In which the pond serves up a cold cut of prattling Polonius, accompanied by a sumptuous spread of garrulous Gemma ...

 

The pond blames the reptiles for turning the pond into a fussy eater this weekend.

At first the pond worried if it was turning anorexic, but it was simply an aversion to the food on offer.

The menu was extremely limited. 

The pond couldn't find anything much about King Donald insulting NATO troops (that got the UK agitated), nor anything about him withdrawing his invite to Canada to join his "peace board" in a massive sulk of mean spite, (elbows up Canada), nor his sending an armada to Iran ... (though no doubt the bromancer will turn up in exultant war monger mode in the near future).

Instead there was a lot of local fluff-gathering and navel-gazing...

Take Noel, for instance ...

We need a layer of unity that binds us all

We must defend multiculturalism from rising tide of nativism
The Australian achievement of multiculturalism will come under increasing attack if we do not answer its weakness.
By Noel Pearson

He's scribbling this for the reptiles? Home to nativists of the Caterist kind? (Which is to say Pom blathering about migrants).

He's forgotten that the lizard of Oz campaigned against the Voice, and yet here he is supporting their desperate paywall model attempt at survival?

He's gone all Tolkien?

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of News Corp where the Shadows lie.

Off to the intermittent archive with him.

Similarly the pond could only take a peck at the craven Craven.

Usually when a craven Craven turns up the pond would feast, gorge, almost like that portly man in Monty Python wanting a final dinner mint.

And yet the pond baulked:

Reality of armed, vicious, racist, homicidal internal threat calls for new legal weapons to fight back
We must adopt extraordinary legal powers as a matter of defence against worse attacks.
By Greg Craven

The closing sermon helps explain why the pond could only pick at the serving ...

...In the context of violent antisemitism, this is what Anthony Albanese is attempting. The half-hearted response of the opposition led by Sussan Ley is a shame on it and the country.
Certainly, we will have to exercise vigilance over these extraordinary powers. This will put our constitutional system to the test, as did other defence crises.
Parliament already seems to be playing its role, forcing amendments to the legislation. A free press is scrutinising and reporting avidly on its contents.
The legislation certainly will be challenged in the High Court, which will determine its fate. Lesser but always independent judges will have to apply the law as cases come before them, remembering that penal legislation has to be applied carefully. The executive, from ministers down to office boys, will need to be restrained in its use of the laws.
In other words, our constitutional system will have to live up to the praises heaped on it by its defenders, including me.
These are not Cromwellian edicts striking at the heart of our system of government. They are laws necessary for the defence of our country against a vicious, racist and homicidal internal threat.
Greg Craven is former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.

The pond simply can't see how the new laws will tackle the internal threat posed by foreign owned News Corp.

It being invasion day season, the reptiles trotted out a little Liddle ...but the pond couldn't get past the headline:

More than ever, Australia Day is worth celebrating
Our national day is not a day for protest, nor a day to amplify and glorify division or discourse.
By Kerrynne Liddle

Say what?

Not a day to amplify and glorify discourse?

What's wrong with discourse?

Oh sure it's inclined to waffle and abstraction ...

Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following work by Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought, knowledge, or communication that constructs our world experience. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power. Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for the framework of dynamic semantics. In these expressions, denotations are equated with their ability to update a discourse context. (The word even has its own wiki)

But then Liddle's own discourse was inclined to abstraction and pious waffle. 

Off to the intermittent archive with her.

The pond knew that it would suffer a severe bout of indigestion if it swallowed what prattling Polonius had cooked up, but what to do?

The pond had boxed itself into a corner, and anyway Sydney Institute is a kind of nativist Taco Bell ...

The header: For racist colonial project, we’ve rubbed along OK; As polling support for January 26 hardens, protests intensify. This paradox exposes a widening cultural divide over history, identity and whether Australia should celebrate or condemn itself.

The caption for the snap: Invasion day protest in Melbourne CBD on Australia Day in 2025. Picture: David Crosling

What was remarkable was that was the sole visual distraction, which allowed the pond to swallow the entirety of the prattle in one gulp ...

It’s a paradox, for sure. As support for the celebration of Australia Day on January 26 increases, so does the intensity of “invasion day” demonstrations.
The recently published Roy Morgan Poll asked this question: “On January 26, 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip landed at Sydney Cove. In your opinion, should January 26 be known as Australia Day or Invasion Day?” Seventy-two per cent of those polled took the Australia Day option. As to whether the date of Australia Day should be altered, 60.5 per cent did not want it changed – up slightly from when last polled in 2024.
It’s much the same with the recent poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs. Seventy-six per cent of respondents supported the January 26 option.
On the evening of January 21, ideologically motivated vandals destroyed or damaged two historical statues in Melbourne’s Flagstaff Gardens. The Pioneer Monument was erected in 1871 to commemorate the settlement of Melbourne. It was sprayed with an inverted red triangle, the symbol of the radical Islamist terrorist organisation Hamas, and the words “Land Back” were written near the inscription. The nearby Separation Monument suffered a similar fate. It was erected in 1950 to celebrate the centenary of the separation of the colony of Victoria from the colony of NSW.
To complete the sense of alienation, the words “Death to Australia” were written on the base of the Pioneer Monument. Clearly, the vandals favour the destruction of contemporary Australia – one of the freest and most prosperous nations on earth.
In a completely unrelated event, January 21 marked the launch of what the ABC calls its “new sharp satirical special Always Was Tonight” presented by Tony Armstrong, who is described as a Gamilaroi man. According to the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster’s media centre, the program brings “a fearless First Nations lens to the stories that are shaping the country”.
This is mere spin. It is false to imply that there is “a First Nations lens” on any matter. Like other Australians, Indigenous Australians do not have a single view on anything. The format of the show is essentially that of ABC TV’s The Weekly, with Armstrong filling the role of Charlie Pickering.
The jokes are of the usual fashionable leftist kind with political conservatives the targets and the focus on Aboriginal issues. Presenter Brooke Blurton (who identifies as Indigenous) has this to say at one part of the program: “Sky News will announce a competitor to Triple J called Triple K. They will celebrate Australia Day by taking the hood to the hood with the hottest of 100 crosses.” Here a logo is shown featuring a Ku Klux Klan hood. How funny is that?

Okay, okay, the pond is sure that Polonius would love himself some Melania. 

How funny is she? 

Polonius kept on with his tut-tutting and clucking ...

