In which the utter chaos of Savva contends with the bromancer's verbal abuse as the path to compromise ...

Meanwhile, the reptiles maintain their rage against the poodle ... sure, it's dressed up as SA Liberals, but make no mistake, the crusade is on, the reptiles are on the war path ... and the poodle is in deep reptile do dah. Once they get a set, they're not for turning ...

Naturally the pond sought refuge away from the conflict with the savvy Savva, but a curious thing happened to her splash, which started out this way ...

Later in the day, it ended up with the full Harry Potter joke,  though it was still lurking beneath the onion muncher vanguard ...

The pond has a secret sympathy with the savvy Savva, sent forth each Thursday to try to make sense of the universe for her unruly young ruffians.

It's a bit like searching for truffles, with the attempt to make sense of it all such a trial for the man who gave the nation such life-sustaining broadband (if you don't mind a drop-out every thirty minutes or so, wrecking your down- and up-loading, and streaming services).

Where did that cartoon come from? We're on about the suffering of St Malware ...

The pond has been here before.

It isn't Thursday. It's Friday afternoon, and the pond has had enough of teaching and the wretched dumb recalcitrants who refuse to listen or to absorb any lesson, and instead sit gazing out the window at the fields of freedom stretching away to the Tamworth hills. They too yearn for the weekend and release ...

Sure Ms Savva might have important things to convey, but she sounds a little like a mild Dame Slap, inclined to reason and common sense, as if that's something to do with anything, and the whole damn class refusing to listen, and ready to depart with a clanging of desks and a battering of ports the minute the bell goes ...

Oh and then there's the deck chairs to shuffle, just in case the iceberg gets a little closer ...

Fun days indeed, because the savvy Savva is close to the desk of Malware, and there, ever so politely, she deploys the Daesh, or if you will, the suicide bomber option ...

Liberals would be wading through blood every day between now and the election that would be imminent because Turnbull would quit and precipitate a by-election. Fun days indeed ...

Please don't ask what's in the body cover, just stand well clear ...

You there! Lower your hand at once!

Rolling disasters? Utter chaos?

Well if the savvy Savva is in despair, at least Malware can turn to the reprehensible bromancer for a bit of unexpected support ...

More Wilcox here and how lucky are indigenous Australians that there's one reptile willing to listen ...

Now the pond has no idea why anyone asked the difficult, uppity, pesky blacks for their opinion.

Such is their truculence, they might well give one, and then where would that leave us, but to ignore it?

At this point the pond must interrupt to apologise. The bromancer provides an exemplary example of cultural condescension, but his 'splaining was actually summarised in a cartoon, first carried by the Graudian here ...

And so to the rest of the bromancer ... sure, it's redundant, the cartoon said it all, but the bromancer will amplify and explain just why Noel Pearson was a passing fad at the lizard Oz and is now totally reprehensible ...

And there, in a nutshell, you have the reptile answer. Fuck the uppity blacks, they're way too uppity, and they insist on calling themselves black ... why can't they just be a decent dinkum white Australian Catholic like the bromancer?

Speaking of the ability to compromise, the pond is reminded of that recent fuss in the United States, in the NY Times here ...

“If John Kelly isn’t a complete idiot,” John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy research organization, tweeted late Monday, “he’s at least 3/5ths of the way there.”

Happily, the bromancer is all the way there, in a deep snit because an uppity black pointed out that perhaps he'd be happier with the slave owners ...

Perhaps he'd also be happier blathering about the way an inability to compromise led to the civil war ...

Here a group of Aboriginal people that made a proposal, and what do they cop as a response?

They cop this sort of response, this sort of language, this sort of verbal diarrhea ...

...contemptuous and unreasonable, gratuitous labeller, bizarre and dishonest ranter, radical ideas, profoundly dishonest, morally intimidating, polarising and destructive path (what? a civil war?), slave owners, legitimate debate in which I can abuse you but you can't abuse me, perversions of liberalism, and destructive tendencies ...

Yep, there's your way forward to compromise ...there's your positive and constructive response from Malware and the reptiles ...

Never mind, this day Rowe indulges in a currently much favoured fantasy, with more fantastical Rowe here ...

In which the reptiles of Oz bring back the coyote and the onion muncher ...

At first the pond thought that Crikey was being unfair, evoking Looney Tunes, the coyote, and crazed, maddening fanaticism, even if there's something reassuringly familiar and comfortable for the pond in talk of greybeard loons ...

The series here, paywall affected, but surely someone like the savvy Savva isn't so much the fanatic as the dedicated, the devoted and the eternally loyal, the sort of person you might see standing at Malware's cake stand trying to peddle week-old lamingtons ...

But then came today and the pond realised that "fanatic" and references to the delusional coyote were probably understating the dire state of the lizards of Oz ...

