details of the institution that's being defamed:

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

Those closing lines produced a degree of fatuity that even the pond wasn't expecting.

It's always going to be 2026, like a repeat of Groundhog Day stuck in an academic loop?

On the upside, there has to be a winner, and the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way was pushed way down the page, as Geoff chambered a round of hope ...

If Taylor stays focused, there may be some hope yet for the Coalition to rebuild its position
If Liberal and Nationals MPs remain united (and that’s a big if given recent efforts), the Coalition can return to being a functional opposition.
By Geoff Chambers

Of course, we all know life wasn't meant to be easy, but why do the reptiles insist on selecting snaps that show the beefy boofhead looking like a lean and shifty-eyed ferret?

And now back to the key matter at hand.

The pond really did go looking for the Caterist, what with its endless interest in the movement of flood waters in quarries, but sadly couldn't find him.

If he turns up, the pond promises to feature him tomorrow, usually a slow day in the hive mind.

In the interim, the pond turned to the holy grail for a summary of the situation.

Some might find this easier to read at the intermittent archive, but it is always intermittent, so here's an alternative:

Stirring stuff, and the lizard Oz editorialist kept stirring ...

Then came the coup de grâce, the stirring summation, the vision for the future, the detailed planning, the comprehensive imagination:

Whatever happens?

Whatever?

Que será, será
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours to see
Que será, será
What will be, will be

There you go, Prof, womyn freed on a whatever happens, basis.

And so to what the pond had intended to be the bonus, what with Major Mitchell always to hand on a Monday, fresh in from the golf links.

It's a follow up to yesterday's Sunday meditation in the pond, a meditation which didn't exercise the minds of many of the pond's correspondents, but whatever ... whatever happens, here he is ...

The pond decided to put in a link to the intermittent archive for anyone interested in following up those Major links: Tucker Carlson’s Israel narrative is an affront to journalism

The reptiles followed up that opening gobbet with a snap of the Major's hero, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Picture: AFP

That stirred the Major's juices, as he lathered himself up about one of the Emeritus Chairman's gifts to the world ...

More worryingly, Carlson, who now styles himself as a devout Christian to appeal to Donald Trump’s Christian MAGA base, is a smart journalist who knows exactly what he is doing. His questions – from stories of US sex offenders hiding out in Israel to a spy who had sold US secrets but served 30 years in jail before meeting Huckabee in Jerusalem – were carefully arranged to undermine his country’s closest ally. He suggested Huckabee, a Christian Zionist former governor of Arkansas and former Southern Baptist minister, is more interested in serving Israel than the US.
When Netanyahu says Israel fights for Western values so the US does not have to, he is telling the truth. Carlson knows the various antisemitic Islamist cults that grew out of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – including Hamas, ISIS and al-Qa’ida – and are financed by Iran and Qatar have as little regard for Christians like him and Huckabee as they do for Jews.
While claiming many times in the interview that he has no truck with Hamas, Carlson raised a series of issues about Jewish identity and historical connection to the land of Israel that journalists from Hamas, Iran and Qatar regularly use against the Jewish state.
This is how modern journalism dies. Carlson is building an audience on social media platform X and YouTube. He was dumped in 2023 by Fox News.
Carlson has platformed Russian leader Vladimir Putin and leading US neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, a Hitler supporter. He has interviewed a popular historian who thinks the US should have sided with Hitler in World War II, and believes Winston Churchill was a bad guy and puppet for the Jews.
It’s extremist confirmation bias as entertainment. It’s nothing to do with journalism.

Just to terrify the hive mind, the reptiles flung in a snap of Tucker and Nick, though perhaps Nick doesn't have brand recognition down under, Tucker Carlson with Nick Fuentes. Picture: Facebook

The Major was in a generous mood ...

Sure Netanyahu made mistakes in Gaza, 

Oh there had to be a billy goat butt after that folly, and sure enough it came in the same sentence ...

...but selling out Israel for money is not one.

And after that bit of tokenism, he reverted to his usual ways ...

Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan, then 30, was killed in the mission to rescue 100 Israeli hostages from the Ugandan town of Entebbe in 1976. Bibi sees Jewish security the way most Jews globally do after the Holocaust: The collective must risk all to save even one Jew.
It’s why the Jews of Bondi are so shattered and why some Australian Jews are moving to Israel. After the Holocaust that killed half the living Jews in the world they expect governments to take their safety seriously. After all, they have been victimised since Roman times.
This is why as PM in 2011 Netanyahu oversaw a swap of 1027 Palestinian prisoners for the return of one Israeli hostage, Gilad Shalit, taken by Hamas as a 20-year-old soldier in 2006. History reveals the deathly irony: the released Palestinian prisoners included Yahya Sinwar, architect of the October 7 invasion.
Carlson described Netanyahu in an interview with Saudi state television network A1 Liwan on February 24 as: “Completely evil, completely destructive”.
He told the Saudis what he told Huckabee: the US was only contemplating attacking Iran because Netanyahu wanted Donald Trump to do so. Carlson ignores the plight of ordinary Iranians, 40,000 of whom have been murdered during the past month for protesting against Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in Saturday’s attack.
Carlson tells Huckabee he mourns for the dead children of Gaza. Apparently he cares less for the student protesters of Tehran.

