For the life of me, I can’t work out why our “single source of truth” continues to lie about ‘that’ message. I have my hunches, but first, we need to consider why the message by “someone from comms” elicits only obfuscation from the great podium of porkies, which to be fair, is at least consistently fib-mongering whoever stands behind it, with Hipkins since wading in on the ‘social media message’ in chorus-like fashion: “something got lost in translation”, “over-simplification”. Phooey.
The goose-media keep repeating the mantra: “it went up on Saturday”, “a mistake”; yeah, right. Firstly, the message was completely harmless; what’s so offensive about “please have a test” that Ardern claims it caused her to become “incredibly angry”. It’s not as though the message said ‘you’ll be arrested for surfing’ or ‘we intend to force you to destroy your livelihood’ which both are completely true but could be considered undiplomatic or irritation-inducing dependent on their voicing and delivery in the context of the correct, very perfect pitch of kindness for all.
Secondly, the message was not “a post”: it was official advice, published by the Health Ministry, and like all publications, was spell-checked, grammar-checked, fact-checked, part-highlighted in bold and approved, with a preamble explaining the perfectly reasonable rationale of the request. It was no mistake by Commie from Comm’s, it was thought-out, signed off and duly published on Thursday, August 27th with instructions to repeat the message on the all-of-government official apps in turn, as they obediently were.
So: why the hullaballoo? Why the fakery and arms-length distancing, let alone the hysterical “it caused me to be incredibly angry” faux-outrage nonsense.
So “incredibly angry” the lady didn’t merit it even a single mention, or more importantly, worthy of ‘very important’ correction, during her lengthy, as always, opening monologue? What’s the bet that Dear Leader’s red-facedness was not anger, but embarrassment because she had known about it. Indeed she had probably tilted her head in sage concession to Health’s wisdom, since pre-publication, and it wasn’t until someone highly-attuned to political pitches suggested the message had connotations of the ‘R-word’ that the floor opened up underneath her exalted righteousness as the penny dropped. ‘Omg! “South or West Auckland” – that could be, y’know, ‘interpreted’…what were you thinking?’.
But who, just who, might have imagined such ‘interpretation’ and had enough clout to a) have the harmless official advice removed, and b) insist our Dear Leader blame a commie for the ‘mistake’, that is, if anybody (fingers crossed) noticed?
‘Don’t say anything unless they bring it up, ok? But if they do, over-react, y’know; as in ‘No, I did not glue the cat to the furniture, I can’t believe you think I could do such a thing.’ Got it?’
Believe me when I say: I have absolutely no idea who such a (wholly-imagined) political string-puller may be, but in my minds-eye, I spy someone beginning with ‘H’. Do you, in your own minds-eye, spy someone beginning with H, 2?
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