In which a partisan Christ Mitchell allows yet another attack on the ABC ... well it's hardly news but thanks to prattling Polonius it provides weekend fun for inquiring minds ...

Pope has hit on a luvvely riff, and more Pope here, but is everyone enjoying the musical?

Some certainly are:

Thank the long absent lord for the bouffant one, now busy shining a new set of shoes. With starched shirt and fancy tie, what a snazzy worshipful dancer he makes.

But some are impatient for action man:

Yes, nothing like the need to make a Rambo rush to the cliff to bring out the hotheads and the recalcitrants:

And so on, as the Bolter maintains the rage on many moot matters:

Nothing, nobody and no one can stop the Bolter ...

What we need then is an explanation of how it's all the ABC's fault, along with a faux history lesson, and even though he's well hidden inside the fold in the pages of "The Inquirer" - oh how the reptiles cultivate and love their "inquiring minds" - the pond each Saturday thanks the long absent lord that Prattling Polonius is around to provide a steady pair of hands.

What an elegant interpretation of events. How seemly and polite, and certainly not bitter or twisted and in no way feral. Instead the outrage must be directed at the usual suspects.

How many times has Polonius prattled that "The ABC does not have even one conservative presenter", thereby damning the wretched Tom Switzer and casting the awful Amanda Vanstone into the outer wetness ...

But stay, The Australian doesn't have a single wild-eyed greenie presenter or commentator - the doddering Philip Adams is mere window-dressing - so let us see how prattling Polonius addresses that outrage at the reptiles' public tone ...

No wait, that's simply not on, not on at all.

Perhaps instead we could all benefit from another of Polonius's thumbnail history lessons, scribbled on the back of a postage stamp and then faithfully transcribed:

Uh huh. In the immortal words of a former leader, shit happens, but what's the point. Can we look forward to Tony Abbott doing a Menzies?

Who knows, but perhaps, maybe, because the hagiographical intent of the history lesson suddenly becomes painfully clear:

And there you have it, a most professional coup, and the victim fluent but certainly not feral, and a relative absence of political vitriol, and Abbott handling matters well, with wonderful verbal dexterity, and hush, please, no mention of gritted teeth ...

Why there's a man who could rise again, like Menzies or Howard and join the immortals in the pantheon of Liberal leaders.

And that is how you re-write history. On the spot, and on the fly, and as always, with the benefit of only one eye, with the white-washing paving the way for more debriefings to the jocks in the run-up to Xmas ...

And what of those determined to maintain the rage?

Nothing, nobody and no one can stop the Bolter ...

And since one more time we've had the ABC and Fairfax done over, how about a balancing meme in closing?

Hush now, please, no talk of Murdochian culture. Remember, it's all the fault of Fairfax and the ABC ...

In which the Nazis, jihads and climate science are once more linked together in the reptile Oz ...

The pond has realised with some alarm that thanks to the white-anting and the back-stabbing and the undermining and the treachery that important issues have been neglected.

Thankfully the lizards of Oz are there to remedy the problem with an important missive promoting the welfare of one of their favourite pets:

Yes, and it's blessed with a most excellent illustration, maintaining the pond's enthusiasm for the y'artz this day:

Thus fortified and inclined to deep thinking, let us move on to a tragic tale of closed minds, which will require the most extensive references to the deepest thinkers to be found around the world:

Ah the tragic Bloom. How did he get into a tale of science? And how did the Bloomians fare?

Too many conservatives deny that the free markets and wars they promote unleash the free morals they decry. But for all their aspirations to virtue - whether the heroic Thucydidean kind or the tea-sipping, Elizabethan, high-church Burkean and American Federalist varieties - far too many are riding crosscurrents that are distort the liberal education they claim to defend. (here)

Ah, but that's entirely another mess, and poor Bloom claimed to have been misrepresented:

"I am not a conservative - neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook, and its adherents usually have to have some firmness of character to stick by what is so unpopular in universities. I just do not happen to be that animal. Any superficial reading of my book will show that I differ from both theoretical and practical conservative positions." 
Bloom denounced the obstacles posed to liberal education by commercial or bourgeois society and by religious belief that, "contrary to containing capitalism's propensities ... is now intended to encourage them".

Poor old Bloom was just a hapless delusional romantic of the backward looking kind, but enough of the distractions, it's on with the substance and the fate of that most excellent Bloomian, poor Bjorn Lomborg:

Finally, we get to the nub of the problem. Democracies inhospitable to intellectual dissent and mass teaching institutions of the the non-elite kind.

