What started as a bit of impish sledging from Tag Team Farrar and Whale, has got even Idiot/Savant biting at the bait. Possibly because Hughes seemed so flippant about such contentious issues. Welcome to the war.
As any Politics 101 student can tell you, journalists and politicians are symbiotic parasites. One cannot live without their tentacles in the other sucker's guts. Little wonder then the natives got restless when John Armstrong went pestilential on bloggers late last year:
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| Shamelessly nicked from The Paepae, because Facebook's Timeline has a memory hole. |
What the Politics 101 student probably couldn't tell you, is how important and fateful one TV interview was, mainly because it happened long before they were born.
Simon Walker's evisceration of Muldoon made politicians' sphincters around the country contract so fast, the resulting sound was mistaken for thunder. TV had not only killed the radio star, it had murdered the supremacy of the prime minister's word. The leader no longer controlled everything. What would the littler Napoleans do?
They wised up and got media advisors, press secretaries, Public Relations spinners, hairdressers, make-up, washed-up actors and creative directors to adapt their shill to the new theatre in town. My old man was very proud of the fact that he refused all these prophylactic professionals and preferred to keep it simple by knowing what he was talking about. He understood the issues to a granular level.
Not much chance of general knowledge, let alone genuine insight, in the House these days. Just a choice of Blue Bull, Red Bull, Green Bull, Black Bull, Brown Bull, Shitting Bull or Purple Haze.