Um, like the deep caring being shown by the King?

Here the pond found The New Yorker far too tempting. a distraction:

Has Trump Thought Through the Endgame in Iran?
The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes, but the conflict is far from over, and has convulsed the Middle East in a spasm of interstate violence.
By Ishaan Tharoor (*archive link)

...There’s little evidence that the Trump Administration has thought through the endgame. Analysts contend that Israel can live with a fragmented, weak Iranian state, whose military assets it can destroy when it sees fit, as is the case with Israel’s periodic bombardments of Syria. But the United States and, moreover, its Gulf allies don’t want to see a total collapse of a country of more than ninety million people. “What regional states and European states are fearing, but not talking about, is an exodus of Iranians from a very unstable post-Islamic Republic Iran, and infighting around Iran’s borders that certainly can also spill over into neighboring countries like Turkey, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Chatham House, a British think tank, told me.
There are few useful precedents to help chart the path forward. Trump may hope for a similar outcome to what followed Maduro’s extraordinary rendition from Venezuela, with the once hostile regime in Caracas reconfiguring itself, under acting President Delcy Rodríguez, into a quasi-clientelistic arrangement with Washington. But, as Vakil told me, “there are no Delcy-like figures in Iran.”
The air campaign over Iran also recalls the NATO-led intervention into Libya in 2011, which led to the ouster and killing of the long-ruling dictator Muammar Qaddafi. But, unlike in Libya, there’s no major rebellion under way inside Iran, nor even a coherent opposition and, absent mass defections from the security forces, little prospect of an armed challenge to the regime gaining significant ground on its own. And then there’s the legacy of the calamity that followed in Libya, with Qaddafi’s ouster paving the way for more than a decade of failed governance and prolonged civil strife.
Outside Iran, some of the diaspora and opposition groups have coalesced around Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah dethroned by the 1979 Revolution. Pahlavi has cast himself as a figure of unity who can shepherd Iran’s political transition. But he is already a divisive character outside the country and has minimal influence within. As Ervand Abrahamian, a historian of Iran and professor emeritus at the City University of New York, noted in a recent conversation that we had, history offers few happy examples of monarchical restorations after a long revolutionary interlude. The most recent example, he suggested, could date as far back as the Bourbons being installed in Paris after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815—but that required the deployment of hundreds of thousands of Prussian, Russian, and other Allied troops to buttress the royalist return. Neither Trump nor Netanyahu nor any Middle Eastern leader would want to participate in such an occupation.
For now, with Iran’s regime backed into a shrinking corner, the potential for a destabilizing conflagration is real. “There is a danger of a regional war in which Iran attempts to destroy the positive things that have been built in the Gulf and to go after oil installations to spike the price of oil,” Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in an interview with Foreign Affairs. “Israel is better equipped to defend itself because of its military prowess and its distance from Iran, but those Gulf countries are more vulnerable.”
The scenes of chaos in expat-clogged places like Doha and Dubai represent a kind of worst-case scenario for leaders of the Gulf monarchies, who want the world to see their glittering kingdoms as oases of stability and prosperity, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Middle East expert at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, told me. It also complicates the Trump Administration’s own significant dealings with wealthy Arab royals, which include major rounds of investment in U.S. tech companies and some of Trump’s own family enterprises. A prolonged conflict has “consequences for U.S. credibility as a mediator, as a negotiator,” Ulrichsen said. “We saw after the Iraq invasion in 2003 how credibility takes a long time to be restored when something of this magnitude happens.”
Until the weekend, it seemed there was an off-ramp. Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr Albusaidi, conducted a last-ditch mission to Washington, meeting with Vice-President J. D. Vance and appearing Friday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” where he said that a substantive agreement between Iran and the United States was “within our reach.” He suggested that Israeli and American fears over a potential Iranian nuclear weapon would be assuaged, that Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium could be secured, and the parties in dispute could settle terms “peacefully and permanently.”
The indirect talks staged between Trump’s envoys and Iranian counterparts now seem something of a smoke screen for what was already in motion: a concerted U.S.-Israeli plan to hit Iran, not dissimilar from the strikes in June that also happened during ongoing negotiations with Tehran. Amid the fog of war, Albusaidi recognized that the diplomatic track he had been trying to furrow as an intermediary had come to an end.
“I am dismayed. Active and serious negotiations have yet again been undermined,” Albusaidi wrote on X, on Saturday morning. “Neither the interests of the United States nor the cause of global peace are well served by this. And I pray for the innocents who will suffer. I urge the United States not to get sucked in further. This is not your war.” For Trump, having taken this course, the war is very much his own.