All those dreadful new students, those yahoos and yobboes, bringing their vulgar, red brick ways to the hallowed ivy halls, dragging their demeaning democratic attitudes with them, and thereby, with their mass political movements, ruining everything for the wondrous 'leets.

Now no doubt the pond can look forward in the third act of this piece in praise of the 'leets - with Lomborg the 'leet of the reptile 'leet - to a savage denunciation of the wretched vulgarians, especially the fundamentalist Christian kind, who have shamelessly set up their very own universities to study creationism and award degrees in same. 

This sort of dangerous democracy clearly can't be tolerated, so please, do go on. 

Oh, and could we possibly have a mention of the Nazis, since breaking Godwin's Law is always handy when wanting to link anyone who dislikes Lomborg's ways with a bowing to the ways of Adolf. When in doubt the pond always likes to mention Orwell and Goebbels and radio, but frankly a reference to Heidegger and Fuhrerprinzip will more than suffice (so much more to the point and so much more relevant when discussing climate science than mentioning that Althusser strangled his wife):

Excellent stuff. Not just the Nazis, but an invocation of a "jihad".

And with just a hint, not an outright declaration, that global warming is just a "hypothesis", and to think otherwise is a declaration of one's determination not to think, because science is always on the move and always changing, and who knows creationism might well turn into a viable solution somewhere down the track ...

Sadly however, this talk of change leads to the pond to contemplate and marvel at a wonder of the ages.

Here's McAllister rabbiting on about how the human brain finds it very hard to cope with uncertainty, and deeming this to be a problem.

And in the very same breath he's urging us all to welcome a "consensus centre" ...

A "consensus centre"!

Talking of Orwell and nonsense ...

There's an irony there, though it would take a John Stuart Mill to work out why McAllister is so contemptuous of the brain-deadening assault of mass political passions, while failing to mention the brain-deadening assault of the Murdochians and the Kochs and all the rest able to use the media as a primitive cudgel designed to produce submission ...

But for that McCallister would need to reverse his very closed mind ... and take a look at the febrile media which favours him by publishing his tosh in the cause and the service of their favourite in-house pet ...

Now back to the truly alarming developments sending a shudder of fear, panic and loathing through the spooked reptiles ....

Yes, but he can't do anything about alarming the barking mad like the Bolter and little Timmie ...

Put it another way Henny Penny ...

Speaking of Narcissus ... g'day gorgeous reptiles, let's maintain the rage ...

The pond is a lover of matters aesthetic. The golden mean, the golden ratio, the proper structure of drama, the resonance of dramatic irony, the plastic y'artz, David Rowe ...

And more Rowe here ...

The problem of course with the current plotting is that we've only reached the end of the first act.

Oh sure, it was excellent that the man who was dumped should return to dump the dumper, but if we're to follow the classical structure in plotting, the second act should see the dumped return to dump the dumper (as in that most excellent and melancholy tale, The Usurper Usurped, The tragedie of Chairman Rudde), followed by the dumper confronting the Australian electorate, only to be dumped by a massive wave back on to the desolate sands of life ... (remember that moving sequel, The Leaker Sprung, The dumpling of Chairman Rudde).

Does Abbott have it in him? He certainly has been acknowledged as a dramatist with great potential ... as in Phillip Coorey's Tony Abbott's guerilla campaign would make Kevin Rudd blush (paywalled, you'll need to find it online).

Dramatist Abbott's work thus far in building the second act is seen by David Pope as being somewhere between Rambo plotting a return to 'Nam and Lt Col Kilgore welcoming the smell of napalm in the morning:

And more Pope here.

Maybe it's a reference to a third rate third world guerilla terrorist leader, but the pond will always revert to the classics ...

Kilgore: I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink liberal Point Piper body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like ...  [sniffing, pondering] ...victory. Someday this Point Piper toff Turnbull's gonna end...

But as always, the pond lets its imagination run away with itself.

Oh sure, the Bolter is almost hysterical with rage. In just the few most recent posts:

The Pope could soon be banned and jailed under our police state of the Left (that's the police state run by the Leftist Turnbull).

We have lost if this government no longer dares call the Islamic State a "death cult" (that's Malware wanting to avoid blunt and divisive language)

Turnbull betrays Liberal base: taxes to rise on the "rich" (in which the filthy rich devours the filthy rich in a way that evokes Goya).

It turns out Turnbull is even responsible for American decisions:

US commits us to an accelerated war without asking Malcolm Turnbull first.

And as for the sickening sight of Point Piper toffs gathered for confabs, Yes, but what will they actually do? And let's not forget Julie Bishop signs us up for a sick circus ...

