"The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution."

"The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution. The revolution proceeds through conflict and strategic framing of polarised manufactured 'sides.' The issue is just an excuse (or mediator) to orient the conflict in the direction of Leftist 'progress'."

~ James Lindsay explaining the process of "dialectical progress"

The Real Dirtiness in NZ Politics

The subject has thankfully gone cold, but Lindsay Perigo is running hot on the real dirtiness in NZ politics:

“Every election” said H. L. Mencken, “is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” Elections, we may agree, are a process whereby loot is exchanged for votes, to gratify the power-lust of sub-humans who crave control over real humans.
    Our 2014 election campaign kicked off with a frenzy of auctioneering that would have startled even Mencken. Tens of millions here, hundreds of millions there—in reckless indifference to where it might all come from and flagrant contempt for the Other People whose Money it is.
    Reacting to Labour’s multi-trillion dollar health package, outgoing Health Minister Tony Ryall was moved to note, “The bidding war between parties on the left is now out of control.” Was it ever under control? Did National ever behave any differently?
    The best that might be said of National is that its bribery has been marginally less irresponsible than Labour’s.
    What is especially ominous about this latest bribery epidemic is that it takes place against a backdrop of the most dumbed-down electorate ever. Our latter-day child-molesters of the mind, the education bureaucracy and the teacher unions, have seen to that—in faithful obeisance to their unacknowledged mentor, Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who enjoined communists the world over to destroy Western Civilisation not by overt revolution but by stealth, a “Long March through the Culture,” infiltrating and mortally corrupting all core institutions and organisations.

The real dirtiness in NZ politics – the real source of all the alleged dirty laundry aired and being aired?

Conviction politics has become extinct. “Opinion polls,” Mike Moore once admitted, “have made cowards of us all.” Politics is: the gutless in thrall to the clueless. Therein lies its real dirtiness, not in the machinations, grubby though they may be, revealed in equally grubby Nicky Hager’s latest dump of stolen e-mails.

What to do?  Read on, MacDuff.

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The #1 reason for #dirtypolitics: the barrenness of the "centre-right"

The #DirtyPolitics saga saw the commentariat almost immediately begin comparing John Key to their favourite modern-day bogeyman, Richard Nixon.

On the face of it, the link looks seriously overblown. Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy led a shambolic dirty tricks team directly overseen by Nixon’s Attorney General that ran a series of lurid operations including luring political opponents with prostitutes, attempts to destroy political party conventions, and carrying out break-ins of journalists and political opponents.

Cameron Slater runs a blog.

If the commentariat can’t see the difference between a blog post and a break-in, we can only despair.

That said however,on a level deeper than the superficial non-similarities pointed to by the regular critics, with all their wild mud-slinging, there is a connection to which they are and will always remain blind.  The real connection is not so much dirty trick s or Judith Collins’s alleged enemies list; the real connection is ideology – or, to be precise, the lack of one.

“Some of the most serious allegations I’ve seen…”

"These are some of the most serious allegations I’ve seen," said David Cunliffe this morning, about allegations that bloggers Whale Oil and Cactus Kate wrote “attack blogs” at the behest of a paying client and a justice minister “gunning for” a minion.

The Herald publishes a graphic calling a senior bureaucrat the “victim [their word] of a number of highly critical blogs.”

Are these people serious? The victim? What, off mob violence? Of a violent mugging? Of a drive-by shooting? No, of some “highly critical blogs.”

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Fucking. Kidding. Me.  Someone wrote some things about him online, and this bureaucrat is now a fricking victim?

This sort of silliness both overstates and understates the power of blogs – and vastly downplays some of the most seriously serious scandals of recent years. (Did Mr Cunliffe not see Helen Clark buying an election with $800,000 of taxpayer-funded pledge card, then retrospectively legislating to make it all legal?  Or the Winston Peters-Owen Glenn-Helen Clark debacle of 2008  – or Winston’s theft of $150,000 of taxpayer money? Or Don Brash dealing secretively with a small but well-funded religious cult to get around donor rules? Or, even, the blatant theft of emails and correspondence of your political opponents … )

I’m sorry, but if these are truly the most serious allegations he’s ever seen he seriously needs to get out more. (Maybe ask David Shearer about the sort of serious stuff that goes on in the world’s warzones, for example.) So a blogger wrote “attack blogs” about a bureaucrat.  How hurtful. How harmful. I’m amazed the poor fellow wasn’t hospitalised.  Just imagine, being attacked by a blogger!  (Maybe pay a visit to your friend and adviser Greg Presland’s home at the Double Standard, David, or Matt McCarten’s Bradbury Blog, to see how folk do this sort of thing just for sport?)

