Mickey makes an ass of himself

LawsWatch got it wrong.

We'd always held that the Mayor's lycra-clad pavement-pounding was due to to nothing more than simple vanity - the typical response of an aging roue to the vicissitudes of age. We were wrong.

Clearly, the hours spent negotiating the often cracked footpaths of Wanganui (who needs to walk safely when we'll all soon be able to swim further?!) have but one purpose - the reduction in size of the Mayoral derriere, thus facilitating more effective ass-covering.

After all, when one is as prone to bouts of discursive dysentry as is Michael Laws, then protecting the source of the outbreak becomes critical. Hence the "small target" strategy.

If we may be forgiven for extending the analogy for one more paragraph as Watchers gag over their evening gruel, Mickey has spent the past week digging himself an ever-deeper latrine while at the same time filling it.

First, he attempted to cite everyone from the CIA to... well, himself... to justify his "fat brown slug" comments. Apparently half a day pretending to be a "celebrity" on a TV show makes one an authority on the region in which the show took place. On that basis, winner of the first "Survivor" Richard Hatch ought to be being cited as an expert on Malaysia rather than cited in multiple counts of charity fraud.

When that didn't work, there was the usual spray in the Sunday Star Times in which he accuses Tonga of practising:

"...institutionalised sexism..."
What, like the regular abuse of female staff, to the extent of allegedly calling one a "useless c___"?

"...the cowering of the independent media..."
As opposed, say, to the fiercely independent River City Press and the Chron?

"...and the domination of the cabinet by royal appointees."
Step forward, Sir Nigelwho, Spin Fairly Mk II et al.

No, that wasn't going to wash either. So the latest Mayoral e-coli is classic Lawsian spin, claiming to have "learned a few lessons" while making it plain he's done no such thing. "Some places are so insular, that if you criticise their leader then you insult the whole country", Mickey marvels. Well, duhhh. Remember the time your mentor and role model Rob Muldoon called US President Jimmy Carter a "peanut farmer", Mickey? And all those "insular" Americans - including those opposed to Carter - took umbrage?

It's basic human nature - we rally round our leaders in times of crisis, and while we may delight in insulting them ourselves, woe betide the "outsider" who does so. Which explains why Bush's approval ratings stayed as high as they did for as long as they did and why Joe Lieberman no longer has political career. But so much of people's basic humanity seems to escape Mickey's understanding, for reasons we will leave it to the experts to speculate upon.

The fact that Michael Laws, Mayor-of-someplace-most-people-have-never-heard-of, draws parallels between himself and Pope Benedict might be something else they could take into account.

Mickey's second, implied, defence - that he's merely standing up for his oppressed Tongan brothers and sisters - doesn't stand up to much scrutiny either. Yes, Tongans are generally poor, and the distribution of income shows much greater disparity than amongst New Zealanders. But it's not that different to all Pacific Islanders. We await his attacks on the leaders of the Samoan, Cook Islands, Tokelaun, Fijian and Niuean peoples. Or his efforts to redress these inequities. Guess which road he's most likely to take.

Important as it is, don't let the Tongan tizz distract you (as it's possibly meant to) from the rest of the e-coli. Wanganui Gas - and today's top secret meeting thereon - gets a passing mention. It is, Mickey regally informs us, a "very important meeting and will have a great deal of influence upon the financial future of our district".

Although these machinations are of "of some commercial delicacy", we can presumably rest assured that Dotty and the Dwarves are more than capable of grasping the full long-term fiscal ramifications of whatever secret proposal they're being asked to consider. And that the King of Tonga will make a posthumous visit to Wanganui to promote the benefits of Xenical.

As the gas leaks, we'll be sure and keep you posted.

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King of the (Ozark) Mountain

Noam Chomsky has defined a rogue state as "a state that defies international laws and conventions, does not consider itself bound by the major treaties and conventions… in fact anything except the interests of its own leadership, the forces around the leadership that dominate policy".

Remind you of anyone? Yesterday Michael Laws used the death of Tonga’s King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV to further push Wanganui into rogue statedom. Sadly, the King had the bad timing to expire at the start of a six-monthly radio ratings survey period and that was the signal for Wanganui’s mayor to spew forth a masterful piece of hate-filled media grandstanding rivalled only by his hysteria about patched gang members that won him prime time attention during the last ratings period in February.

In New Zealand flags on government buildings were lowered to half mast, except in Wanganui where mayor Michael Laws refused and called the king a "brown slug" who had ruled a corrupt country. - Dominion Post

Mr Laws used his Radio Live show to say the Wanganui flag would not be lowered for "a big brown slug". “We honour people who have contributed to the community or the nation," he told the Herald. "Not someone who has been a despotic beneficiary of the New Zealand tax-payer." - New Zealand Herald

Meanwhile, back at LawsWatch, an anonymous commenter with an uncanny knack of sounding exactly Michael Laws has advised Watchers thusly:

The Tongan royal family have been ripping off the Tongan people for generations and its your MAYOR that's the problem? Time to get some perspective, people - which your mayor seems to have.

