Mister Minit's a munting muppet

My political beliefs - which probably belong in this blog about as much as nude photos of Madeleine Albright, but we'll run with it - are what I've described in other media commitments as 'pragmatic left'. That is, I back small-L-liberal causes, but I'm aware of the flaws behind the mechanism of implementation - for instance the fact that any state or federal Australian Labor government should never be allowed to stay in power more than three terms lest they atrophy into a lazy, reactionary pack of tossers tending cynical-right-wing on any political question of merit. The problem with any political system or framework is usually that humans are involved. Humans are vain, jealous, venal and egotistical, and political humans more than most.

So, yeah. Occasionally, you're going to have to wear a conservative government. Such as we have now in NZ under PM John Key's Nationals. It could be worse. It's a conservative government hamstrung in its conservativeness by only being in power through a very uneasy alliance with the usually-leftist Maori Party - a party many members of the NZ Nats would like to see disenfranchised by the abolition of the Maori electoral seats in parliament, but that's another story - and as a result, to paraphrase a Don Chipp-ism, the bastards are kept more or less honest. The Keymaster is far from the worst conservative leader you could imagine. That'd be some kind of horrific melange of Abbott, Howard and Dubya, I suspect. Mr Minit has spent about 15 minutes in politics, having made a metric shitstack of coin as a merchant banker for Merrill Lynch and belatedly decided to go into politics having safely accrued his first couple of million. He doesn't seem to want to kill and eat babies of single mothers on welfare in the same way your usual common-or-garden-variety NZ Nats leader would. Given that the last guy did a deal with the Exclusive Brethren for support, anything's an improvement.

Mr Minit's biggest problem - aside from the rest of the NZ Nats still being the same rabble of arse-backward bigots, inbred Cletuses and born-to-rule fucking imbeciles they ever were - is that not being a politician by training means he's desperately shit at the one thing career politicians make their living at, the impromptu, off-message, off-the-cuff soundbite. The Beehive press gallery know the drill by now: Stick mike under Mr Minit's nose, ask off-topic question, watch the bastard flounder and mumble like a beached dugong with a harpoon up its jacksie. Helen Clark used to be a monster at this - she'd dominate the room. (The off-topic soundbite stuff, not the harpoon thing.) Whereas the Keymaster just redefines crap.

One can only offer this apparently inherent inability to provide intelligent (or even intelligible) content on cue as some kind of weak explanation for what the fuck he's doing apparently giving the country's full backing to Egyptian dictator Mubarak over the weekend - buried, in true NZ media fashion, at the end of this piece about how a former All Black was in somewhat mild danger of splitting a nail while poo and Mistral were first interfacing in Cairo.

"New Zealand wants a peaceful outcome to this, in the end whoever governs your country is a matter for the citizens. In the case of Mubarak, he's been there for a very long time -- 30-odd years I think -- we respect the fact that he has done his very best to lead a country which has recognised Israel and therefore wanted to make sure the position in the Middle-East has been a peaceful one."

Riiiight. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume these thoughts reached outside air before Mubarak's goons started shooting old ladies in the face. Though with the religious profile of Key's electorate - and of Key himself, for that matter - in mind, it's interesting that 'recognising Israel' seems further up Mr Minit's Big List Of Stuff Egyptian Leaders Should Do than 'not killing your own citizens.'

The Doctor is OUT before Mr Minit sets his SIS Secret Police onto him. The arsehats who took five years to realise they'd hired Walter Mitty as their chief scientific advisor. But that's another (other) story...