Always Was Tonight concludes on a serious note about Indigenous children in prisons and a call for all Australian governments to raise the minimum age for criminal responsibility to 14. But its essential message is that Australia is racist.
Sky News’ The Bolt Report on January 21 ran a clip of Armstrong’s appearance on Network Ten’s The Project where he said: “This country still can’t accept that it’s a racist country … that it’s built off the back of slavery … of dispossession. It’s built on the back of rape and pillage of Indigenous people.”
The first sketch presented by Armstrong centres on the claim that the early settlers intentionally infected Aboriginal people with smallpox. No evidence is presented for this most serious allegation.
For an Indigenous Australian in an allegedly racist nation, Armstrong has done remarkably well in sport at the highest level and in the media. He was reported in the Daily Mail in June 2022 as saying that he was raised by his white single mother and does not know his Indigenous father.
Armstrong was educated at Assumption College in the Victorian town of Kilmore, which was founded by the Catholic Marist Brothers. Armstrong’s single mother managed to pay the school fees and her son completed year 12.
After that, there has followed a brilliant career. Yet the host of Always Was Tonight reckons he lives in a racist country built on the back of dispossession. But there’s the difficult point. Without colonisation, which Armstrong states led to dispossession, he would not have been born.
Addressing The Sydney Institute in February 2017, Stan Grant said: “I am drawn from the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi of NSW, my story also comes from the green fields of Tipperary.” He spoke of an academic of Indigenous-Anglo-Asian heritage who saw himself as both “coloniser and colonised; black and consummately white”.
Any Indigenous Australian with non-Indigenous ancestors owes his or her existence to, yes, colonisation. When former Greens and now independent Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe, who identifies as Indigenous Australian, said on October 2023 “we’re in a war” with non-Indigenous Australia, she was talking about going to war with herself.
Certainly, in the decades after 1788, the Indigenous population suffered grievously from imported diseases and frontier violence as settlers moved away from the centres of colonial government.

Don't you just love that "certainly"?

But wait, there was happiness and bliss, and never mind the occasional massacre ...

But there was also co-operation between settlers and the Aboriginal people and many partnerships, even marriages, occurred.
But all that is now long gone and the British, for all their faults, were perhaps the best colonisers.

Oh indeed, indeed, it's all long gone, all off in the distance, and life has never been better for Aboriginal Australians.

There's nothing like being ravaged and pillaged by the Poms, and didn't they leave the world, and especially the Middle East, in fine shape?

The pond was tempted to slip in another 'toon, but decided that it was best to get it over with ...

The evidence suggests that majority support for maintaining Australia Day – and not introducing “invasion day” – is at least steady and probably slightly increasing. Australia Day is opposed by some Aboriginal people, alienated leftists, radical Islamists and more besides. This group is not going away.
But neither is the group – consisting of diverse backgrounds – that likes Australia. I would make Australia Day the last Monday in January, as it was before 1990, but I acknowledge that this is not the majority view.
On Australia Day this year, I will be reading parts of the recently released Commemorative Book to Mark 50 Years of Vietnamese Refugee Settlement in Australia. It was very much influenced by former South Vietnamese diplomat in Australia Tuong Quang Luu, who became a refugee.
The cover contains a photo of four Vietnamese women carrying a placard declaring “Thank You! Australia” who are followed by the NSW Police band. That’s a good reason to celebrate January 26, in a paradoxical way.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

In a paradoxical way?

The pond will settle for a plain way ....

Such was the pond's desperation, the need to take a bite of something, anything, the pond decided to swallow a chunk of grating Gemma ...

It's been a long between drinks with garrulous Gemma ...

The header: Fed-up voters seek political home in rising One Nation; One Nation has surged to 22 per cent, leaping over the Coalition by addressing issues the main parties dismiss at their peril: cost of living, immigration, and for many, Bondi.

Not really a caption for the rocket, but it'll have to do: January feels like a long year already. Can I get a witness? How many of us limped across the line at the end of 2025? The year of the snake carried an almighty sting in its tail.

The real reason the pond went with Gemma?

Unfortunately the intermittent archive doesn't capture the hoot of seeing that rocket flash across the background in a truly tragic gif ... but the pond did want to celebrate how this header ...

One Nation’s rocket-fuelled rise shows voters are looking for a new home

... got turned into a literal rocket, like a ten year old illustrating a class assignment.

But at least the pond could note it, even if the price was a five minute soundscape of Gemma grinding away ...

Gloomy Gemma was, like all the other reptiles, oblivious to the way that the lizard Oz had helped make the current mess ...

As a nation, we were traumatised by the massacre of 15 innocents at Bondi Beach, gunned down by hate-filled terrorists who police say were inspired by Jew-hating ideology that is maniacal and foreign to who we are.
Australia never used to be a place where support for terror groups such as Islamic State could incubate in secret. Neither was it a place where Jewish teenagers were chased through the streets by brazen thugs shouting Nazi slogans, as if it were the days of the Weimar Republic.
This whole time, our Prime Minister hasn’t put a foot right. Anthony Albanese is unwilling or unable to lead; who knows? Either way, it was no surprise that he and his government were punished in opinion polls published this week. They got told, but that’s not even the main event.
The main game has shifted, and it’s now the rocket-fuelled rise of One Nation in the polls. It would seem that Barnaby Joyce played a blinder; from mainstream outcast to political heir apparent in a few scant months.
When Joyce and Pauline Hanson finally confirmed the news, there were obviously many questions. How does one cook a steak in a sandwich press? And: why? How long had this political courtship been in play? Was it a bolt from the political blue or just two old colleagues who, after many years, realised they had more in common than the fact they were both flaming redheads and decided to make each other honest.

The other reason the pond was drawn to this gruesome Gemma feast?

Good old Barners, Tamworth's eternal shame, was on the menu, while Pauline whipped up a meal like the good hausfrau she is ... Hanson preparing a wagyu steak on a sandwich press; Pauline Hanson dines with Barnaby Joyce.

Charming and with a level of devotion you won't find many other places, though there are some ...

Gloomy Gemma watched it all from the stalls ...