Which prompts the question … Just what perspective does "our mayor" seem to have? The perspective of a minor media "celebrity" with a cowed and stupid council majority, more than a few screws loose, and a big ratings problem, perchance?

Six months down the track from Radio Live’s last survey bomb, Auckland’s media moguls are all aquiver at the start of a new ratings period, running till October 13th. Heaven knows what it has cost Wanganui’s ratepayers, but Mickey’s famous gang patch bylaw stunt did nothing to stop the bad news for his little earner Radio Dive, with the February survey showing it haemorrhaged 12,000 listeners and won the New Zealand Herald title of "big loser". We’re predicting there’ll be more bad news when the latest results are released on October 27th.

So, Watchers, welcome back to Wanganui showtime where a mayor who is campaigning to attract intelligent, qualified medical people to the city goes out of his way to portray Wanganui as a red-neck paradise awash with ignorance and racism and rivalled only by a few charming little hamlets deep in the backwoods of the Ozark Mountains.

It’s all been a bit much for former military man and flag-lowering devotee Cr Don McGregor who once did a tour of duty in Tonga, but we shouldn’t expect Mickey’s loyal sychophants to be much bothered by what might look to sane reasonable people to be an outburst sure to bring the city and its council into disrepute. As perspicacious Watcher and regular commenter Bearhunter has quite rightly pointed out, such mayoral obscenities are protected by precedent, aka the Code of Conduct ruling last year by said mayoral sycophants:

"Mickey said these things while NOT being mayor of Wangers, which should be clear to all those mental giants who listen to talkback," says Bearhunter. "I know he did this because Dotty (speaking of mental giants) told me so, as she told everyone after the Code of Conduct fiasco. SO that's all right then, there is no way ANYONE could think that the Mayor of Wanganui was actually speaking as the Mayor of Wanganui..."

Of course, the irony of this can’t be lost on Cr Don McGregor whose hand shot up with military precision, along with those of Rangi Wills and the diVisioners in support of this bizarre theory advanced by Michael Laws in his defence.

So not only does Wanganui’s Mickey Mouse Mayor have the endorsement of a majority of councillors to launch attacks like these, he’s also able to (and does) cite their approval for the flag-lowering policy he introduced in the wake of the song and dance last year following the demise of King Faud of Saudi Arabia, who apparently topped the list of Middle Eastern despots identified by the Michael Laws Institute for Democracy, Transparency and Openness.

He wasted no time using the WDC website to bash the council with its own flag-raising policy, probably in anticipation of being strung up by McGregor et al at tomorrow’s Strategy meeting (where chairpillock Dot McKinnon will doubtless again fall off her chair in a fit of giggling as she did during the last mayoral rant about flags and despots - when "Mayor Michael" talked about the person Dotty described as "Professor Phard" in her breathless report in the River City Press). We hope she’s got her laughing gear in order for tomorrow because it’ll be her job at tomorrow’s meeting to shut down any debate about the latest outbreak of mayoral dysentery.

Here he is on the WDC website today trying to explain that his "personal views" really have nothing to do with where the flag flies on the council’s mast because it all comes down to "policy":

"I have strong personal views, having recently visited Tonga, as to the non-democratic and corrupt political structure of that country. However, whatever those views, the King's death did not meet council policy.

"Personally, I think we demean the whole process if we simply lower the flag every time a leader of a non-democratic nation dies. Tonga is the Zimbabwe of the South Pacific and we can only hope that the new monarch will allow his people the economic and democratic ability to escape their relative poverty."

Mr Laws said that he had been inundated with calls from throughout the country supporting his stance but reiterated that he was simply employing existing council policy."

A neat little rationale that overlooks just one awkward fact - a Mayor acting on policy would not then jump on talkback radio and claim he acted on prejudice. Unless, of course, he took his citizens, and his listeners, for utter fools.

And even the "policy" argument overlooks one thing. The King is dead, as was "Professor Phard". While supposedly in honour of the deceased, the flag-lowering is also a mark of respect for the nation that has lost a leader. One that might not be to Mickey's liking, but their leader nonetheless. But we're sure the thousands of Tongans in New Zealand understand it's just politics. Oh, and ratings.

Meanwhile, a Watcher has reported that a Wellington-based acquaintance responsible for a significant government programme available to local authorities let slip recently that the organisation’s limited resources and limited time wasn’t likely to be wasted on any council run by "an idiot like Michael Laws". Rogue state, indeed!

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