Sorry, Iranian students, you might still be on your own, as the pond returned to the Major and a snap of the hapless huckster, US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. Picture: AP

The Major wrapped up in a way befitting of a leading member of the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

Carlson’s attitude to Iran ignores that country’s oft-stated objective to build nuclear weapons. Iranians say Israel has such weapons so Islamic regimes should too.
Israel has had nuclear weapons for more than 60 years and has never used one. Do Carlson and the MAGA isolationist right really imagine Iran would not drop the bomb if it had one?
Another irony of Carlson’s position on Netanyahu and the casualties of Gaza? Netanyahu is criticised in Israel for having been too generous to Hamas and Gaza during the years Israel allowed the terror group to operate freely and 18,000 Gazans a day to enter Israel on work permits.
This column on August 24 argued Netanyahu’s position before October 7 “was in line with what the left-wing leaders of Europe and Australia … believe Palestinians still need”.
Tablet magazine’s Liel Leibovitz on August 11 wrote: “Israeli society, fragmented … (on) any subject imaginable, was in full agreement (before October 7) on one thing: the best way to handle Hamas in Gaza revolved around the logic that the more prosperous Gaza grows, the harder it would be for Hamas to hold on to power.”
No one understood just how brutal Hamas could be in sacrificing the lives of its own people to damage the Jewish state.
There is no isolationist MAGA path out of the West’s problems with radical Islam, as readers following hate preachers here, in the US and UK should know. Islamism is outsmarting modern leftists happy to parade in pro-Palestinian marches for a regime that hides rockets under schools and hospitals, murders gays and subjugates women.
Carlson knows accusations of antisemitism will not trouble his listeners because they will see such criticism as confirmation elite Jewish opinion is trying to shut him down.
Carlson seeks to frame a world where the rich and powerful – Jews – are responsible for the declining power of the US.
Michael Doran in The Free Press on February 23 argued the seemingly unrelated issues Carlson wanted Huckabee to discuss in fact contribute to “a single indictment: American authority bends in one direction. Israel is not simply an ally. It is the illegitimate beneficiary of an inverted order.”
“The United States provides approximately $US3.8bn annually in military assistance (to Israel). The return on that investment … exceeds the appropriation many times over,” Doran wrote.
The alliance leaves room for the US military to focus on China while relying on Israel in the Middle East.
The logical outcome of thinking such as Carlson’s and that of the pro-Palestinian chanters each weekend here is the Bondi pogrom – killing people because of who they are. It’s where antisemitism always leads.

Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing goes on, any notion of a Palestinian state withers in the wind, the West Bank is made over, and now the middle east is in a state of chaos.

Well played, and well celebrated Major Mitchell ...

In which the pond does Polonius prattling on patriotism and "The Hill doctrine", but then slides further downhill into a fundamentalist Xian rabbit hole ...

 

The pond overdid yesterday - the pond was astonished when one correspondent claimed to have read "Ned's" natter, which is a bit like saying they tossed off War and Peace in an hour - and so was hoping that a serve of Polonial prattle would settle the nerves.

Alas, it only exacerbated an ever-deepening nausea ...

The header: Labor minister Julian Hill challenges progressive left in patriotism speech; Two Labor politicians – Anthony Albanese and Julian Hill – have delivered starkly different messages on education and multiculturalism.

The caption for the prime goose who managed to score a shout out from Polonius and a handsome Emilia collage: Julian Hill, a left-wing Labor frontbencher, ‘almost chan­nelled Tony Abbott by recognising the importance of Anzac Day, Australia’s British parliamentary democratic inheritance alongside Indigenous history and culture, and the celebration of “new people taking Australian citizenship as a welcome act of patriotism”.’ Picture composite: Emilia Tortorella

For once that Emilia collage is fitting, because that prime goose deserved to be fitted up with a fit of Australian flag-waving.

The pond wonders if he might question his ineffable stupidity when he discovers he's been soundly endorsed by Polonius?

Probably not, the ALP is littered with hacks and mates and bears with little brain. 

In these situations the pond is always reminded of that quote in The Wire made by Royce's ex-chief of staff, Coleman Parker, to Norman: "They always disappoint. Closer you get, the more you look. All of them."

Go on, disappoint:

It’s a tale of two speeches: the first on February 20 by Anthony Albanese to the Australian Education Union federal conference in Melbourne; the second on Wednesday by Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs Assistant Minister Julian Hill to the McKell Institute in Sydney.
The AEU is a left-leaning trade union. The McKell Institute is a Labor-right think tank. Albanese was a member of Labor’s Left faction until he became the party’s leader. Hill is a member of Labor’s Left.
What was surprising turned on the fact that the Prime Minister and his assistant minister took different tacks. Albanese appeared to speak without reference to a written text. The Prime Minister’s office issued what is termed a speech transcript.
Hill, on the other hand, delivered a long written speech. He told Radio National Breakfast on Thursday that he had been thinking about the content of his address “for months, or in some cases years, but it just kind of came together at this moment”.
It was Hill’s speech that made the news while Albanese’s address was all but overlooked. Yet both were important.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap so that Polonius could cluck-cluck and tut-tut: Anthony Albanese ‘expressed concern about “far-right ideological positions”, which he seemed to imply were evident only in non-government schools’. Picture: NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

The tendency for Polonius to tyke is never far below the surface, and so it was today...