The mind boggles. As most of you would know, I’m not part of the political machine. Not a member of any party. I’ve no dog in the fight, in the sense that I’ve no interest in preselection. Don’t need a favour from anyone. I am just a humble observer, friends. A frustrated taxpayer who swings between rage and resignation at the idiocy of those in charge, both of the government and what’s left of the opposition.
Which brings me back to the most recent published polls, which has One Nation leaping over the federal Coalition like high-jumper Nicola Olyslagers but with less of a joyously radiant smile.
One Nation surged to a whopping 22 per cent primary vote in Newspoll, a jump of seven points across the past two months. Others will go into the minutia of that, which way the sexes are skewed, the demographic according to location, occupation and earning capacity. There will be many an autopsy on that data.
My take is from the cheap seats in real life. It’s not empirical data but if there’s one skill I think I’ve refined in the past few years it’s being a pretty solid listener to the world around me.
I know many people who have joined One Nation in the past six months. And they’re normal folk in a range of professions, ages, men and women, single and in relationships. At first it felt a little bit like Fight Club in that the rule seemed to be that if you’d joined, you certainly didn’t talk about it.
Not any more. Conversations I’m hearing are out and proud. Loud and defiant. The reasons are all fairly unremarkable. Frustration with a terrible government and a useless opposition. Cost of living, unvetted mass immigration. One person told me they’d never been a member of a political party before and that Bondi was the breaking point for them, the proverbial last straw along with issues such as stagnant productivity, bloated government and social engineering. This person is not alone.
Objectively, and because I’m old enough to remember, the party and its eponymous leader are not the same as they were when One Nation burst on to the scene in 1998. They have changed. The country has changed, and not for the better in my view. Watching and listening, I see middle Australians being talked down to, by my own side and by the elitists on the left. Is it any wonder voters are looking for a new home?

The reptiles couldn't get enough of the new, if slightly odd, couple, Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson at the Bondi Pavilion. Picture: Daily Telegraph / Monique Harmer

      

Despondent, downhearted, disconsolate, melancholic Gemma kept quietly weeping ...

No, wait a second, she's been tempted by Tamworth's shame, and never mind his drinking to excess or his womanising.

He's just a good old Tamworth boy, and he's found a new disciple ...      

Whether or not you agree with me is irrelevant. Numbers don’t lie. What people are seeing in One Nation is simple. It doesn’t seem to hate Australia or systemically seek to undermine Australian values. It is not afraid to raise uncomfortable issues even if the methods can be a bit crude. It wants to revive the economy and reduce government spending. There is a pride in Australia, an imperfect country that hasn’t always got it right but once was the envy of the world. The truth is, everyone knows what this team stands for and that is a rare thing indeed. The Liberal Party continues to break my heart, like an old flame that descends into addiction or can’t seem to ditch the booze and ciggies. You have affection for the person they were, try to remember when they were young, fit and healthy, but seeing them in this state is just painful. They couldn’t organise an intimate encounter in a house of ill-repute.
Waking up this week to news that the leadership of the NSW division of the Liberal Party is backing a radical plan to exclude men from some preselections, among other things, proves my point. That’s not policy. That’s revenge. Excluding men does not make up for the many years in which women were kept out and it reduces us to the sum total of our reproductive organs. Show me one place, one jurisdiction, in which this kind of strategy has worked.
Of all the wins I’ve been blessed with in my career, not one has been because capable men were excluded.
Being a woman doesn’t make you a better leader any more than being a man does. Putting purpose over preference, being able to draw disparate parties into unity, having an authority that commands respect, doing what you say: these make a leader.

Quick reptiles, save Gemma from her gloom, another snap of the happy couple if you please... One Nation surged to a whopping 22 per cent primary vote in Newspoll. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Poor Gemma, despite her yearning she really couldn't go all the way there, and yet for some strange, perverse reason, watching her struggle and cry out to the existential void, caused the pond's own gloom to lift.

Perhaps the pond could take a final bite and at last enjoy the feast ...

This plan is just the politics of exclusion in reverse. There is nothing bright or innovative or compelling about it – the same of which can be said for the Liberals’ current policy offering, in fairness.
My kingdom for a policy platform. A policy milk crate. Just imagine if the Coalition could nail the childcare brief. It would be unstoppable. This government has removed choice and agency from parents, making institutionalised care the only option. It ignores best practice data from around the world about the involvement of close family members such as grandparents for those who have that option. Imagine developing a policy that says to parents: you get to choose what’s best for your child. Be still, my giddy aunt.
As the Coalition imploded again this week, we voters remain short-changed. While the Liberal Party obsesses about gender quotas and implodes with factional infighting, the worst government in a generation gets to act with impunity.
As I said to someone the other day, I want to be part of the solution on the conservative side, but I don’t know how. I’m certainly not going to run for parliament, and let me let you in on a little secret: They wouldn’t want me. I’m not known for being compliant in the face of foolishness. Will I join One Nation? Nope, I don’t think so. I can’t really articulate why. Perhaps it’s because, true to form, I have hope that things will turn around for the once great Liberal-National Coalition. That said, I think it’s best I don’t hold my breath.

Go on, hold your breath, and enjoy the fun ...

And so to a few odds and sods for the weekend stocking, provided by the lizard Oz editorialist ...

There was a reason the pond ran with that one. It's been a while since the pond gave this Godwin Law an airing ...

Speaking of woke declining globally, what a triumph that has been ...

But wait, there's more lizard Oz editorialist, offering fresh pasture, or at least a ley, to Ley ...

Well played reptiles ...

When Sussan Ley chose to politicise the Bondi atrocity to damage Anthony Albanese’s political dominance, and News Corp and the Nine newspapers egged her on in the hope of either doing the same or achieving some form of regime change, some outcomes could have been predicted.

Yes, not a single reptile, and especially the lizard Oz editorialist, would have the first clue about what the keen Keane was on about ... 

And yet, with the leadership in chaos and confusion, now apparently is the time to get into "policy action".

So it continued to the bitter end ...

They want to balance the books?

They can't even balance an egg for a leadership egg and spoon race ...

On the upside, News Corp might have helped the opposition shoot itself in the foot, but it's a flesh wound compared to the way that Faux Noise has helped shoot the United States in the head ...

Elbows up Canada ...

Consternation for Brits and Canucks ...

In which the bromancer and the dog botherer emerge from a dismal weekend reptile pack ...

 

Okay, that got boring fast, the lettuce won, and now it's just a matter of observing the funeral rites, always a tedious business, especially given the way the likely chief mourners are the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way and the hastie pastie, plotting to take over the corpse's job.

The reptiles were well into it in a bigly way ...

... but the pond was bored, compounded by the usual reptile carry on about invasion day.

The reptiles dressed up simpleton Simon's 12 minute rant - 12 bloody minutes - with a hideous uncredited graphic featuring some kind of moving aura ...

Off to the intermittent archive with him ...

‘Existential moment’: How a catastrophic split threatens the Liberal Party’s future
An existential crisis and palpable despair: inside a conservative implosion
No one appears to have asked the question: How do three competing parties on the right all survive? The answer is they can’t.

Simplistic Simon seemed only dimly aware that the reptiles had played a key role in bringing on the implosion courtesy their latest jihad, a confused and incoherent cry for the suppression of free speech, followed by an incessant yammering about the need for free speech.

Also off to the archive with the bouffant one ...