But that's the Bolter, always on the verge of hysterics ...

In such dire emergencies, the pond always turns to the reptiles of Oz for guidance,  that febrile media outlet that sounded the constant drumbeat of the need for economic reform, then faltered and turned greenie leftie when it mattered most ...

Or so Narcissus says ...

At first the signs seemed good for Malware:

And the comically titled Strewth discreetly overlooked Narcissus's indiscretion in mentioning the reptiles as a bunch of cowardly turncoats, gutless wonders when it mattered:

See. Not a mention ...

Mr Abbott revived his complaints about the media but broadened his criticisms to include the conservative broadsheet The Australian, which he accused of failing to strongly back his first budget. He said this contradicted the paper's "constant drumbeat" for economic deregulation. (here, with forced video)

Oh you cowardly, craven reptiles, deserting the field in time of battle.

But sooth, some reptiles have stayed loyal, and you don't have to look far for visible contempt, lurking on the surface, in plain sight:

Yes, the bromancer is outraged. Sure big Mal might win the next election, but it's meaningless stuff.

It is, the bromancer astutely notes, a tale told by an idiot and signifying nothing:

Prospero:
You do look, my son, in a moved sort, 
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir. 
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, 
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd; 
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled: 
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity: 
If you be pleased, retire into my cell 
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk, 
To still my beating mind.

Indeed, Bill, the stuff of dreams, and if only the bromancer had much of a beating mind to still, but lets hear it for the y'artz, to think that old Bill could still resonate centuries later, and turn up in the headline for the mindless, meandering musings of the bromancer:

Ah the stuff of the ABC and the Fairfax press, and nary a mention of how the treacherous turncoat reptiles sold out their fearless leader and his most excellent 2014 budget.

And so to dealing with that master of fluff, that man who dudded the nation with Fraudband, deploying savage whimsy and terribly clever irony ...

How good was it when Abbott was in charge, and now how grievous are the Point Piper toff's symbolic gestures, devoid of substance (well they're certainly devoid of decent bandwidth in the outback, and the pond will certainly be looking at the suffering of deprived communities this weekend on Landline):

And there surely, in the whimsy and the satire and the irony, is a sign for optimism and hope.

Narcissus still has his supporters and they are bitter and snarky and inclined to make jokes about Mars and moonbeams ...

It gives the pond hope in its yearning for a classical dramatic structure which the wonderful Bill could spin out into five acts on a gossamer thread of dancing moonbeam delusions ...

More strange than true: I never may believe 
These antic fables, nor these fairy toys. 
Lovers and bromancers and madmen have such seething brains, 
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend 
More than cool reason ever comprehends. 
The lunatic, the lover the bromancer and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, 
That is, the Malware madman: the lover, all as frantic, 
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Abbottian Pharaoh Egypt: 
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; 
And as imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name. 
The ABC and Fairfax!
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy, 
It comprehends some bringer of that joy; 
Or in the night, imagining some fear, 
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
And the ABC and Fairfax
Supposed a bear to fear ...

Or some such thing. As Rowe has apologised to Caravaggio, the pond must apologise to Bill, and now we live in hope for the next outburst of bitterness, bile and resentment ... because thus far it's all been going so terribly well ...

Damn you Fairfax and ABC, damn you to hell. Just when did you do that takeover of UK media, including The Times?

Dirty water indeed, and a pathetic plea for tolerance ...

Dirty water indeed, and the reptiles Oz were right on to the sniping and wrecking and undermining:

And so on, and on, but curiously, as the rest of the story wended its way through the undercutting and the sniping and the white-anting, this little detail seemed to have dropped off the twig, though naturally it could be found at Fairfax here, with forced video:

Mr Abbott revived his complaints about the media but broadened his criticisms to include the conservative broadsheet The Australian, which he accused of failing to strongly back his first budget, which he said was a contradiction given the paper had repeatedly called for economic deregulation. The former PM made the comments moments after the Turnbull government confirmed it was dumping one of the hallmarks of Mr Abbott's first budget – the proposal to uncap university fees. "That's an interesting one," Mr Abbott observed, when asked to comment on Mr Turnbull's decision. 

Yes, reptiles of Oz, it's all your fault, you pack of greenie lefty ratbags you, what a treacherous, duplicitous, double dealing, back handing pack of hypocrites you are ... you said you wanted change and now you're moaning that you really wanted stability ...

Well, at least that's what your shattered, embittered former hero seems to be saying, as he does his Ozymandias routine, at least until Christmas ... or the challenge ...