The focus of the Prime Minister’s speech turned on government or public education. Early on, he declared pride “that my son went through the entire system through public school … and it made a difference”. Albanese made no reference to the fact that he himself studied at St Mary’s Cathedral School in Sydney when it was run by the Catholic order of Christian Brothers.
It is understood that the Christian Brothers advised Albanese’s single mother, who was an invalid pensioner living in social housing, that she need pay only what was affordable by her with respect to the education of her son. A generous but not unusual act at the time.
In his AEU speech, the Prime Minister made no reference to his education in a low-fee Catholic school. In fact, he did not mention private or non-government schools. Rather, he opined “strengthening our public education system has always informed the priorities and the work of Labor governments; it is what Labor does”.
In what could be read as an implied criticism of non-government schools, Albanese said “at a time where we talk about social cohesion … in this country, one of the things about public schools is that they’re open to everyone”.
He said in the government education system “kids don’t see race, religion, gender, anything else, they just see kids; hatred and division is something that’s learned”.
Earlier the Prime Minister expressed concern about “far-right ideological positions”, which he seemed to imply were evident only in non-government schools. A controversial position, to be sure.
Towards the end of his address, the Prime Minister commented: “Certainly, if you look at where I was born and the circumstances, you would’ve got pretty good odds against me standing here addressing you as Prime Minister today.” Quite so. He went on to thank his mother again but made no mention of the Christian Brothers.

Hmm, probably no need to mention the leather straps that were paraded routinely and with vigour at the CB school in Tamworth, which sent tyke boys of the pond's acquaintance into a heap of shivering fear, but never mind, at this point the reptiles offered the hive mind the chance to be distracted by the dog botherer offering a standard burst of Islamophobia, Sky News host Chris Kenny details how the ISIS brides are returning to Australia despite their husbands actively being a part of a radical Islamist caliphate. “The issue of Islamic State families returning to Australia also relates to the threat of Islamist extremism and terrorism in this country,” Mr Kenny said. “Let's be clear, the so-called ISIS brides and their husbands were part of a radical Islamist caliphate that took the barbarity of Islamist extremism to unprecedented levels.”

Whenever the pond sees that method of generating fear, it's always reminded of the nuns who wandered through Fellini's movies and through many other flicks and through the pond's early schooling ... thereby reviving the pond's ancient fear of copping a slap on the cheek from a hooded peril.

Those snaps are from Ken Russell's extremely fruity The Devils, though if you're a student of nun flicks, you should always find room for the Powell-Pressburger epic, Black Narcissus:

 

Barking mad, and for devotees of the genre, there's 15 nun flicks listed here...

But the pond digresses, but then so does Polonius, because amazingly he's reached this point without hitting on his keyboard shortcut that announces there are no conservatives in the ABC ...

It’s little wonder that Hill’s speech attracted attention, especially coming from a member of Labor’s Left. Early on, he referred to the “shocking antisemitic attack – the killings at Bondi Beach fuelled by a radical Islamist ideology” that he described as a “perversion of Islam”. Not many members of the Australian left concede that there is such a thing as radical Islam.
As would be expected from any talented politician, Hill had his criticisms of his political rivals, namely One Nation and the Liberal Party. But the focus of the McKell Institute speech was what Hill called “the progressive left” and its unwillingness to acknowledge that those who settle in Australia should “not import foreign communal conflicts into our society”.
Hill made this point: “Many decent Australians have attended ‘Marches for Australia’ or may vote for One Nation … they deserve to be listened to rather than dismissed: the economic concerns of frankly pissed-off people or worries about integration are real.”
Hill went on to warn of “the dangers of radical Islamist politics and ideologies” and express concern about gender segregation, forced marriages and homophobic abuse of gay children. And he targeted “neo-Nazis, criminal gangs and ISIS” in one sentence.
Then Hill turned his attention to education, pointing out that “over the last decade there were 320 new Catholic and independent schools and only 279 new government schools”.

The pond has already gone down that both siderist, Charlottesville, "good people on both sides" routine, and so was amazed when the reptiles interrupted to reveal the sort of loons that the prize goose suggested we should be listening to rather than dismiss, Neo-Nazi groups are reportedly working to regroup, after disbanding prior to hate speech reforms passed parliament. Picture: Simon Bullard/NewsWire

Yeah, that mob, sunnies 'n singing, n'all ...

Go on, both siderist that mob of goons.

The pond understands a little. 

When you're a low rent assistant minister, you're by definition a bear of little brain, and so will be pleased to have anyone turn up to a speech, and even be pleased by Polonius paying attention to your mindless offerings...

He said “over the last seven years the proportion of students attending a school with a religious affiliation (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh and more) has grown and in 2025 surpassed one-third to reach 33.9 per cent or 1.4 million students”.
He expressed concern about reports of “quite extreme or conservative curricula being used” but did not identify what institutions he had in mind. Hill added: “This is not an argument against faith-based schools, I attended one myself.”
At the end of the McKell Institute address, Hill expressed thanks to his audience for coming along at short notice. This suggests that the speech may have been timed to give attention to his “final few words about patriotism”. He stated that “controversially to some … this means embracing Australia Day for as long as there is no consensus to change the date, as a day to reflect, celebrate and be proud of our country and our complex history”.
Hill went on almost chan­nelling Tony Abbott by recognising the importance of Anzac Day, Australia’s British parliamentary democratic inheritance alongside Indigenous history and culture, and the celebration of “new people taking Australian citizenship as a welcome act of patriotism”.
And there was the hard point – directed at the left-intelligentsia. Hill stated: “Many of us like to don Aussie garb and people don’t want to be sneered at for loving Australia.” This a rejection of what I have termed the sneering left-wing interpretation of Australian history which is replete with guilt and self-hatred. In other words, a repudiation of the alienation of Manning Clark’s history and a focus on the Australian achievement.
It’s difficult to imagine a left-wing Labor frontbencher making such a pitch to patriotism before the radical Islamist attack on the Australian Jewish community on December 14, 2025. It remains to be seen whether the Prime Minister will embrace the Hill doctrine in future addresses.