Poll pain for Albanese, partisan gain as Coalition implodes
Chaos has engulfed Canberra as the domestic terror crisis exposes Anthony Albanese’s leadership failures and a fractured opposition falls apart.
By Dennis Shanahan
National Editor

The bouffant one managed an astonishing 8 minute read, which for him is Herculean, putting him almost in nodding off nattering "Ned" territory.

The sublime incomprehension of the way that the reptiles contributed to this current folly continued apace in his extended musing.

Meanwhile, the reptiles carried on the jihad ...

Collectivist thinking is eroding our way of life
Modern antisemitism dispenses with Jews as individuals, blames ‘Zionists’ for everything from global conflict to domestic upheaval
Anti-Zionism fuels Western moral decline, replacing individual responsibility with grievance-based politics.
By Jeremy Leibler

Collectivist thinking is the problem? 

Tell that to your local kibbutz (that's collective agricultural settlements) and to your moshavs (cooperative villages) and then go off and read The Collectivist Core of Israel’s Social Fabric.

Here's what's fuelling Western moral decline - the observing of a slow motion genocide and ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a Board of Peace to which the likes of Putin the Sociopath have been invited, alongside the likes of Belarus, Uzbekistan and Hungary...an international body in service to one man’s ego.

Dame Slap didn't provide an alternative. 

She was busy blathering away in her court of Dame Slap opinion ... 

Who holds the public prosecutors to account to protect the public?
The Dowling saga: who holds prosecutors to account in order to protect us?
The explosive clash between NSW’s top prosecutor Sally Dowling and District Court Judge Penelope Wass has exposed a disturbing truth: Australia has no meaningful mechanism to hold prosecutors accountable for misconduct.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

Who holds the MAGA cap-donning Dame Slap to account in order to protect innocent stray readers?

No one, but at least she can be despatched to the intermittent archive.

But that left the pond with an ever diminishing circle of choices.

The pond holds Brendan in such contempt that not even his feeble attempt to do an Our Henry in his header could make the pond interested.

Radical chic mob discovers its inner John Stuart Mill
The left ignores censorship and cancel culture — until antisemitic slogans face restriction. Its sudden love of free speech reveals not principle, but a moral double standard.
By Brendan O'Neill
Columnist

Oh FFS, is this the same Brendan that scribbled ...

I’m glad sections of the left find the free-speech crisis so funny. Or ‘free-speech crisis’, as they always put it, those sarky quote marks signalling their scepticism towards the idea that there’s a censorship problem on campus and elsewhere in society. ‘Freeze peach!’, they cry at anyone who thinks it is a bad thing that people can be No Platformed, threatened with death or sacked from their jobs for expressing the ‘wrong’ opinion. Hilarious, isn’t it?

Is this the same loon who turned up at Oxford posing as a free speech fundamentalist, and inspiring this piece in the Oxford Student ...

In a speech in Sydney in 2015, he argued that feminism in its current form amounted to a “war on women”. He criticises the idea that street harassment is widespread: “… there’s catcalling, wolf-whistling, people who might start a conversation with you. And women can’t cope with that, apparently.

Go wolf-whistle yourself into the void ...

Just when are the lizards of Oz going to stop importing these dangerously radicalised Poms intent on radicalising the populace? Isn't there some way to stop these mad furriners from infesting the country? Isn't enough that we have wild-eyed third rate sociology students ranting at us?

Can't Brendan be sent to somewhere else to see where his ranting about freedumb might get him?

Speaking of those disunited states, luckily the bromancer was to hand with a bigly 10 minute read about King Donald ...

The header: A tale of two Trumps: good, bad and bluster; The US President seems to value NATO’s vast security network at nothing. That’s not only insulting, it’s untrue.

There was an actual credit for the artwork, when AI should have copped the blame: Donald Trump, Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

The bromancer continued with his weird Manichaean heresy that there's a good King Donald residing in the same body as the the bad King Donald, when in reality, there's just one barking mad demented narcissistic authoritarian wreaking havoc on the world and on his country.

The best the bromancer could manage was to sound confused ...

It’s official. Donald Trump will not, after all, use the massive military might of the US to invade, defeat and occupy Greenland, a big territory that belongs to Denmark but has a tiny population of about 57,000. Nor will he transfer its sovereignty from Copenhagen to Washington DC, or impose punitive tariffs on European nations, especially NATO members, that formally opposed his Greenland threats.
The Greenland crisis is over. Phew! Trump, after negotiating with his good friend, NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte, says he’s got an “eternal” deal, or “framework” that gives America “everything we want”.
This is confusing. Trump claimed previously that total US ownership of Greenland was necessary for US and world security. Rutte said sovereignty didn’t come up.
Trump’s reckless threat to attack a NATO ally has damaged NATO. The US and Denmark, under article five of NATO, are committed to come to each other’s defence should one be attacked. The idea of one attacking the other is bizarre, horrific, unbelievable.
Trump’s verbal trashing of NATO, which he continued in his truculent, rambling 72-minute speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, is like a bruise in the soft tissue of an athlete’s arm. It will heal eventually. But if Trump keeps punching the same soft tissue, forever aggravating the bruise, the damage will be permanent. In the politics of every NATO ally, the constituency that thinks the Americans unreliable, bad partners is energised. That damages the whole US alliance system, on which Australia’s security is incidentally dependent.

The reptiles immediately introduced an AV distraction, featuring King Donald with angelic halo ...

US President Donald Trump boasted America was going to build the "Golden Dome" defence system with technology that is "second to none". The president came during an interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo. Trump said the system would work better if the US had "access" to Greenland, claiming it was "important strategically". When pressed on whether part of the "Golden Dome" will be on Greenland, the president said a "very important part" would reside there. Trump's comments come as he rolled back his aggressive rhetoric on the acquisition of Greenland.

At least that gave the pond a chance to slip in a 'toon ...

The bromancer began the next gobbet with a compleat furphy ...

Yet Trump has also rightly drawn the world’s attention to Greenland’s increasing strategic significance. He continues to goad Europeans into doing more to secure their own defence.

Really? If King Donald wanted to do down the sociopathic Vlad the Impaler, all he needed to do was give Ukraine a helping hand. 

Instead, for reasons not clear but clearly sinsister, he's in thrall to the invader, an inspiration for King Donald's own lust for territorial expansion.

