Posts by Russell Brown
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Vernon Small notes that:
The saga began when a pile of court and other documents were dropped in a Dominion Post reporter's letterbox wrapped in a copy of the Otago Daily Times. That was followed by an anonymous text and several drops of further documents from someone calling himself Batman. All pointed to Mr Key and the H-fee scheme.
Batman was the one-time guest poster on The Standard.
The Dim-Post offers:
My (totally uninformed) guess is that Williams and his little helpers found their evidence on Key during the weekend and set events in motion to get the story out there as soon as possible, but the Prime Minister - who is super-cautious when it comes to stunts like this - told them to hold back until she was confident the story was sound. When it transpired that they had nothing they’d already primed the story in the media. It’s hard to walk a story back when its being spread by a guy called ‘Batman’ sending reporters anonymous text messages.
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I'd love to know exactly who has been shopping this story around.
"Steve Pierson" has confirmed today that The Standard got emailed information on H-Fee as a series of blog posts, of which they ran one (noting Key's confusion over dates in different interviews) -- but left the others unpublished for want of evidence.
The possibilities are endless ...
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True, but was any taxpayer $$ spent by Wishart producing his tome ?
No, but Mike Williams isn't under our employ either.
I wasn't seeking to directly compare the two -- whatever National's sins, it had nothing to do with Wishart's book -- so much as note the selective outrage applied with respet to political smears in some quarters.
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One observation: it is a little ironic that some of the people most up in arms this morning about the "smearing" of John Key are the same people who spent weeks masturbating over Ian Wishart's despicable book about Helen Clark's supposed secret life.
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The 3 News report was quite a useful summary.
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Oh cool. The Herald is re-versioning. Here's the latest version of the paragraph:
Checks by the Herald of court documents made public by Labour have raised questions about several aspects of the version he told, including his memory of when he left the company. He resigned from Elders in June 1988, six months after the first payment. There is no evidence that he was involved in handling the sham transactions.
And the original again:
Checks by the Herald of court documents made public by Labour have unravelled several aspects of the version he told, including the fact that he resigned from Elders in June 1988, six months after the first payment. There is no evidence that he was involved in handling the sham transactions.
Guess somebody complained. I suspect Eugene Bingham is not very happy about his story being rewritten by his bosses.
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It looks like the Herald breaking the story has accelerated Labour's schedule. One News says there'll be a press conference in about 20 minutes.
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It will be interesting to see the details and the spin then applied - that Herald article doesn't really say much that's damning to me, except the "I definitely left before the payments were made" line he made when clearly he hadn't.
The (ahem) key paragraph of the Herald story is this:
Checks by the Herald of court documents made public by Labour have unravelled several aspects of the version he told, including the fact that he resigned from Elders in June 1988, six months after the first payment. There is no evidence that he was involved in handling the sham transactions.
Labour will be seeking to show not that Key was involved in the crime, but that Key is slippery about his past.
It's a wee bit like the Springbok Tour thing -- no one cares in 2008 if he happened to be pro-tour as a 19 year-old, but his evasiveness was odd.
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No wonder you don't see real corruption when it winks at you with a cold dark staring eye.
You seem to think this behavior, not only normal but to be commended.
The man is in it for the power not the principal.Huh? Sorry, I don't get what you're on about.
Let's give Hagel some credit, huh? He's burned his GOP bridges with his withering criticisms of Palin and his support for Obama.
As far back as 2006, he wrote this for the Washington Post:
Leaving Iraq, Honorably
By Chuck Hagel
Sunday, November 26, 2006; Page B07There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis -- not the Americans.
Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism. There will be no military victory or military solution for Iraq. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger made this point last weekend.
The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation -- regardless of our noble purpose.
We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam.
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It's totally in the tank for Obama now.
Sen. Chuck Hagel is on board.
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