Astonishingly, despite not having a new idea since the 1980s, he's campaigned this year on a platform of change and new directions, like he hasn't been in Parliament for fucking decades. Even more astonishingly, he still has enough support from other scared old people, to the point where he is still likely to hold the balance of power after the forthcoming election.
But the ball always bounces perfectly for the leathery old shit. It looked like he could be in trouble last week, with the revelation that he had been overpaid for his superannuation for years, to the point where revealing an exact figure would have been truly embarrassing. But it only took a few days before he managed to be the fucking victim again - a true, solid man who was being undermined by lesser creatures.
Even without getting into the morality issue - why the fuck does a working person on a stunningly good public salary need to claim the money for anyway? - there were legitimate questions about how a man who is extremely up-to-play on the ins and outs of the super system could miss the wrong data for years. Suggesting it was a simple, honest mistake might impress the rubes, but since he's a leading politician who has been hip-deep in the finer details of the pension for years, it just makes him look incompetent as hell.
But somehow, the shit just slid off him, and by the end of last week he had managed to portray himself as a victim of a smear campaign, threatening prosecution on anybody involved in leaking the information.
Mr Peters has, of course, never stopped himself from using his own leaked information to smear his opponents, but got right on his fucking high horse when it started coming his way. Suddenly, a man who has built his career on some jaw-dropping leaked data was the paragon of privacy, outraged that people would use the same tactics he had happily employed for years.
Peters set his sights on the usual political targets, and unsurprisingly, a lot of it was also apparently the media's fault for daring to report on an interesting news story.
The news media has long been a target of Mr Peters' ire, but it's only got worse in recent years. After he made the outrageously racist claim that Herald journalists were only working on stories about the property boom because they were Asian, Mr Peters didn't really suffer any consequences, so it's no surprise that when it comes to his latest media criticism, he once again played the man, not the ball.
It was, admittedly, a pretty fucking lame assault - claiming that the Newshub reporter who confronted him about his super overpayments was a young, inexperienced reporter out to prove himself by beating up a nothing story.
Which is the usual heaping pile of bullshit. The reporter involved has been around a while and knows the fucking score, and only the most catastrophically inexperienced journo would hear that a major political figure was overpaid his pension for years and think it was a non-story. To ignore that would have been the true incompetence, but no, it's all part of some sordid conspiracy to bring the Last Honest Man In Parliament down, apparently.
Mr Peters is getting nastier as he gets closer and closer to death, and the truly funny thing about his nastiness is that it just doesn't work politically - his poll numbers have been fucking tanking for weeks now. While he is still a folk hero to the kind of morons who gladly drink poisoned Kool-Aid if Winston said it would get rid of immigrants - there were plenty of voxies last week from the usual idiots who sneered at the media to just leave him alone - he's scaring off the more moderate voters, who can see through his thin veneer of charm.
Still, at least he has some real competition for biggest shithead of the campaign this year, after Paula Bennett revealed in the weekend that a little concept like 'universal human rights' wasn't really something she subscribed to. It's an interesting tactic for National to try appealing to the moron vote as much as Peters has been doing, although Bill English was hitting the morning shows hard yesterday to let everyone know that Paula didn't really mean what she said (an admirable trait for a career politician), so maybe they looked at those poll numbers for Peters and realised there are only so many idiots willing to buy your bullshit.
Mr Peters has, with dull predictability, written off his terrible poll results as 'fake news' and they're still not terrible enough to stop him from having that grip on power later this month, so he's unlikely to change. Maybe all we can do is ask the press gallery to soak up some more of his bile, because he might think he's being big and clever by blaming the media for everything, but he just looks like a fucking tool.
- Ron Troupe
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