At least the bromancer had the grace to slip in a billy goat butt in the form of an "however":

However, the cost is considerable. This Greenland whiplash represents one of the two faces of Trump. There is another Trump. Last year, Trump took action previous presidents threatened but never seriously looked like carrying out. He ordered the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities with the world’s most powerful non-nuclear bombs. This strike, following a sustained Israeli air campaign, gravely damaged Iran’s nuclear program. Trump has also applied sustained tough sanctions on Iran. Preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is a signal contribution to global security.
It would take a Dickens to do justice to the Janus-faced Trump. Perhaps A Tale of Two Presidents, beginning: He was the best of presidents, he was the worst of presidents, a president of wisdom, a president of foolishness, a leader of Light, a leader of Darkness … you get the drift.
Iran Trump vs Greenland Trump
Over the past few weeks as Iranian authorities murdered thousands of their own citizens, Trump supported the protesters. This was moral leadership. He promised support in terms of military action. Urged by US Arab allies not to strike now, Trump elicited a promise from Tehran not to execute protesters. Now he’s moving a US aircraft carrier battle group to the Middle East. This provides a wider range of more powerful military options.

Moral leadership? Call them out into the streets, and then retreat and watch them butchered?

That's a deeply weird form of moral leadership, and pace Iraq and Afghanistan, we've got plenty of examples of how US moral leadership ends up.

At this point the reptiles revived an old tic which the pond thought it had seen the last of some time ago ...

Don't ask the pond what it means, that'd be like asking the bromancer for sensible insights ...

So, which is the real president, Iran Trump or Greenland Trump? In truth, you never really know which face he’s wearing. Iran Trump is historically consequential, Greenland Trump is bluff, bluster and often irrational blather. This always has to be taken seriously, however, because a US president is so powerful. Yet sometimes it’s weird beyond measure. Channelling his inner Joe Biden, the soon-to-be 80-year-old Trump in his Davos speech repeatedly called Greenland Iceland and made numerous other preposterous statements (such as China has no wind farms).
Sometimes Trump creates negotiating leverage with bluff and bluster, but he devalues his own credibility.
Trump has given up the demand for total sovereignty over Greenland but will get a renegotiation of the 1951 treaty between the US and Denmark.

Ah yes, the old 'concept for a plan' routine, with more details in two weeks, as the reptiles slipped in an entirely meaningless Nat Geo style snap, The red rock mountains of Vikinge Bay, Scoresby Sund, in Greenland.

Hang on, hang on, why did they slip that poley bear into the foreground? 

And why didn't the reptiles mention the bear? 

Did the creature remind them of their climate science denialism, what with things getting warm around here, not to mention there?

Greenland’s importance
So what is Greenland, why is it suddenly so important and what does Trump want with it? Greenland is the world’s biggest island, a landmass roughly a quarter the size of continental US. It sits to the northeast of Canada, mostly covered in ice and mostly all but uninhabitable.
The Inuit and related people have been there, with some gaps, for thousands of years. Europeans – Danes and Norwegians – have also been there for 1000 years, also with some gaps. If you enjoyed the Vikings TV series you would have seen them establish Greenland’s first European settlement.
Eighty per cent of Greenland sits above the Arctic line. Melting ice has opened up greater sea travel possibilities in Arctic waters. The most strategically important such waters is the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, to the northwest of the US and Canada. The US and Russia, across the Bering Strait, are only 85km apart. The Bering Strait figured in many Cold War novels and movies.
The waters around Greenland are not as important as that but they are hugely important. Looking at two-dimensional maps can obscure the world’s spherical geography. In the age of fast jets, missiles and satellites, the US faces potentially as big a threat from across the North Pole as from east or west. Russian and Chinese ships have appeared increasingly in Arctic waters.

Phew, no mention of the way that climate change is loosening up Arctic waters and denuding Arctic lands of ice. Instead have another Nat Geo snap ...Nuuk, Greenland.

The bromancer carried on with his lecture ...

In World War II, when Denmark was occupied by Nazi Germany, the US took Greenland to make sure the Germans couldn’t use it, perhaps to attack the US. Washington took Greenland well before it entered World War II, a prudent move.
After the war, in 1946, the legendary president Harry Truman tried unsuccessfully to buy Greenland from Denmark, the offer made and rejected in secret.
But the Danes were happy for the US to have a military presence, and Truman, though more polite than Trump, was not inclined to take no for an answer on military access. In 1951 the US and Denmark signed a treaty for military co-operation on Greenland. The US built a number of military bases. At one stage it had 17 facilities there. After the Cold War, Washington ran down its presence and now has just one base in Greenland.
When Colin Powell was secretary of state, in 2004, the treaty was updated so Washington could expand its military presence only if Denmark and Greenland agreed. Greenland is a self-governing region but still officially part of Denmark, with Copenhagen control­ling defence and foreign relations.
One irony of the present kerfuffle is that, outside Britain and Poland, Denmark is the most solidly pro-US nation in Europe, providing military support to virtually every campaign or war the US has led. There was never any prospect Denmark would prevent Washington expanding militarily in Greenland.
Trump’s deal, or framework, provides for an expanded US presence and with US bases to be treated as sovereign US territory. Such an arrangement is not as unusual as it sounds and resembles Britain’s deal with Cyprus.
Trump’s Golden Dome
Trump has said he wants to use Greenland as part of his Golden Dome project. The Golden Dome is a hugely ambitious effort to provide a comprehensive, layered, missile-defence system for the whole of the US. Many boffins are sceptical this could ever be achieved. But missile defence is real. The model is Israel’s Iron Dome.

Highly ambitious?

Well that's one way of putting it ...

The boffins may scoff now but if ever a single offensive missile is stopped from hitting the US or, worse, gets through, Trump’s foresight will be regarded as genius.
Greenland is rich in rare earths and other minerals. But this is a minor factor. It’s extremely difficult to mine in Greenland. There are only two active mines now. It’s too cold, the ice cover too thick, there are no roads, it’s inaccessible, it’s remote.
Trump’s new agreement will involve greater NATO effort generally on Arctic security. Trump was wildly exaggerating when he claimed Russia or China would take Greenland if the US didn’t. This is one of Trump’s most fantastic inventions. Chinese and Russian missile, satellite, submarine and surveillance capabilities are all big factors. But the idea either would directly attack a NATO nation, on the US doorstep, is far-fetched. Nonetheless, it will be a good thing for Greenland, Denmark, NATO, the US and indeed for global security for the US to have a more formidable military presence.
Trump’s speech at Davos repeated his desire to take full control of Greenland even as he was withdrawing his threats. It was needlessly insulting and hostile. Most US presidents stroke allies and speak hard truths bluntly to adversaries. Trump’s brain seems to have got scrambled. He strokes adversaries such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and abuses allies.

Then came a snap of the King with the NATO sell-out man, operating under the delusion that he's a Donald whisperer, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte speaks with Trump during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.

Nothing like a NATO clown thinking he can speak for Denmark and Greenlanders, and speaking of clowns ...