Oh sheesh, more than enough already.

"The Hill doctrine"?

Let's not give the bear of little brain too much praise, or he might get stuck in a tree trying to reach for a bit of honey comb.

As always in such moments, the pond turns to Haaretz.

They were distracted by King Donald's plans to destabilise the region, as were others, with this in The Independent noting...

Trump advisers would prefer if Israel bombed Iran first as the ‘politics are a lot better’, says report

That came to pass, making the chant "Make America first and isolationist again" sound a little hollow, as the reptiles were forced to pay attention and go LIVE... (well it's not an away game like Pakistan v. Afghanistan, this is a core Australian Zionist Daily News home game).

But even while King Donald's minions were suggesting that Benji lead the way in bermbing Iran, so that the real culprits could skulk in the shadows, because that would look good, Haaretz still had space for this ...

'They Had Murder in Their Eyes' Reports: Four Wounded After Israeli Settlers Assault Palestinians, Activists in West Bank (*archive link)

And for this ...

Israel Police, IDF Clash Over Probe Into Killing of Palestinian-American Teen in West Bank (*archive link)

And then the pond came to grating, garrulous Gemma ...

‘No more bloodshed’: We need a radical course correction
Australia is not learning from Bondi massacre as extremism threat continues to grow
In the absence of honest conversations about the clear and present danger from extremism, it feels as if we’re still simmering, instead of having the heat turned down.
By Gemma Tognini

...and baulked at the jump.

The pond decided a change of course was urgently needed. 

Back in the day - in the times of angry Sydney Anglicans and rampant Pellism - the pond would spend its Sunday meditating in a religious way befitting a heathen secularist and barbarian atheist.

Instead the reptiles kept flinging useless bits of detritus into the digital ether ...

EXCLUSIVE
Randa Abdel-Fattah used $889k tax grant to fund ‘intifada’ chant protest: report
Macquarie University has been forced to release the ­findings of its review of Abdel-Fattah’s unorthodox research techniques and expenditure.
By Natasha Bita

So she's been cleared and the grant reinstated?

But that's never enough for the gnawing reptiles, always wanting to gnash at the bit.

Spend six unholy minutes on a Sunday watching Natasha gnashing?!

Instead of any of that, the pond thought it would take as its text the KJV of Genesis 18-21:

18: In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:
19: The Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites,
20: And the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims,
21: And the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.

It is of course the text that Tucker quoted to the hustling Huckster.

Some liberal Xians have tried to suggest that the KJV got it wrong, and that the "river of Egypt" isn't a river or isn't the Nile, but fair's fair. 

There aren't too many rivers of Egypt that match the Nile, especially when it's a river nicely positioned to mark the beginning of Israel.

The pond notes that the bible is allegedly inerrant and mono/univocal, and that any alleged contradictions are simply click bait for YouTubers of the Dan McClellan kind.

But truth to tell, Tucker caught the Huckster napping, and while Tucker might be barking mad, he has a rat cunning for gotchas, and given the berming of Iran - is there ever a war Benji hasn't loved to stay out of clink? - it might be worth examining Israel as the biggest imperial state on the middle east block.

That's why  the pond was delighted to see that the Huckster had turned up in Vanity Fair to try to redeem his situation:

Mike Huckabee, Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, Defends His “Kind Of Strange” Interview With Tucker Carlson 
In a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair, the US ambassador to Israel explained his controversial comments to Tucker Carlson and addressed a shift in public opinion against Israel over its bloody war in Gaza. (*archive link)

The introduction to the interview didn't augur well ...

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee sparked a major diplomatic incident last week when, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, he said he would “be fine” if Israel “took it all.” By it all, he meant the land that, in a literal interpretation of biblical scripture, was promised by God to the descendants of Abraham—give or take, a vast swath of the Middle East.
Huckabee quickly backtracked after Carlson expressed consternation at the idea of an American diplomat signaling approval for a single country annexing almost the entire Levant, half of Saudi Arabia and a good chunk of Egypt. He did not take back his claim he would “be fine” with Israel taking the land, but instead claimed the country has no current plans to do so. Israel’s neighbors were unamused, condemning the remarks as “dangerous and inflammatory” in a joint statement and arguing they endanger regional stability. According to The New York Times, the comments could even have forestalled American strikes on Iran. Politico reported that Trump administration officials were calling Arab countries for damage control.
The two-hour interview with Carlson, held at Ben Gurion Airport, had other eye-popping moments. As Huckabee defended Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of children in Gaza, Carlson asked: “Do you hear yourself?” The debate reflected a growing fissure in Donald Trump’s base. Carlson’s faction is increasingly critical of Israel, which has coincided with souring opinion among younger Americans—on the right and the left. A recent poll found that more than half of younger Americans have a negative view of Israel, a number that spiked as the country waged a bloody war in Gaza that killed more than 75,000 people and left the densely populated enclave in ruins. A Gallup poll out this week found that for the first time since they started polling, more Americans sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis.

(That Gallup poll can be found here, though Gallup is currently unpopular with the pond because it cravenly refuses to do popularity contests when it comes to King Donald).

