How to shoot yourself in the foot [updated]

Back in April,  I said then what everyone from Chris Trotter to Lindsay Perigo are essentially saying now, i.e.,  that whoever runs in ACT’s anchor seat runs the party, that you can’t credibly present yourself as a liberal fiscally responsible party when you have a big-spending bigot running in your anchor seat, and that as a consequence Brash’s clinical take over of the ACT party

has been poisoned at birth by Don Brash’s bizarre insistence that Minister-of-Rhyming-Slang John Banks be given the post of Act’s anchor in Epsom.

That there was any way anyone thought things might be different, that somehow Banks’s involvement would turn out any other way than it has, just really beggars belief.

UPDATE: Knutz suggests the shot wasn’t through the foot …