Oh come on Horsey, there's good in the clown, you just need a bromancer to find it ...

Trump’s spoke like a mafioso making an offer you can’t refuse. All we’re asking for is Greenland, Trump said, which is very little compared with what we’ve given. If you say yes we’ll be very grateful, if you say no we’ll remember.
Similarly: “The problem with NATO is I’m sure we’d be there for them, 100 per cent, but I’m not sure they’d be there for us.”
That’s not only insulting, it’s untrue. Denmark and other NATO members followed the US into Afghanistan, a campaign entirely in response to the 9/11 terror attacks, and later into Iraq. To claim Britain, Poland or Denmark wouldn’t help America if needed is unhistorical, inaccurate, insulting and the surest way to undermine the alliance.
NATO’s contested value
Possibly Trump displayed such bad grace about his climb down because he was genuinely forced into it. If he had tried military action against Greenland there would have been uproar in the US. Even supine congressional Republicans would rebel against attacking a NATO ally.
Further, when Trump was threatening military action in Greenland and punitive tariffs on Europe, stock and bond markets headed south. The bond markets, like the Chinese supply of rare earths, have disclosed themselves before as factors that can force a Trump backdown.

Even Pope Leo has lamented Trump’s trashing of the NATO alliance. The chief arbiter of human morality sees the historic US-Europe alliance as a force for good in the world.

    Trump seems to be ignorant or disregarding of the military value NATO adds to the US. 

Eek, not the Pope? Will the bromancer have to start trashing this bloody American Pope for not falling in line with Pellism?

On the pond trudged ...

The US contributes far more militarily to NATO than the reverse. Trump is both right and to be praised for forcing Europeans to do more on defence. And they are doing more (much more than Australia, incidentally). But the vast network of NATO bases, satellite capabilities, listening stations, military forces, British and French nuclear weapons and nuclear submarines, all the NATO air forces, the joint planning, the battle preparedness, the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of US defence equipment NATO buys – Trump seems to value all that at nothing. It’s analytically mistaken, morally obtuse and strategically ridiculous.
Nobody’s asking Trump to speak like Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy, but he could surely do a bit better than this.
As this column has noted before, it’s impossible for the US to lead the creation of an allied economic and supply chain alternative to China if the President spends so much time insulting and belittling US allies.
Another feature of Trump’s obsession with Greenland is that it seems to reflect his relatively new obsession with focusing US foreign and defence policy on the US’s direct region. This could be a disastrous invitation to see the world as three great powers with natural spheres of influence – the US in the Americas, China in the Indo-Pacific and Russia in eastern and central Europe and Eurasia more widely.
Foreign Affairs recently published a piece outlining a strategy for the US eventually, peacefully to draw Greenland into some intimate sovereignty association. Essentially it would be by an excess of economic kindness, supply chain substitution and cultivation of the substantial independence sentiment in Greenland.

Then came a sub-heading that for some reason the pond found peculiarly, hilariously funny ...

Lessons from the Vikings

Surely King Donald has learned more than enough from the Vikings, with a pillaging here and a pillaging there.

The reptiles, and so perforce the pond, have already been down this path, and now must go there again ...

Australian Strategic Policy Institute senior fellow and polar geopolitics expert Elizabeth Buchanan in her absorbing book, So You Want to Own Greenland? Lessons from the Vikings to Trump, outlines a range of constitutional paths Greenland could take and charts the importance of pro-independence sentiment.
Trump touts both the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary to this doctrine, and now wants a Trump corollary as well, the Donroe Doctrine. Trump loves the 19th century but seems to misunderstand it a bit. President James Monroe authored his doctrine way back in 1823. It was simple enough: European colonial powers had to recognise the US interest in Latin America.
The greatest practitioner of the Monroe Doctrine was Teddy Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909. Roosevelt, for my money the most extraordinary and engaging of all US presidents, announced in 1904 an expansion of the Monroe Doctrine such that the US would reserve the right, open to no European power, to intervene in the internal affairs of any Latin American country guilty of sustained wrongdoing.
TR was the most subtle and ambitious strategic thinker ever to occupy the White House. Far from being a narrow regionalist, he was the first president to conceive of his country as a great global power.
In explaining the Roosevelt Corollary to congress, TR stressed that the US had no “land hunger”. This was not designed to secure any extra territory for the US. Washington would only interfere if a nation’s misdeeds were so gross that they “invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations”.
Nonetheless, the US acquired a huge amount of territory in the 19th century, with the Louisiana purchase from France, the Alaska purchase from Russia, the establishment of sovereignty over Hawaii, the acquisition after the Spanish-American war of 1898 of Spanish colonies such as Puerto Rico and The Philippines, though the US always understood it would lead The Philippines to independence in due course.
But these methods are simply not applicable in the 21st century. A subtle, clever Washington could one day perhaps see Greenlanders decide by referendum to join a compact of free association with the US or become a US overseas territory. If it happened democratically, no one could object.
But the US doesn’t need sovereignty over Greenland for security purposes. And it can’t proceed undemocratically. Trump’s threats to Greenland have helped Moscow and Beijing as they associate the US with destabilisation. It’s good reality TV. It’s bad statecraft. Greenland Trump should go into hibernation in an Arctic winter. Iran Trump should re-emerge.

So we can have another Iraq war?

Or so he can make vague promises of help, invite people out into the streets and then watch them be butchered, and then do his usual TACO while boasting about how many he'd saved from execution?

Sheesh ... but at least the pond got the chance to slip in a few cartoons, especially as the bromancer forgot about King Donald's ongoing desire to take over Canada ...

Elbows up Canada ...how you must envy our AUKUS wheelbarrow.

And now as it's the weekend, the pond feels obligated to offer a bonus, even if it's the lowest form of trash retrieved from the hive mind bin.

Before going there, the pond wants to remind correspondents of a note by the keen Keane in Crikey ...

The Coalition, egged on by the media, gets what they deserve from exploiting Bondi (sorry, that's a paywall)
When the Coalition and the media used Bondi to attack Anthony Albanese, it meant opening up issues that were always going to risk tearing the Coalition up. And they have.

The keen Keane went on at some length, but opened this way ...

