Smoke & Mirrors, The Art of Political Deception

“An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.” – Plato

This quote is, I feel, very timely with the popular (populist?) press braying like a drove of asses, every time someone breaks out of quarantine. It can equally be applied to the Opposition party of losers who are struggling to recapture the rhythm of their favourite pastime of dirty politics.

But I can almost forgive the Opposition because they really don’t know any better. They have been threshing about clueless as hell for so long without a policy that runs to more than a 15 second sound bite, that they don’t know how else to behave. Their entire raison d’être for the last 20 years or more has been based upon dirty tricks.

However, I have less tolerance for the antics of the media who should, and in fact do, know better. Unfortunately, their biggest failing is that most of the outlets are now owned by just a couple of really big players whose interests are those of big business and they don’t wish to upset their major advertisers. The reporters themselves (most don’t deserve the title “journalist”) are not interested in balance when a snappy and usually misleading headline will do. In short, they have become lazy and would rather invent a disaster that their dullest readers can tut-tut about around the water cooler than provide in depth reporting that will enable people to have an informed debate over.

Lately their behaviour has been even worse with their vain attempts to find holes in the Government’s performance rather than actually finding out what has happened. Their decision to leave Simon the Pixie to travel back and forth between Tauranga and Wellington for the entire level 4 lock-down without badgering him on a daily basis as they did with the Government at every single press conference, is a glaring example of this one-sidedness.

Now we have a situation where irresponsible idiots are breaking out of quarantine facilities and both the press and the Natsis are trying to make out that it is the Government’s incompetence that is causing this. When considering who is at fault in this case we should always remember that these people are breaking out and not just walking out. They have been going to a lot of trouble to actually cut through fences and so forth to escape their quarantine.

It has already been explained to the thickos in the press gallery on many occasions that these facilities are not prisons. And neither should they be. The Government has now been forced to place military and police at these facilities, but they don’t want to get too heavy handed because that would make the whole experience awful for the 99.9% of people who are respecting the boundaries and the reasons for their confinement. There will always be some arseholes in any society, and we will simply have to deal with them (severely, I hope) as they pop up.

Frankly, it would not surprise me in the least of we were to find out that some (or all) of these escapees were offered an inducement to break out. If they weren’t offered an inducement, then they must be even more stupid than they already appear, because breaking out and risking actual imprisonment for the sake of a few beers, or a razor and some toiletries, most of which you could have had delivered to you, seems a bloody high price to pay.

And who would offer such inducements? Well that would have to be someone who had something to gain from the resulting hoo-hah and if those same individuals already had a track record for dirty tricks, then the circumstantial evidence does look quite damning.

We now know that Mullet was aware of this stuff much earlier than he had previously admitted. That now explains why he is usually sweating profusely when being interviewed; it is because he knows he has been “cute with the truth” as Lisa Owen, who is one of the few that has done her job well, suggested. He is crapping himself about how much of his (as yet) undiscovered involvement in all of these dirty tricks will be uncovered.

So why would the Natsis do something like this? Well that is easy. It is because they don’t have any policy that will convince the electorate that they should be the next Government. So far all we have seen from them, apart from the aforementioned dirty tricks campaign, has been smoke and mirrors.

On Checkpoint a few nights ago, Mullet kept puffing to Lisa Owen that the Government “had no plan”, but when questioned about his own plan, he stammered and sweated and threw out a couple of vapid comments about how they were the team to run the country and the Government was a shambles. Pressed further he said they had a lot of policy already agreed and a whole lot more “in the works”. But when he was pressed to name which policy areas they had agreed upon, he refused to even say which areas they had nailed down, never mind what their actual plans were.. He even had the audacity to say that the Government had done “a pretty good job” handling the Covid crisis, but that didn’t make them a suitable outfit to run the country in normal times.

Really?

I don’t know about you, but in my book, those who can handle a crisis are exactly the sort of people you need to run the show full time. To use another old adage (this one attributed to Joe Kennedy, father of JFK), “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”, and so it is that in tough times you find out who the quality performers are.

The cruel facts are that after 9 years of underfunding by previous Natsi Governments of every imaginable bit of infrastructure in this country, this Government has been doing its best to correct those shortfalls, without getting us into even more debt than the Natsis left us in. They are on track to do most of the things that the electorate wants and so for the Natsis to go against all of those policies would be political suicide, so instead they are clueless as to what they can come up with that will make them look attractive to the electorate again.

It is in this vacuum that they have panicked and decided that there must be a scandal they can find or invent to discredit one of the most popular Governments we’ve ever had and that is led by the most popular Prime Minister we have ever had.

But it gets even worse for them, because now that the media are starting to see some scandal being uncovered in the Natsi ranks they are starting to hold them to account. But Mullet has been enjoying the comfort of being the new boy in town for a few weeks and now that he is being badgered by the press he is losing the plot and refusing to front or answer any questions directly. This in turn has begun to piss some of these media people off and there was a glorious moment a few days ago when he tried to hold a press conference to announce a new Transport policy and nobody wanted to know. They simply peppered him with questions about Walk-On and The Bogey.

Since then he has been outed by Woodlouse who has admitted that he spoke to the Mullet about the emails he had received from The Bogey, several days before The Mullet was out front and denying any knowledge of anyone beyond Walk-On sharing with him that they had such material. Now their Chinese Spy trainer is leaving and along with Benefit and Trolley Dolly they will also lose Sarah Dowie, Nicky Wagner, David Carter, Amy Adams, Nathan Guy, and Maggie Barry. Rats? Sinking ship?

So, now that the press has begun to turn on Mullet he is going to find it very difficult now that the media has smelled blood, to find a sympathetic ear to try and get his policies out, should he ever actually get around to formulating them.