CleverBlogName

…like Kinsey.

Pity the National PartyNew Zealand Herald couldn’t be arsed reporting on what the candidates really think before polling day.

I am reminded of Peter Dunne’s rise as the media’s annointed “Mr Sensible”, followed the same organs of opinion suddenly noticing he’d merged with the half of the Christian Coalition that were too extreme in some their views for Graham Capill’s taste.

Watching Winston Peters give what is likely to be his farewell speech I was struck, hard by a thought: what a waste.

Peters is an excellent speaker. His speech touched on many of the highlights of his career and the causes he cares about; the elderly, corruption. Later, especially on Maori TV, voices were added in support of something he didn’t really mention; as the first Maori MP elected to hold a general roll seat, and the first post-War Maori MP to exist outside the Labour/Ratana alliance, he had a certain inspirational quality as a Maori footing it outside that environment.

If that had been the summary of his career I could feel a real sense of sadness at his passing out of public life.

Instead, I find it tragic. Because Peters, expert politician, pioneer, battler against corruption, and so on, had his fatal flaw: he couldn’t stop supping with racists. The years he spent calling to the anti-immigrant and anti-Asian sentiments that poison some parts of our society were despicable. They helped make the country a less welcoming place for many of my fellow citizens, and he helped legitimise the some of the basest elements of politics. It will forever tarnish his name, and rightly so; it could all have been so different, and that’s the tragedy of it.

I would like to miss Winston. But I cannot.

I hear that Labour are considering Phil Goff as the new leader of the parliamentary party. I guess that seals 6 years for the National-ACT coalition, then.

In the village of Muslyumovo, a local physician’s personal records from 1993 indicated an average male lifespan of 45 years compared to 69 in the rest of the country. Birth defects, sterility, and chronic disease also increased dramatically. In all, over a million Russian citizens were directly affected by the misadventures of the Mayak Chemical Combine from 1948 to 1990, including around 28,000 people classified as “seriously irradiated.”

How the Mayak Chemical Combine screwed Russians worse than Chernobyl.