When Sussan Ley chose to politicise the Bondi atrocity to damage Anthony Albanese’s political dominance, and News Corp and the Nine newspapers egged her on in the hope of either doing the same or achieving some form of regime change, some outcomes could have been predicted.
The first was that tighter gun laws would outrage the Nationals and require either urban Liberal MPs to oppose such laws — which have strong support in the community — or risk splitting the Coalition.
The second was that any tightening of hate speech laws, despite the Coalition’s reflexive support for Israel and incessant attempts to brand Labor as the party of antisemitism over the past two years, risked revisiting a deeply divisive issue that the Liberals themselves have struggled with for over a decade: the protection of free speech and religious groups.
The third was that so weak is Ley’s hold on her own partyroom, let alone the Coalition, that any internal divisions would immediately feed into leadership tensions.
By demanding the immediate recall of parliament to rush through tighter laws and implement “in full” antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s bizarre set of unlawful and unconstitutional recommendations, including muzzling the press and stronger laws against hate speech, the Coalition was carefully putting in place a series of land mines — not for Anthony Albanese but for itself. And journalists, under the same delusion that this would destabilise Albanese, cheered them on as they did so.

Well yes, and the reptiles of Oz and their endless crusading should take a major share of the blame.

Now watch as the dog botherer tries to wriggle off that Keane hook, by attempting to blame the ABC ...

The header:  Politicians, incurious media have failed the terror test; Instead of holding Labor to account for its culpability over Bondi, Coalition parties made themselves the issue. They, and an incurious media have failed the terror test.

The caption for another of those hideous uncredited lizard Oz collages: The Coalition split has seen Sussan Ley, left, and David Littleproud, right take centre stage, allowing Anthony Albanese, centre, to escape proper scrutiny. Pictures: News Corp

The pond doesn't have much to say about the dog botherer's offering. He's always been a contemptible loon, with a second rate fundamentalist one-eyed ideological approach to the world, and nothing herein changes the pond's mind ...

At a time of unprecedented national trauma and vulnerability, Australians have been let down by an indolent government and a dysfunctional opposition. That our entire political class could be so negligent is deeply worrying, especially given that with a largely complicit media we are left with no functioning means of accountability.
Federal and state governments, law enforcement agencies and most media could not have moved on more quickly from their culpability over the Islamist terror attack at Bondi Beach that killed 15 people at a Jewish Hanukkah event last month. Rather than examine their failings, they have busied themselves with communal mourning and cloaking themselves in the stories of Bondi’s heroes.
Despite more than two years of warnings about rising levels of antisemitism and Islamist extremism, and constant pleas for more decisive action, Anthony Albanese not only did the minimum possible to stand up against this hatred but, encouraged by the ABC and others, he fanned the flames by demonising Israel. Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong even tried to assuage Hamas by recognising the non-existent state of Palestine, a dangerous move that rewarded terrorism and therefore could only encourage extremists.

You see? The relentless reptile jihad forced precipitate action, and now here we are, with the reptiles and the one time coalition in a sorry mess, and the lettuce triumphant ...

Cue an interruption ...Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks during the Light Will Win memorial service at the Sydney Opera House in Sydney on January 22. Picture: AFP

The dog botherer maintained his rage, invoking fellow crow eater Lord Downer  ...

This is the most shameful dereliction of duty in national security and social cohesion in our nation’s history, and as our longest serving foreign minister, Alexander Downer, has said, the worst foreign policy shift of the post-war era. Thanks to a divided and confused opposition there has been no public reckoning, and we are left to hope the royal commission properly examines these issues.
Instead of holding the government to account and providing a template for stronger action, the Coalition parties have taken a blunderbuss to their own feet as parliament considered hate speech laws this week. Whatever their differences and the complexities involved, they needed to be united and focused.
The Liberals and Nationals have made themselves the issue, thereby absolving the government of scrutiny. It seems unlikely the Coalition will be re-formed until the Liberals install a new leader.

The pond hates to bring up this interruption, but the reptiles keep bringing it up ...

Why? What's it mean? The pond hasn't held a hard copy the rag in its hands for years, not since they gave it away at airports.

So why put this nonsense in the web version? Have they worked out how to put a URL in a hard copy newspaper?

Never mind, it's more amusing as a mystery than the dog botherer's tiresome musings...

The fact the opposition pushed for a return to parliament shows a lack of political judgment and real-world awareness. It wasn’t a lack of legislation that led to the Bondi terror attack, it was two years of unchecked public hatred, antisemitism and Islamist extremism.
The opposition should have been busy prosecuting Labor’s failures in the public debate rather than pushing for a return to the ALP’s home ground of Parliament House in Canberra, where it has the numbers on the floor and the press gallery running protection in the corridors. The opposition did well to force Albanese’s backflip on a royal commission, then lost sight of what mattered.
The pivotal lines and the arguments had been laid out for the opposition by former deputy Liberal leader Josh Frydenberg when he paid his respects at Bondi last month.
“We, as a Jewish community, have been abandoned, and left alone by our government. Our governments have failed every Australian when it comes to fighting hate and antisemitism,” Frydenberg said. “Our Prime Minister … has allowed Australia to be radicalised on his watch.”
The former treasurer rattled off a list of threats and escalations over two years. “We have seen the doxxing of Jewish creators, the cancelling of Jewish artists, the boycotting of Jewish businesses, the graffiti at our schools, the harassment, the intimidation of Jewish students and staff on our university campuses and, of course, the firebombing of our synagogues and daycare centres, and daily protests of hate in this, the lucky country, which is lucky no more,” he said. “And for 2½ years, as the Australian Jewish community and others have raised the alarm bells, they were told by people who should know better that this was not as significant as they had said.”

Perhaps it's best not to go to Haaretz, and be reminded.

Oh why not ...Olga Cherevko Showed the World What's Happening in Gaza. Israel Won't Let Her Return. (sorry, possible paywall)

Inter alia:

And again...

Back to the lizard Oz, as the reptiles slipped in a snap of domestic suffering ...Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, and Nationals leader, David Littleproud have allowed their own parties’ issues to let Albanese off the hook. Picture: John Feder/The Australian.

And then it was on with the job of pinning it all on the ABC, in a way to be expected of a columnist for the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

That is it – that is the undeniable indictment of the Albanese government that should have been the mantra of the opposition. Yet instead of prosecuting this case about the lack of moral leadership, the reckless ignoring of warnings and threats, the opposition followed Labor’s cue and pretended that new laws were needed.
This foolish strategy not only delivered unnecessary laws that are bound to have unintended consequences, it also implicitly excused the government of blame because it suggests the missing element here was not leadership and resolve but legislation.
If an identical series of events had unfolded under a Coalition prime minister there is little doubt he or she would have been pushed close to resignation by now. Labor and its media mates, quite rightly, would have piled on the pressure over warnings ignored and pleas denied. Remember Scott Morrison was scarified by Labor and the media for making the obvious point that he could not physically extinguish bushfires: “I don’t hold a hose, mate.” Yet Albanese spent 26 months resisting demands for action against rising levels of antisemitism and Islamist extremism before the Bondi Beach massacre finally jolted him into some sense of urgency.
Here was a study in denial, a tin ear turned to legitimate concerns and a community endangered because a Prime Minister averted his eyes. In the history of our nation no leader has so actively and comprehensively failed their prime duty to protect their citizens – he still struggles to mouth the words “Islamist extremism”.
Complicit journalists’ failures
The reason journalists are not clamouring for Albanese’s scalp is because they have been just as delinquent on Israel and antisemitism. The publicly funded media in particular has spent the past two years demonising Israel, regurgitating Hamas propaganda, underplaying the atrocities of October 7 and downplaying the scourges of antisemitism and Islamist extremism.
If the bloodshed at Bondi exposed the recklessness, misjudgements and indolence of Albanese, it did the same for much of the media. They have spent the past two years running wild and erroneous claims against Israel, censoring the Islamist and extremist elements of endless pro-Palestinian protests and talking down the threat of antisemitism.