It rather overstates the effect of bloggers, don’t you think, to take this sort of silliness seriously. To get all sanctimonious about what amounts to a few colourfully-phrased blog posts. As blogger Ruth used to say, a blogger is a brain on a chair. He has a keyboard, not a gun. His influence is precisely as much as the degree to which his stories and smears are taken seriously.

This is basically an online flame war that’s spilled over into real life, and is somehow making headlines.

Is attack politics itself wrong?  Then where’s the condemnation of Trevor Mallard. Or Winston Peters.  Are baseless attacks out of order? Then talk to those two again, or every political blogger ever, everywhere. Are attacks on bureaucrats themselves wrong? Not as long as these pricks hold the power of life, death and penury over all of us.

You don’t like what a blog post says, then don’t read it. Move on. There’s plenty of others saying plenty different.

I’m not sorry Judith Collins resigned.  That was long overdue. Not for things she did in the shadows, but for the many and serious outrageous offences against taxpayers and individual liberty done right out in the open – for which she received and receives nary a condemnatory quip even from her political adversaries.

There is an insufferable whiff of sanctimony wafting over this whole sorry saga. It doesn’t just overstate the importance of this kind of attack blogging, the degree to which it is taken seriously demeans and disregards the real power that bloggers and politicians can wield.

Of that, more here.

Crushed [updated]

Gutless, and gone?

UPDATE: Good riddance. A shame she wasn’t sacked for all her real offences.

Chris Trotter still “acceptably corrupt"

Chris Trotter argues when it comes to politics “(t)he options are not fair means or foul: they are foul means or fouler.” Pablo reckons this means either Chris has lost his ideological bearings or has consciously decided to join the Dark Side.
Pablo has forgotten it was Chris defending “acceptable corruption” not that many years go. Acceptable, to Chris, if it turfed out the Tories.

Irony.

As I’ve said before, irony.

Judith: think it possible you may be mistaken [updated]

It’s true that both a person’s and a politician’s emails should be private. But what might have been revealed by the reaction to the illegal @Whaledump was more than just some ill-considered repartee.

How Judith Collins has reacted to media pressure about her behaviour – leaving her Prime Minister to bat for her when she should be fronting herself – has been revealing. It turns out Entitleitis isn't just for corporate cronies and lowly-paid beneficiaries. Cabinet ministers get it too.

But then, they are the country’s highest-paid beneficiaries.

Irony, then, that Collins’s biggest crime according to this document dump was revealing the name of a former Helen Clark staffer she thought might have revealed Sir Double Dipton’s double dipping.

Nonetheless, Judith Collins is once again embarrassing her party, her cabinet and her Prime Minister – this time in the middle of what should be a campaign, when she is already on her third last warning.

And by refusing to front, she not only allows the story to continue until she does, she reveals again her overweening sense of Entitleitis.

Yes, she has Entitleitis, just like most ministers do in a second-term government: she thinks she is entitled to her ministerial position and baubles*, and anybody or any questions on any subject suggesting she might not deserve them should be ignored until they go away.

If it’s not Entitleitis, then it’s a severe case of cowardice. Not a good look for a woman who likes to revel in the name ill-named moniker ‘Crusher.’

In either case, she would do her colleagues, the campaign – and, let’s face it, the country -- a power of good by pissing off.

Now, would be good.

* Baubles? Not sure what she costs us now, but back in 2009 the pint-sized power luster was racking up $46,000 plus rorts for accomodation and $188,981 a year in flights and limos. And all we got in return for that was “asset confiscation; suspension of your right to silence; expanded search and surveillance powers for an extraordinary range of government departments.” You know, stuff she did right out in the open.

UPDATE 1: Nice to  hear Leighton thinks the same. (Although more politely.)

UPDATE 2:  Interesting to see that Cameron calls his “former Beehive contact” Jason Ede “gutless” for not fronting up. If he means it for his other mate, he obviously means it double for this one.