Poor old fundamentalist, the rapture is coming for the Huckster ...

Vanity Fair: I wanted to speak about your role in Israel as a US ambassador and the debate that has followed your interview with Tucker Carlson. What have you made of the response to that interview?
Mike Huckabee: I’ve been very pleased. People that saw it thought that it was kind of bizarre in some ways, that he went off on some rabbit holes that were very difficult to understand, like DNA testing for Jewish people in Israel, the ridiculous and reckless claim that President Herzog had been at Epstein Island—something he later edited out, reformatted his program, and then issued a video apology for that. There were a number of things that were just kind of strange. And then the first 30 minutes that he went back and tacked on to the interview was filled with stuff that had us scratching our heads, like treatment at the airport, at the executive lounge and stuff.
There were an overwhelming number of people who felt like I didn’t lose my cool. I was able to push back on some things. He normally will give a guest like Nick Fuentes or Darryl Cooper, or some of the people that have some very strange views, or the Iranian president, or Vladimir Putin, and he’ll give them 65% of the time of his show and he’ll spend 35% asking the questions. With me, it was exactly the opposite. He talked 65% of the time and gave me about 35% of the time to respond to questions. And [he] interrupted me, I think one analyst said, like 500 times.
VF: Did you hear from the White House? Tucker Carlson apparently met with Trump this week.
Huckabee: Nothing negative. I heard positive things, but nothing negative.
VF: There was one exchange that sparked coverage. Carlson asked you if Israel was entitled, according to a literal interpretation of biblical scripture, to claim much of the modern Middle East. And your response was, “It would be fine if they took it all.” When he pressed, you said that Israel didn’t have any intentions to take over all that territory, which includes the land of many other countries. Could you tell us what happened there?
Huckabee: He had pressed and pressed and pressed, and he just wouldn’t let it go. And I finally, it was really tongue-in-cheek, said, “Well, they can just have it all.” And then I immediately, five times, five times said, “Tucker, they’re not trying to take over everything that is listed from the Nile to the Euphrates. They’re just not.” And made that very clear. He took an edited version of that and he left that part out. He ended his clip—that he sent to apparently every Arab nation in the world—and put it out that this was the full exchange. So therefore there was so much consternation about it.
I thought that was a very deceptively edited piece, and dishonest and disingenuous to do it that way. It would be like me saying, “I watched the hockey game between the US and Canada in the Olympics, but I didn’t watch the last 30 seconds.” So the question is, Do I really know how that hockey game went? Well, not if you edited out the last 30 seconds. And I would say that if you edited out the rest of my response, you have no idea what I really said. (Carlson declined to comment to Vanity Fair.)
VF: There are people in the Israeli government who do want to pursue what they call Greater Israel. Would you support those efforts?
Huckabee: Honestly, I’ve never heard anyone—and I’m pretty close to a lot of the people by virtue of my job. I deal with ’em every day. I have honestly never heard a single person say, “Yeah, the land should be the Euphrates to the Nile.” I’ve never heard it, ever.

The pond is pleased to suggest a link to the Huckster, though his hackles would probably rise if he found himself at Al Jazeera, reading ...

What is Greater Israel, and how popular is it among Israelis?
Recent US and Israeli comments on ‘Greater Israel’ trigger regional concerns over sovereignty and territorial expansion.

The pond will cut to the chase and clip this key gobbet:

How has Israel worked to achieve expansion?
The current state of Israel emerged from the British Mandate for Palestine in 1948. The mandate, created by the League of Nations in the wake of World War I and the occupation of Palestine by the British, geographically limited Israel upon its creation.
The 1948 war that followed the end of the mandate led to Israel taking control of all of Mandatory Palestine, with the exception of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
But Israel soon expanded by force – in 1967 it defeated Arab forces and took control of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and Syria’s occupied Golan Heights. Israel continues to occupy all of those regions, with the exception of the Sinai, which it returned to Egypt in 1982.
Since then, Israel has ignored international law and continued occupying Palestinian and Syrian land, and has shown little respect for its neighbours’ sovereignty, occupying more land in Syria, as well as in Lebanon.
How popular is the idea of Greater Israel?
This needs to be broken down into two separate concepts – the expansion of Israel into the territory that immediately borders it, and the most extreme definition of Greater Israel: between the Nile and the Euphrates.
In terms of expansion into its immediate surroundings, Israeli Jews by and large support the annexation of East Jerusalem, which is occupied Palestinian territory, and the Golan Heights.
The Israeli government continues to move towards the de facto annexation of the occupied West Bank. Israeli politicians vary in how open they are in their support for the formal annexation of the West Bank, but most mainstream Israeli politicians are supportive of the illegal Israeli settlements in the territory.
An expansion of Israeli settlements into Gaza is not as popular, but is supported by far-right Israeli parties.
A Greater Israel, including parts of Jordan, or the most irredentist definition between the Euphrates and the Nile, is more controversial. Pre-1948, many Zionists sought not just Palestine but also Jordan for their future state – one of the most important Zionist armed groups at the time, the Irgun, even included the map of both Palestine and Jordan in its emblem.
But after the foundation of Israel this took a back seat, and open calls for a vastly expanded Israel were largely restricted to the fringes. But those fringes – far-right figures like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – are now in government, reflecting a wider radicalisation within Israeli society itself.
That means the Israeli ‘mainstream’, politicians such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and centrists like Lapid, are either more open in their support for some form of Greater Israel beyond the West Bank, or less willing to publicly oppose it.