Look, there, notice the placement of the coyote himself, an epically failed politician ... (and note also the attempt to drag an ALP senator into the citizenship fiasco when the reptiles had a guaranteed Liberal senator at the heart of the citizenship fiasco for their lead, if they'd wanted...)

And look at the loon who's the top of the digital 'opinionista' list this day ...

The image of the pond's old dog digging an old bone out of the dirt and sitting down for a good chew was irresistible, though truth to tell, we probably need the pungent sight of a corpse being exhumed to catch the full stench of what's going down here...

One of the signs of crazed fanaticism is not just the elevation of the onion muncher to the top of the heap, but the assigning of attendant lords to bow and scrape and pay due heed and attention to his delusions ... it's like a re-enactment of the madness of King Tony on a weekly basis ... though the onion muncher's delusions don't even have the excuses available to the suffering King George III.

This time it was poor Shanners who drew the short straw ... and what an unhappy pumpkin he was...

This splash promised much ...but then it turned from "Conservatives look for a leader" into a meaningless toddle down a path of wonder ...

And since there's absolutely no point looking to the irretrievably damaged onion muncher for leadership, the result was a short, very damp squib ...

Yet there was more to come because it was poor Shanners who'd drawn the short straw to write up the onion muncher's speech.

You see, whenever the crazed fanatics really get rumbling, the crusade requires not just that the fearless leader is given space, but that a lickspittle lackey must be assigned to repeat what the fearless leader has just said ...

Poor Shanners. How the bouffant one is made to suffer.

It's not often that the pond has a sneaking sympathy for servile lackeys, but what must it be like to turn up day after day and serve as a hack copyist for the onion muncher, faithfully transcribing pathetic, natteringly negative, stupidly defiant rhetoric?

There goes a massively stupid man, indecent in his intolerance, doing his bit for Cory and his mob.

Will he still head over and join Cory and the fundie Xians?

Who cares, he's already done a fine DLP job on the Liberal party ... and yet poor Shanners must type out his words all over again, even as the reptiles run the original onion muncher piece ...

But they can't stop, can they, and nor can the pond, because we've gone through all this, and that incompetent dropkick loser, the onion muncher himself, has yet to speak ... and speak at interminable length he must ...

In part because marriage has preoccupied the national debate?

But that was a debate you created, you goose, that was the poisoned chalice you set up ...

Oh okay, there's no point arguing with a dropkick loser who has, in his nattering negativity, made himself irrelevant, a voice braying in the wilderness, a seer only to malcontents and reptiles, and really requiring a different movie to portray his political condition ...

Luckily the final gobbet is small. No doubt his speech was much longer, but this is as much of the stench as the reptiles could stand as they dragged the suppurating corpse from its tomb, the festering thing returning from the dead to announce a triumph, a snatching of victory from the possible jaws of defeat ...

There's something deeply weird in that reference "As this newspaper's Paul Kelly points out" ...

Few in New York would understand that reference to "this newspaper" or to "Ned" Kelly ... yet it brings home how deeply entwined the reptiles and the onion muncher are in their shared delusions. What a rump of right wing coyote looney tunes they make ...

And as for the result being easier to accept, what an epic horse laugh. The fanatics will never accept the result, and will yearn for the onion muncher and the fanatical coyotes will encourage them in their delusion ...

And speaking of which, here's a couple of readings for some light comedy relief.

The first came in the New York Times, in full here ...

The counternarrative was particularly pronounced in the outlets controlled by Mr. Murdoch — who has close ties to the president’s family — and his news and entertainment companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp. 
On Saturday, the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro called for the jailing of Mrs. Clinton, saying, “It’s time to shut it down, turn the tables and lock her up.” 
She alleged that “the Obamas and the Clintons” had “built the Trump-Russia connection,” pointing to a report in The Washington Post that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee had helped finance research by Fusion GPS, which produced a dossier describing ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. She did not mention a report in The New York Times that a conservative media organization, The Free Beacon, hired Fusion GPS to research Mr. Trump and other Republicans. 
The most salacious findings in the dossier, based on information collected from sources inside and outside the Kremlin by a Fusion GPS contractor, the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, remain uncorroborated. 
Also on Saturday, The New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin called for Mr. Mueller’s resignation, citing Fusion GPS as well as Mr. Mueller’s previous job as an F.B.I. director under President Barack Obama, given that, in Mr. Goodwin’s view, so much of the investigative focus must now fall on Mr. Obama’s administration. 
Foreshadowing Mr. Goodwin’s dubious argument was an editorial in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which declared that Mr. Mueller “lacks the critical distance” to look into the allegation that “Democrats paid for Russians to compile wild allegations about a U.S. presidential candidate.” The editorial also questioned whether the dossier had triggered the F.B.I. inquiry into Mr. Trump’s campaign. 
But the investigation began in July last year, James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time, told Congress in March, not long after Fusion GPS’s financing passed from Republican to Democratic sources. 
And while skepticism is a virtue in all journalistic endeavors, there is no evidence to support the assertion that the Democrats hired Fusion GPS with the purpose of getting Russians to spread “wild allegations” about Mr. Trump. 
As John Sipher, a former Central Intelligence Agency chief of station, pointed out, intelligence tends to come from sources within foreign governments. 
“Reaching out to Russians and Americans to try to collect information on what might have happened and then pass that information to sources in good faith, that’s different from trying to conspire with Russia to get stolen emails from the United States,” Mr. Sipher told me. The collective coverage from The Journal editorial page, The New York Post and Fox News — not including the straight-ahead coverage by the likes of Shepard Smith and Bret Baier — was testament to the Murdoch empire’s ability to make its own journalistic weather. 
Between the promotion of alternative narratives and the way the social media platforms have been so slow in describing their inadvertent hosting of the Russian effort, there’s a striking lack of national unity over what appears to have been a foreign incursion in an American election. So you have to wonder how the country will ever come together to do something about it.