UPDATE 3: An emailer pointed out Collins was bearded at the airport wearing a carpet. Not a great looks, but she does answer questions.

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DotCon Drivel

Guest post from our accidental Invercargill correspondent, Jim Cuttance, who inadvertently stumbled into an InternetMana revival meeting….

The principle message from the savvy new internet party that's going to change everything is: don't change anything.

That's what Auckland school teacher and list no. 3 Miriam Pierard insisted at the InternetMana party's Invercargill show this week.

She assured everybody that education in New Zealand was bureaucratic perfection and new-fangled charter schools would ruin things for young people.

Because, you know, overseas evidence and stuff.

Everybody should know by now that the education department always gets everything right and if they know it don't you should send them to remedial education camps and we've got the tax drones right where we want them, thank you.

Furthermore, only a vote for the savvy new Dotcon party that's going to change everything can make sure education won't change.

Pierard and teacher-cum-lawyer Angela Greensill are driven by the desperate need for more teachers, lawyers and unionists on New Zealand's political left. Because they're just aren’t enough already.

They set the platform for megalog-on jillionaire Kim Dotcom to decry New Zealand's slow internet.

He said it was caused by Telecom's undersea cable monopoly but A-lister and unionist Laila Harre wasn't there to explain why monopolies are bad.

And party no.1 Hone Harawira wasn't there to tell us whether he is still a global warming sceptic.

However, Pierard assured us changing climate is a key youth issue, and the savvy new Dotcom party that's going to change everything is going to stop the climate from changing too.

Huzzah!

Plus, I think she's going to feed the kids.

All of them.

Because she's sick of kids dropping dead of starvation in the middle of her climate classes.

I forget why parents have some other priority rather than feeding their kids, but they do, and that’s fair, and it’s not right to ask. And anyway, it's the government's fault and stuff.

OK, I admit I was switching off quite a bit, but if you take anything away from this you know there is a savvy new Dotcom party that's going to change everything.

Or not.

Hager, rhymes with macabre

Nicky Hager’s thesis appears to be that negative attack politics damages our political system. He makes the case in a book that is a negative political attack, the fourth in a series of attacks he has hoped each time will change an election.

Nicky Hager is a privacy campaigner utterly opposed to government intrusion into private data and communications. Nicky Hager has published four books based on data derived from stolen communications.

Nicky Hager is appalled that some bloggers (Cameron Slater, David Farrar) are National Party members, and are part of National Party campaigning. He is relaxed however about other blogs and bloggers (Martin Bradbury, The Double Standard ) being members of other parties and part of other parties’ campaigns.

Nicky Hager is an unreliable witness.

But so too are the dim bulbs in the mainstream media who allow themselves to be manipulated.

The mainstream media has failed, still, to come to terms with blogs and bloggers -- part of the reason Hager’s claims at this election get traction. The mainstream media and its commentariat section have been ignorant for years about what constitutes objective journalism. Failing to understand that objectivity does not mean neutrality – that even in selecting the facts to report, every journalist necessarily betrays their own position – since the birth of blogs the mainstream has risen up in horror at bloggers broadcasting their own opinions loud and proud in every word, sentence and paragraph they publish.

To bloggers and blog readers, this the pleasure of blogs.  To the mainstream finger-waggers, this is a crime. And not just do bloggers broadcast their own opinions – and none so loudly locally as Cameron Slater – they have the temerity to publish them without the imprimatur of the media’s gate-keepers. This crime, still unforgiveable in some circles, has the MSM ready to convict every time the words Slater and Cameron come up.

I say: note the facts, and beware of hyperbole.

Nicky Hager (rhymes with saga) makes a short story long.  But that is no excuse to make it wrong.

The always-wrong Armstrong for example has already decided Cameron’s openly-boasted-about downloading of documents from an insecure Labour Party website is akin to Watergate – ignoring that Watergate was an amateurish attempted theft that only brought down a president because he tried to cover it up, not a blogger publicly downloading documents the website had made open to the world.

The MSM has mostly accepted unquestioningly Hager’s claim that he is “letting people know about the government” (as he told ZB’s Hosking this morning), yet all he’s told us about, at best, is what some party hacks got up to.  Interesting, maybe; but devastating? Really?