And there was also this in Al Jazeera:

The Carlson-Huckabee interview may be the wake-up call Americans needed
The interview brought the ‘Israel first vs America first’ debate to heart of the American right.

Inter alia ...

...American academics have long been interested in Israel’s oversized influence on US politics. Scholars like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have written extensively about the issue.
But for many years, this scrutiny was largely confined to academia or left-wing activist circles. Conservatives and liberals labelled such critics as conspiracy theorists or anti-Semites.
The Carlson-Huckabee interview has perhaps let the cat out of the bag on the American right.
What makes the interview important is not simply the substance of Huckabee’s remarks, but the interviewer, venue, audience, and underlying message of the line of questioning.
A hugely popular conservative media figure travelled to Israel and publicly pressed a sitting US ambassador on whether American interests are being subordinated to Israeli interests. He questioned the theological and historical underpinnings of Zionism, criticised Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Christians, and asked why US tax dollars are sent to Israel.
In his responses, the ambassador appeared to speak more as a representative of the Israeli government than the United States government.
Judging by Huckabee’s defensive reaction after the interview and its social media fallout, he is learning an important lesson: appearing to put Israel first and America second is no longer an asset, but a liability, for American politicians.
Elected American officials will be watching the public reaction carefully — especially in light of polling data showing that American public opinion towards Israel has shifted dramatically in recent years.
The political incentive that has driven decades of unconditional support for Israel has now been weakened. The political calculus, too, is changing — it may be politically advantageous for American officials to adopt more evenhanded, even openly critical, approaches to Israel.
This alone marks a significant shift.
Carlson’s interview with Huckabee did not create that shift, but it brought it into the heart of the American right. If the question “America first or Israel first” can now be asked openly in conservative circles, then important political boundaries have already been broken.
The Carlson-Huckabee interview could be the wake-up call that American politics needed to break free from the outsized influence of a Middle Eastern country that has long undermined US interests.

Well yes, there's a reason the pond calls the lizard Oz The Australian Daily Zionist News, but there's no sign it will break free from the outsized influence of a certain Middle Eastern country

And having gone down the Xian fundamentalist rabbit hole, one thing led to another, and in particular to ...

The Right-Wing Nonprofit Serving A.I. Slop for America’s Birthday
PragerU, a fount of Judeo-Christian edutainment, is now a key partner in the Trump Administration’s “civic education” campaign. (*archive link)

The pond will begin at the beginning:

In his new book, “If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil,” the right-wing radio host and edutainment impresario Dennis Prager spends a couple of pages discussing the killing, in 1989, of a sixteen-year-old American girl by her parents, one of whom was Muslim and born in the West Bank. “I’m not picking on them because they’re Muslim or because they’re Palestinian,” Prager writes. “It just happens that this story was about them.” In the next paragraph, Prager seems to change his mind about why he’s picking on them: “In many parts of the Arab world, parents essentially own their children, especially daughters.”
Ostensibly, Prager is recounting this awful crime because it illustrates a central question taken up by his book, which is “Why do people hurt other people?” The answer, by and large, turns out to be secularism. “The death of God has led to massive deaths of men, women, and children,” Prager writes, citing the “secular doctrines” of Nazism and communism. Secular creep, he goes on, “also appears to be leading to the death of Western civilization.” One might wonder why Prager would choose a thirty-seven-year-old murder, which he implies is linked to monotheistic religious extremism, to build his case against secularism. But the God he has in mind is specifically that of “the Judeo-Christian outlook.” The sole “source of objective morality,” Prager suggests, is the Bible. Prager does not mention that the murdered girl’s mother, who held her down while her father stabbed her to death, was Catholic and from Brazil, a country whose most famous landmark is a hundred-and-twenty-four-foot statue called “Christ the Redeemer.”
“If There Is No God” is not the worst thing Prager has ever written. (That honor may go to a two-part op-ed from 2008, titled “When a Woman Isn’t in the Mood,” in which he explains why wives should have sex with their husbands even when they don’t feel like it.) That said, if Prager’s new book were a term paper, his teacher would have a lot to say. She might flag, for instance, that lack of symmetry between his argument and his choice of grisly anecdote. She might object to the tautological reasoning, or to the flagrant cultural animus and Islamophobia. Using terminology from the education world, she might say, politely, that Prager has many “areas of growth” as a student, or that his progress toward grade level is “emerging.”
Yet Prager, a co-founder of the conservative education-media nonprofit PragerU, is one of the most influential voices in education in the United States today. PragerU is not an accredited university, but curriculum materials from its PragerU Kids division, on American history, civics, and financial literacy, are approved for optional classroom use in eleven mostly right-leaning states. (One of those states, Oklahoma, also worked with PragerU to develop a short-lived multiple-choice test intended to screen teachers for signs of “woke indoctrination.” Last year, PragerU unveiled the Founders Museum, a “partnership” with the White House and the U.S. Department of Education featuring A.I.-generated video testimonials from luminaries of the American Revolution. These include a digitized John Adams who ventriloquizes the words of the right-wing influencer Ben Shapiro, almost verbatim: “Facts do not care about our feelings.”
PragerU is also supplying the multimedia content for the Freedom Truck Mobile Museums, a travelling exhibition of touch-screen displays, Revolutionary War artifacts, and A.I. slop that will chug across the country on tractor-trailers throughout 2026, in celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It seems that the battle over who defines good and evil—or, at least, over who defines American history—will be waged, in part, from the helm of an eighteen-wheeler.