The ability to make its own journalistic weather ...

Put it another way, the coyote and his ACME products can be found everywhere in the Murdochian empire ... and with the delusions generating the same capacity for harm ...

Fortunately, there came an epic smackdown in The New Yorker, in full here, conducted by Troy Patterson in a warm welcome to Laura Ingraham as part of the Fox pantheon ... ...

Her prologue—a soliloquy parallel to the Talking Points Memo of “The O’Reilly Factor” or the Wørd of “The Colbert Report”—was called the Angle, and it was obtuse. The inaugural theme of the Angle was “What is America?” Ingraham connected this query with a Frank Sinatra lyric. She botched the title of the Sinatra song that the lyric comes from, though—it’s not called “What Is America to Me?” Nonetheless, the screen lit up with a handful of photographs of Ol’ Blue Eyes taken in the slow-dancing-with-Nancy Reagan phase of his career. For the record, Ingraham was quoting a song called “The House I Live In,” which Sinatra performed in a 1945 short film that was created to shame anti-Semitism. One enjoys breaking it to her that the lyricist, who also wrote Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” happened to have adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, after they were executed as Soviet spies. “We hope that ‘The House I Live In’ will serve to remind all Americans that patriotism is not limited to the right wing,” the boys once wrote… 

And there was also this ...

Lost in the fog of the Civil War is the fact that Ingraham posed Kelly quite a number of stupid questions. When she wondered, “What do you pray for?,” he began, like a pageant contestant, “World peace.” When she asked what his ideal Halloween costume would be, he told her that he’d like to dress up as a Marine Corps sergeant—an answer with a special flavor of condescension when coming from a retired Marine Corps general. At one point, right after the Robert E. Lee bit, she laughingly wondered who might rise up to serve as the self-loathing élite’s choice of an acceptable figure worthy of public statuary. Kelly said, “We can find some cult hero. . . . Andy Warhol or something like that,” and I suppose that this was one of his better answers in the interview. Any number of the artist’s statements speak eloquently toward the civic life of the Republic. Not quite at random, I opened “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol” to page 26: “When I got my first TV set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people.”

Hey, Troy, can the pond borrow your razor some time? 

The pond only ran those gobbets so it could feel better about the onion-muncher worshipping lizards of Oz ...

And so to a Pope cartoon, with more papish pleasures here ...

In which the pond sinks into the bromancer swamp ...

On the surface, and at any level below the surface, that angle is preposterous and silly, and so naturally the pond had to abandon nattering "Ned" for the day, and read on ...

As usual, and as with any Murdochian worth his salt, the bromancer had channelled the instruction issued recently by the Donald ...

And that's just what the bromancer does, with his talk of crooked Hillary and Bill's swamp taking down the presumably pure and untainted Donald ... well so the Donald says ...

So much yelling ...

And so to the bromancer explaining how the current state of affairs is actually all the fault of the Clintons...

Yep, if ever you wanted a correspondent at the Salem witch trials, the bromancer is your man ... he can spot the way the Clintons are witches with an unerring eye ...

Now this, for the moment, is as good as the disingenuous dissembling gets ... nothing to see here, and nothing wrong with chatting with the Russians and trying to sell out your country, the real crime was getting caught telling a fib, and what a modest and inconsequential crime that is, no worse than telling a fib about a blow job ...

Why soon enough the brave lad will be pardoned by the Donald and where's the harm in that?

What a classic half-baked, half-arsed bromancer fudge, though at least he didn't go the full WSJ, and demand that Mueller - foolishly searching for crimes like a terrier hunting for rats amongst the innocent Donald clan - be sacked forthwith, terminated and dismissed, and the entire affair forgotten so that the Donald could get on with the job of giving the filthy rich a tax break and ending health care for millions and otherwise fucking over the entirely useless poor ...

