I was wrong!

It's nice to be wrong sometimes.  

I arrived back from holiday, turned on the radio -- and the first two words I heard were "Owen Glenn."  Nothing much changed in a week then, apart from more lies, more spin, and the same lack of evidence that Brian Henry and Winston Peters came up with at the culmination of the Winebox Inquiry. 

They had nothing then to justify any of their claims; they have nothing now to back up their fibs.  The dog, once again, has eaten all their homework.

But I was wrong about one thing.  I said some weeks ago that while it was obvious even then that Winston and his "blood brother" were up the creek without a paddle's worth of evidence, for the five percent or so of morons who are his target voters (which is all he needs to survive, remember) Winston's picture in the papers day after day would be all that was needed to get out and vote for him again.  "Winston isn't dying of this," I said, "he's dying for it."  

For months now he's been trying to get headlines, for anything -- anything at all --  and we all know that Winston doesn't care what he get headlines for just as long as he gets those headlines.  He knows that his voters are too dim to either know or care what those headlines are for, just as long as that stern jawline is amongst them.

But it turns out they aren't that dim.  For years, Peters has relied on the assumption that there is a five-percent rump of the New Zealand population so braindead they don't notice he's nothing but an empty windbag pedding a pack of lies.  But polls now show his party just six weeks before an election sliding inexorably under two percent, and into oblivion -- and with a similarly small number believing the derisory stories Peter and Henry have cooked up for the privileges committee, this means that the number of morons in the country is somewhat fewer than I thought.

It's nice to be proved wrong sometimes.  

UPDATE:  And it's amusing to watch some people who twist themselves into contortions just so they can try for the state of moronry -- Chris Trotter for example, who so wants to believe Winston will be there to prop up another Clark Government, he's willing to believe all this.