Meanwhile, the moaning, whining Catholic hierarchy know where to go for a good whimper. 

The reptiles of Oz:

Uh huh, the usual stuff, about how faith-schools need to have their freedom, which invariably is code for how taxpayers need to pick up the cost of propaganda for said schools, either directly, through subsidy, or indirectly, by allowing said churches to become tax evaders and avoiders.

Well no, the pond doesn't quite see how faith-based schools should be heavily subsidised to put out their propaganda, especially when it's the gay-bashing women's right depriving Islamics ...

By golly those Islamic fundamentalists show how it's done - it's behind the NYRB paywall, but you get the whiff of it in the first couple of questions featured in Slavery: The ISIS Rules.

But it's not just the Islamics, is it, when it comes to the crunch of fundamentalism v. gay and women's rights ... the angry Sydney Anglicans and the fundamentalist Papists also do the hard yards, and now after centuries of abuse, comes the plea for tolerance, just a few centuries too late ...

Uh huh, all standard stuff, but it was at this point that the pond began to roll its eyes ...

They're taught about it? What, like the way every woman can aspire to become Pope? And treating everyone as equal is the same as berating gays up hill and down dale for their sinfulness and wickedness?

Well herein lies the nub of the debate. If you want to go preaching your bile and your prejudices and instilling them in children, let the parents pay for it themselves. Don't go cap in hand with begging bowl to the taxpayer for direct and indirect subsidies to pay for the putting out of the propaganda ...

The pond doesn't care a whit or jot that the heart and identity of all religious schools is seriously under threat. If you want to make your bedfellows Scientologists, the Exclusive Brethren and Islamic fundamentalists, then do it on your own dime ...

And don't peddle that crap about hoping you will always remain tolerant of every member of society.

Tell that to the gays working as priests under cover in the church ... tell that to the women who want to keep control of their bodies ... tell that to anybody who has suffered persecution at the hands of the passionately religious for not sharing their multitude of gods, or their frequently bizarre and contradictory beliefs ...

Ah, the pond feels the need to recycle a bunch of ancient cartoons one more time ...

A bumper pond edition, in which, through gritted teeth, the white-anting continues, the pond endures a simple-minded history lesson from the bromancer, the Bolter is remembered for the Iraq war, and the femi-fascists provide a concluding cartoon ...

The pond almost overlooked yesterday's splendid effort by the Terrorists to spread Terror far and wide. How's the NT News holding up against such a splendid effort?

Hah, pathetic. Is that all you've got, Darwinians? Aliens and crocs? Forget it, we've got stalking sharks. Give the pond a yell when you're up to competing with the Terrorists ...

Meanwhile, in the sombre, sedate world of serious, respectable broadsheet journalism (oh remember when that divide meant something), the bouffant one is deeply into Erica:

Oh dear, that sounds serious, and look there's a picture of a smiling Erica ... what a trooper, laughing through his disappointment ...

Uh huh. But what about Erica's home state? Is the bouffant one going to report what was reported elsewhere?

Senator Abetz's claim of "hundreds" of resignations was immediately disputed by the President of the Tasmanian Liberals who said only 7 members had quit and that had been outweighed by 8 new applications to join. 
"While any resignation of any member is regrettable we need to keep a sense of proportion about this given that it is a matter of public record that the Tasmanian Division's membership numbers over 2000," President Geoff Page wrote on Facebook. (here at Fairfax with forced video).

Nope, nope, nope. Seems like the bouffant one is happy to entertain the white-anting and the destabilising and the grand-standing of the nervous nelly Erica:

The pond has to thank Erica for one of the more graciously self-serving, up the fundament, serves in recent tennis history:

It is understandable that with the removal of Tony Abbott, Kevin Andrews and myself from the ministry that our core constituency feels disenfranchised ...

Yes, who knows how that humbug poseur and eastern suburbs ponce got the numbers, but he'll understand what it's like to be a plucked chook, and soon enough ... as the conspirators gather on the back bench ...

Meanwhile, the pond was entranced by the bromancer's latest effort, which might be dubbed a child's guide to Australian history ...

... at least if the child is under ten, doesn't have a clue or a shred of memory as to what really happened, and thinks that the bromancer - who proudly boasts of his ignorance in relation to world affairs - is some kind of useful guide.

Take it away bromancer, show us how a simplistic summary for dills is what passes for broadsheet reading in these wretched Murdochian, reptilian days ...

Imagine how the electorate would have treated Ben Chifley if he'd run for election in 1949 ...

Oh wait ...

But please, do go on ...