The claims last night that secret SIS dirt on Phil Goff was dished to Cameron to serve up already looks like hogwash: being revealed now as as a claim Cameron was invited to file an Official Information Application to get details of Phil Goff’s briefing by the SIS – a claim some miles down the road of hyperbole broadcast last night, and another already denied by the Whale.

Perhaps the most pathetic of all the claims that have emerged so far (and at the time of writing this, Dim Post seems to have the most concise summary) is the whole chapter of the “explosive” tome devoted to Hager’s belated discovery that David Farrar is an active National Party member and pollster – something evident to most of us since at least 1996 when Farrar was on Usenet, and widely advertised since, not least on the very blog that Hager claims is a National Party front, yet repeated breathlessly this morning by every news broadcast it’s been impossible to avoid. [Farrar answers the hysterics here.]

This is not to totally discount any actual facts that might be found in the book – a book, remember, based on six years of stolen emails, amongst which you’d expect to find at least an interesting tale or two to tell, if you didn’t mind betraying someone’s privacy.

But perhaps the biggest message already from the results of Hager’s carefully-orchestrated document dump is that it’s not a dump at all -- that is, it’s not a dump in the Climategate/Wikileaks sense of dumping a ton of documents online so all the facts can be revealed. Instead, it’s a cherry-picking by Hager of what he considers to be the worst stories imaginable he can spin from the stolen documents.

And if this is the best he can do – if the worst he can say about a collusion between senior government ministers, party staff and high-profile bloggers is that they exchange emails and occasionally post anonymously, then it seems this little country at the bottom of the South Pacific has less to worry about than we might have thought. You know, compared to evidence from, say, the States that the Justice Department there was compiling data from journalists’ phones; that their IRS is actively targeting political opponents of the president; that an opposition film-maker has been jailed based on trumped-up charges …  in the cold light of day I can’t help thinking that by comparison it makes what Hager so breathlessly revealed all seem remarkably benign.

Which I hardly think was the conclusion Hager was inviting us to draw.

Hager v Whale

Nicky Hager (rhymes with lager) alleges that politics is dirty. He alleges it as if that’s news. As if the corpses of a thousand political victims never happened.

He further alleges that John Key uses a friendly blog, mainly Cameron Slater‘s, to help get his message out. As if that’s unique. As if not one in a thousand leftwing blogs have any affiliation whatsoever with unions, Labour Party, Greens or the German Billionaire Marxist Maori nationalist party.¹

He even further alleges, on the basis of emails and webs hacks he alleges were stolen (somehow) while Cameron’s website was hacked (which doesn’t explain how Cameron’s offline emails would be hacked, but there you go), that (and here I quote from Hager’s press release):

During the 2011 election campaign … the prime minister’s office used its knowledge of secret SIS documents to tip off Slater and arrange an attack on the Labour leader.

That last paragraph of mine is as tangled as Hager’s usual reasoning. Nonetheless, if true, it is political dynamite.

But is it true? Can he prove it? Has he proven it? Is this really news?  I have no idea. None whatsoever. And neither does anyone else who hasn’t read the book – but expect a slew of commentary by those who have by this hour tomorrow morning, and a to  of  innuendo from every politician on all sides of the electoral divide whether they’ve read it or not.

It’s no accident it’s released so close to an election that few will bother to check if the mud has any bottom – nor that Hager’s focus on dirt in politics shines a light only on Team Blue, when Teams Red, White, Brown, Black and Green have been and are no angels. Nor has Hager himself (once again, these are stolen communications he’s relying on, right? )

And it’s true too that Cameron has been happy all along to downplay the importance of the SIS and GCSB being granted powers to bug and surveil without warrants, mostly on the basis that it’s okay if his mates are doing it, or it’s being done  their behalf, or they’re the ones in power while it’s done. But if he had been leaked material from SIS with which to attack Phil Goff in 2011, it must have been pretty bloody innocuous since not one member of the commentariat can remember anything remotely larcenous raised against him.

So it’s entirely probable that, as with every other Nicky Hager book since publishing began, he is making too much stew from too few onions.

If however he can prove it, and if that proof is actually and only contained within the pages of his book, I’m sure you’ll hear about it– without having to pay him any money – in every headline between now and Christmas.  And it will be an outrage.

And Cameron will still enjoy every headline,interview and new blog reader that he gets. Which by September will probably be counted in their hundreds, if not the thousands.

---

1. Liberty Scott’s quip was so good I had to borrow it.

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