Inevitably Josh wangled his way in, what with his desire to wangle his way back into parliament, Former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg reacts at the memorial at Bondi Pavilion for the victims of Sunday's terror attack. Picture: Sky News

What a pity he lacked the ticker ... as the dog botherer ranted on ...

In June 2024 the ABC’s Media Watch host Paul Barry admonished me for focusing too heavily on the “rise of antisemitism” in Australia on my Sky News program. “On our count, it’s around the 30th time it’s been discussed on Kenny’s show since the war began,” sneered Barry. By the time of the Bondi terror attack I would have raised it 200 times; in fact on what was supposed to be my last program for the year, three days before Bondi, I said antisemitism and the government’s lack of action were the greatest challenges confronting the country. With 15 people buried, including a 10-year-old girl, and dozens injured, I wonder how long it will be before the ABC gets back to scoffing at claims of antisemitism.
Among the biased and incorrect reports run by the ABC was the false claim early in the war that Israel had fired a missile on Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital killing 500 people. (In fact, the rocket came from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and killed a fraction of that number.) The ABC constantly reported Hamas claims and statistics as fact, usually ascribing them to the “Gaza health ministry” or some other source that sounded reliable, and among its many deceptions were reports of the absurdly erroneous claim in May last year that 14,000 babies would die in Gaza within 48 hours.
This is the same public broadcaster whose global affairs editor, Laura Tingle, insists the Bondi Islamist terrorist attack had “nothing to do with religion”. Tingle and other ABC staff, including David Marr and Louise Milligan, joined a boycott of the Adelaide Writers Week in solidarity with Randa Abdel-Fattah, who publicly celebrated the slaughter of Israelis in the October 7 atrocities.

The reptiles then selected Tingle for a snap, The ABC’s Laura Tingle claimed the actions of the Bondi terrorists ‘had nothing to do with religion’. Picture: ABC

And yet insofar as the pond understands religion (admittedly not much), butchering a bunch of innocents in a murderous rampage doesn't have much to do with religion, at least if you avoid the carnage of an Old Testament god always up for a genocide, slavery and such like ...

Back to the keen Keane for a few more thoughts ...

None of this would have happened if the Coalition hadn’t been so eager to exploit Bondi and had thought through the consequences of making ridiculous demands, such as implementing the Segal report. Albanese’s conduct following Bondi has hardly been exemplary or politically astute, but ever since the first mutterings of “this is too rushed” began emanating from Coalition ranks, he has looked like a 3D chess player in comparison. He must be unable to believe his luck that he keeps being gifted with such inept opponents.
But Australia is the loser from this emerging Victorianisation of the whole country, in which a poor government can glide through debacle after debacle because its opponents are much, much worse.
The Nationals, at least, can now bring all their forces to bear on trying to fend off a surging One Nation in their heartland. That’s likely to see some pretty ugly politics as the rural party embraces some deeply toxic policies, unhindered by having to keep the Liberals onside. Immigration, the tighter gun laws, climate, environmental and economic regulation, social issues — all are now fair game for the Nats.
For Ley, the universal commentary will be that she’s finished. Most likely she is, but she can now get on with her project of trying to make the Liberals relevant to urban electorates, to the extent that mad right-wingers and ultras like Andrew Hastie will let her.
Right from the moment she became leader, Ley has had to craft a credible opposition from a diminished number of mostly talent-free and selfish MPs and senators. At least she’s no longer lumbered now with a bunch of duds imposed on her by the Coalition agreement. If nothing else, it’s a good time to be a Liberal backbencher — as of this morning, their chances of promotion increased sharply.
As for all the journalists, especially at Nine, who weaponised a terrorist massacre to campaign against Albanese, they might reflect on the fact that in politics, things rarely quite pan out how you expect them to. Or, more simply, be careful what you wish for.

Especially Nine?

Oh fair go, keen Keane, show the reptiles, and especially the dog botherer, some respect.

If you want to look at reptiles weaponising a massacre to campaign against the Labor government, no need to look past the lizard Oz.

Who else could invoke silly Sharri (full disrespect) in support of their current jihad?

Media outlets, especially the ABC, have been bad actors in the Gaza conflict every day since October 7. As such, they too are answerable for the hatred and division that culminated in the bloodied sands of Bondi.
Former ABC director Joe Gersh has spoken out repeatedly about the ABC’s jaundiced coverage of the Middle East and its reluctance to take antisemitism seriously, long before Bondi.
“It is a matter of deep concern to me as a member of the Jewish community, as a former ABC director and as an Australian citizen, that our national broadcaster has not fully understood and dealt with what I believe has reached a crisis proportion, which is antisemitism in this country,” Gersh told Sharri Markson on Sky News in May 2024.
Then, just seven weeks before the Bondi attack, Gersh spoke on my program about concerns the public broadcaster’s biased Middle East coverage was fuelling resentment in Australia: “The manner in which the ABC and other media outlets treat Israel and the war Gaza reflects directly in action in connection with antisemitism here in Australia.”
Back in June 2024, senator James Paterson was critical of the ABC’s “lack of curiosity” about antisemitism. “When we have Holocaust survivors say they’ve never felt less safe in their own country, in Australia, that’s a national disgrace,” he said. “And the fact that a national broadcaster is so uninterested in that is a great shame.”
This gives us a sense of why Albanese has escaped serious media scrutiny over his shameful handling of Middle East diplomacy, and antisemitism and Islamist extremism at home. The distressing reality is that with the Coalition parties split asunder and the Liberals about to endure another round of leadership turmoil, the dangerous indolence of the Albanese government (and the ABC) is set to run unchecked for some time to come.

Phew, the pond is glad that's over, keeping the dog botherer's company is a bit like tending to King Donald ...