And so, in this astonishing world view, the hapless, useless Billy McMahon emerges redeemed, which naturally sets up the completely useless Tony Abbott for some kind of redemption, while the always useful Gough Whitlam cops all the barbs.

The stability we crave ...

Which just goes to show that the bromancer doesn't have a clue. There's more to life than stability, and under McMahon, the Liberal party was completely clueless. The nation voted for change. It might have got more change than it expected, along with some totally dud ministers, but even the times that Sheridan celebrates - the years of Ming the Merciless and Howard - were riven by change.

Who remembers now the credit squeeze and the recession and the election of 1961 which saw Menzies scrape back with a one seat majority? And Jim Killen getting home with the help of 93 Communist preferences? A result that almost saw the gravel-voiced antiquated Arthur Calwell get to power (you can Greg Hunt it here).

Apparently Sheridan has no time for subtlety, nuance or change.

But if you read the carry-on by the reptiles on a daily basis, the last thing they want is stability. They want change, dubbing it "reform", including the slashing of penalty rates, the abuse of pensioners, the tearing down of the health system, the privatising of the education system and so on and endlessly on ...

Whatever you call it, that's not stability, but that's what, on any other day of the week, the bromancer would be craving.

In reality what he's doing here is holding up Malware to a golden age ... knowing that Malware will fall short, and he won't lead us to the alleged stability that we allegedly crave.

Let the destabilising continue, long may it flourish ...

And with the help of the Bolter it will continue ...

Uh huh. Let's overlook the first Iraq war and the ongoing relationship between Australia and the United States and its dearly beloved fundamentalist Wahhabist ally.

Speaking of licking the boots of despots and tyrants, where was the Bolter when Australia joined in the second Iraq war while Saudi Arabia tried to hold its Wahhabist nose?

Here in Australia, Andrew Bolt wrote a column on 20 April 2003, announced that he wanted to 'let the accountability begin'. 
In that piece, he denounced by name a whole series of war opponents: Simon Crean for doubting links between terrorists and Saddam, Carmen Lawrence for anticipating 480,000 deaths, Bob Brown for predicting 100,000 deaths of children and 900,000 refugees, Paul Dibb for talking of 'cholera or typhoid' and 'street-by-street fighting with enormous casualties', the Australian Sociological Association for suggesting the war would be 'responsible for the probable loss of 100,000 civilians', Robert Manne for anticipating that perhaps 'hundreds of thousands of Iraqis' would die, Amin Saikal for suggesting 'Baghdad will be turned into a bloodbath', Andrew Vincent for expecting 'absolute chaos, I think, in the whole of the Middle East and the Muslim world', and so on. 
In retrospect, Bolt's piece sums up the politics of the era perfectly. 
The people he listed massively underestimated the catastrophe that was coming - to take merely one measure, the Iraq invasion's now estimated to have created something like three million refugees, not the 900,000 predicted by Brown. 
Nonetheless, they were basically right and Bolt was catastrophically wrong. Not only was he mistaken on everything, he did everything in his power to belittle those who weren't, so as to ensure a cataclysmic war took place on schedule. (here)

Oh yes indeed ...

Let me put this plainly. The leaders of the Australian war party – John Howard, Rupert Murdoch, Alexander Downer – and their most influential cheerleaders – Chris Mitchell, Andrew Bolt, Greg Sheridan – bear some responsibility for the deaths of half a million Iraqis, for the incalculable number of deaths still to come and for the unimaginable suffering that has been endured by the people of Iraq since the invasion of their country. And yet so far as I am aware – their supreme self-confidence apparently unaffected by the catastrophe they had helped unleash in Iraq – not one of these warriors of the right has expressed even one word of contrition or remorse. (here).

Speaking, as we were, of grubby little boot-licking, lickspittle fellow travelling war mongers ... now doing their best to demonise the UN, and destabilise Malware ...

And so finally to a follow-up of recent pond business.

Well actually, since you ask, you eternally useless Pru Goward, if someone starts spewing around the word "fascist", in complete defiance of Godwin's Law, all bets are off.

If you dribble on and on about femi-fascists, you're a troll. And when someone writes "Come on ladies", the pond is reminded of the stupid gentlemen of Tamworth who imagined that calling women ladies was a sign of respect when in fact it was designed as a profound insult ...

But at least something good came of the fuss, in the form of a First Dog cartoon.

Ah yes, the good old femi-fascist joke. 

Come on ladies, let's call Pru Goward a doofus lover of the Devine, ergo a hater of femi-fascists, and let First Dog continue, and the original First Dog in its original form is available here.