Peters doubled down over the next couple of days. He told talk radio that he wasn't a racist just because he said racist things, and he was quoted in articles that he wasn't being prejudiced against other races at all, he was just saying that the professional journalists involved changed the data in their own favour purely because they were 'Asian immigrant reporters'.
While Peters has, reportedly, been perfectly happy with a bit of the ol' casual racism behind closed doors for decades, this was something else. This was right out in the open, unapologetic and unashamed.
It's obvious where he's getting it from. Nobody can keep up with the cascades of dogshit coming out of the White House right now, because it's all piling up so high. President Pumpkin can offer a tax plan that will obviously benefit his personal wealth, and nobody does a fucking thing about it, because they're too busy worrying about what he's doing with North Korea, or the latest stupid fucking tweet.
This kind of 'straight talk', which always seems to come from men in positions of power who wouldn't touch the common man with a 10-foot pole, is undoubtedly appealing to Peters - a politician who really is in the twilight of a long career, trying to kickstart some life into it by appealing to the most xenophobic aspects of the public.
And it's not just racist - it's fucking offensive to the integrity of the journalists involved. Lincoln Tan has been doing some spectacular work for the Herald for a long, long time, covering issues that nobody else ever notices, while Harkanwal Singh, (whose praises we've sung before) has given the Herald an immeasurable amount of credibility with data journalism that is both enlightening and entertaining.
To suggest that these men might mess with the numbers, just because their families had an Asian background, is fucking intolerable. And Peters' refusal to apologise is equally vile and cowardly. Have you no decency, sir?
It was the kind of bullshit that couldn't be ignored, so Peters got what he wanted - more publicity for his stupid old man theories, and a couple of chicken-sucking dullards thinking 'fuck yeah, Winston tells it like it is', because he's giving a public voice to their idiotic prejudices against both the media and Asians.
(Of course, all these stupid old men are blissfully unaware they're on the wrong side of history, and will be remembered as goddamn cavemen in our history books, with their old-world hatreds holding back any hope of progression. For people reaching the end of their natural life-span, they seem incredibly blinkered by how their legacy will actually look.)
But the fuckwit-in-chief in Washington got where he is because, even though there was a huge amount of fine reporting work showing his corruptions and incompentencies, he always had a voice on cable news, with some stations falling over themselves to lick his saggy backside.
Nobody in the New Zealand media wants to lick Winston Peters' arse, because he's shat on all of us at some point. Considering his antagonistic approach, he still gets a lot of free publicity from the news media, because he's always willing to offer up a comment on any fucking story, (and, yeah, because there is always the horrific possibility that he'll end up being a goddamned kingmaker again after this election).
But maybe we don't have to seek Peters' comment on every other bloody thing. He can provide a valuable refutation of a government line, but he's just as likely to blame the media, immigrants and young people for everything that's wrong with the world, and maybe we've heard the old voice enough.
- Steve Lombard
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