There's more - PragerU is a a remarkably malevolent force -but the pond will - knowing it's in the archive - do a quick edit and cut to the end, because there's only so much disunited States madness the pond can take in any one day:

...Although PragerU has won fans at the highest levels of federal and state government, its educational content and short-form videos are reviled across many chambers of the internet, where the Prager name—attached to videos with titles such as “DEI Must Die,” “Preferred Pronouns or Prison,” “Multiculturalism: A Bad Idea,” and “Is Fascism Right or Left?”—has become synonymous with MAGA-brand disinformation. (PragerU claims that its videos receive tens of millions of views per quarter, but these metrics have not been independently verified.) A PragerU Kids video called “How to Think Objectively,” which was reportedly shown in Houston public schools, provides the thinnest façade for a lesson in climate-change denial. Democratic socialism and, especially, immigration are scourges of the Prager-verse, which has attempted to undermine the constitutional provision of birthright citizenship and cranked out endless pro-ICE videos since the Department of Homeland Security began its violent occupations of Minneapolis and other major U.S. cities.
The most noxious PragerU videos often involve slavery. In the PragerU Kids series “Leo & Layla’s History Adventures,” animated versions of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington are deputized to play down the historical significance of slavery; Christopher Columbus goes a step further, using slavery to introduce children to the concept of moral relativism. (“How can you come here to the fifteenth century and judge me by your standards in the twenty-first century?” Columbus asks.) A now deleted video—as bland as a corporate-compliance webinar, and scored to a generic hip-hop beat—gives Robert E. Lee a thumbs-up for crushing the attempted rebellion of enslaved people at Harper’s Ferry. The video also uncritically shares Lee’s view that slavery was harder on whites than on Black people, since “Blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa.”
In terms of historical facts and narrative, the A.I. videos that PragerU produced for the Founders Museum offer nothing so repugnant. In fact, they offer close to nothing at all. Like a poorly trained large language model, John Adams filibusters on his bona fides, calling himself a “voice for independence” who believed in “telling the truth” and who “stood on principle.” The content is oddly content-free, and then it repeats. Thomas Jefferson, who never blinks, says, “We must guard liberty with learning.” Adams, who seems to be reading off a teleprompter, tells us, “Guard liberty well, for, once lost, it is lost forever.” Ben Franklin agrees: “Respect this founding, friend. It is your inheritance, hard-won and fragile. Guard it well.”
A commonality across all the PragerU videos, and distinctly those in the PragerU Kids catalogue, is their total aesthetic bankruptcy, their absence of beauty or joy or wit. It’s impossible to imagine anyone enjoying any of this or electing to watch it, not because it’s factually wrong or propagandistic but because it’s ugly and boring. The intentionality of the misinformation—or the absence of information—coupled with the laziness of the execution ties a perfect knot of contempt. The various characters in “How to Think Objectively” grimace and vocalize as if the woke mob had dosed them with tainted ketamine. The “Leo & Layla” render-farm animation of Martin Luther King, Jr., sways back and forth affectlessly, like a puppet on a stick, voiced by an actor doing a bad Jay-Z impression. Perhaps Dr. King is dissociating, and the viewer should follow his lead.
In the Founders Museum, PragerU’s Chuck E. Cheese-ification of Presidents is hideous enough, but the animation deteriorates further as you click through to lesser-known revolutionaries, their mouths taking on the shape and muscular coördination of a Wombo A.I. The merchant Francis Lewis blankly recounts the death of his wife after her imprisonment by the British, and concludes, “Freedom demands much of us, but what it gives in return is everything.” Another Founder, Roger Sherman, intones, “I did my part. Now you must do yours.” It’s entirely unclear what the viewer is being asked to do, which may be the point. Dennis Prager once admitted that he didn’t mind accusations that PragerU indoctrinates its young viewers, saying, “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement.” But perhaps indoctrination and stupefaction go hand in hand. Maybe reaching patriotic Judeo-Christian nirvana should feel like the unbearable lightness of an emptied mind.

And there it is, what a fine meditation on barking mad fundamentalist Xians - as a little both siderist balance to fundamentalist Islamics - and what a deeply weird country it is.

The pond won't be reading any of that sort of stuff in the lizard Oz soon, but what a relief it was to turn away from bog standard lizard Oz Islamophobia and Zionophilia to spend a little quality Sunday time with the Crusaders.

And so to Simon Marks, who skipped last week, but turned up yesterday ...

 

And for a little further relief, a most humorous tale of democracy and pillows flourishing in the disunited States:

 

Last but not last video distraction, news from Vlad the Sociopath's Stalin-curious Russia ...

 

And now, having gone full KJV on this day, a final thought:

Leviticus 19:34 - But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

Colossians 3:11-13 - Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all. Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.

Hebrews 13:1-3 -  Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.

Ye verily ...

And remember, ye shall have no false gods or icons before ye ...