And the pond had given up nattering "Ned" for that?

It made the pond determined to have an after-dinner mint, and what better way to do that than nibble on a delicious dashing Donners?

Foolish reptiles, they entirely missed the real selling point ...

Yes, Soviet-style approach!

That's the dogwhistle, reptile sub, and please don't leave it up to google next time ...

How dare you fail to highlight the way dashing Donners is banging on about a Soviet-style approach to education, which, it has to be said, is completely unlike the Catholic style theological indoctrination, Ponzi scheme, give me a child of seven and I'll make him a tormented Catholic for life, approach to education ...

How important it is for creationists and Catholics to be able to roam wild and free, and make life hurtful and hateful for anyone of a minority persuasion they disdain ...

And even worse, it might result in a poofter sneaking into the Catholic system! And what would that do to the poor children in the care of Catholics, as they imbibe their homophobia on a daily basis ...

Never mind, as the Donald was raised earlier, it seems only fair to revert to a Rowe, celebrating the season, with more Rowe here ...

And now, this ...

And now, simply for the fun of seeing the Donald talk to children, this ...

And now, this ... just for the fun of seeing the Donald handing out candy ...

In which Dame Slap embarks on a V2 bombing run to take out the poodle ...

Say what? Dame Slap has turned reporter, the intrepid Lois Lane of the Daily Lizard? And then, in the usual reptile way, she gets to comment on her discovery of the dirty dog's dirty deeds?

Stand aside doddery nattering "Ned", making the bold and brave assumption that Malware was ever in control, and so was in a position to lose it.

Amongst the other reptile detritus the pond has been forced to lose in its unseemly rush to check on Dame Slap?

Stand aside, ancient Lazarus, no bypass will bring you back to relevance ...

Farewell coal, everyone loves thee, though none so much as a passing reptile marvelling at your deep black eyes ...

What's that? There are fresh reports on climate science, at the Graudian here, or the Chicago Tribune here, or dozens of other papers around the world ...??!!

Oh how can these possibly compare to the heady, intoxicating sight of reptiles infatuated and madly in love with coal, and discovering to their rapture that Queenslanders, oi, oi, oi, share their diamond bright passion for pure carbon ...

But no, none of this can compare to the Dame in full flight at the top of the opinion page ...

A Liberal woman? Oh the misogynist cad ...

Now it will be remembered that the delcons harbour a rich and deep hatred of the treacherous, double dealing, two faced Janus of a poodle, who helped do down the onion muncher in a most despicable way ... oh the night they did the old onion muncher down, all the delcons were wailing.

So there was always going to be payback, if ever a chance presented itself, and the pond was always going to book a ringside seat, just to see Dame Slap savage the hypocritical hound...

Now because the pond believes in double the pleasure, double the bang for the buck, what better time to whip in Miranda the Devine, trolling the delcons?

Yep, it requires stepping around the Devine fracking the farmers in the fundament ...

See, there it is in the fine print ...

Oh she's going to troll the onion muncher and the delcons yet again ...

By golly, the Devine has called them V2-bombers, if you like, and truth to tell, the pond has always fondly thought of the onion muncher as an unguided Nazi missile ...

And come to think of it, Dame Slap seems about ready to launch herself on yet another destructive strike on the poodle, that treacherous, traitorous double dealing rat fink lurking amongst the great aunts on the verandah under the wisteria ...

24 years and not a single thing done? Nothing, nada, zip, zilch ... like an Oscar Wilde rocket ready for a drop into the mud ...

Now that's how a V2 bomber does its job. Take out a loser dropkick poodle, with clean, clinical precision ... while the Devine is somehow left with the ineffable job of defending the malingering, malfeasant, malleable Malware ...

By golly, that's a ringing endorsement of a ning nong with no political nous, and so to a final sinking of the slipper, a shivving of the blade, by Dame Slap ...

And with that Dame Slap has spoken ...

And as the poodle limps away into the night and the eternal mud, there's one last bit of the Devine trolling to enjoy as she calls out Dame Slap as a jihadist...

Uh huh ... because forsaking all your Xian principles to put a barbarian in the house has really worked out well for Xianity and the United States and the world ...

Well it's pleasing to report that the Devine's trolling successfully infuriated the readership ...

Oh steady Barry, settle down and have another splash ...

The pond could have gone on and on forever, watching as the pinheads lined up to heap abuse on Miranda, so that the pond might continue to have the onion muncher in its banner ...

But as much fun as it was - the pond loves to see Malware v. the onion muncher feuds almost as much as Dame Slap castrating the poodle or jihadist V2 bombers battling essence of vitriolic Devine - the pond simply just had to acknowledge the latest Liberal Senator's wonderful discovery of his status by running an infallible Pope, with more papal jests here ...

And now, though everybody and his poodle has probably already seen it, this ...