Rosemary McLeod

Rosemary Mcleod, it appears, doesn’t really like Nicky Hager or Jon Stephenson:

Reluctant heroes of their generation, they fought fascism and returned with memories they’d rather bury than share. I don’t think anyone imagined they had never seen war crimes, or doubted they occurred on both sides of the war, but it would have been churlish to ask. You can’t give people lethal weapons and tell them not to use them, or have a war without a body count, much of it innocent civilians, who we call collateral damage. Killing people is what war is.

Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson’s book, Hit & Run, accuses our Defence Force of a cover-up after civilian deaths in Afghanistan seven years ago.

Stephenson previously produced a documentary about it, and has been involved in extended libel action with Defence which was settled out of court. Hager has several books to his credit, all of them, I gather, springing from the idea of cover-ups and the public’s right to know everything it has a mind to.

Some books are released to media in advance of publication, giving the opportunity to follow up allegations. This book was not, a guarantee that it would receive saturation coverage, while anyone who doubted its claims would look as if they were trying to hide something. Hager knows how to play the media, which laps up his every utterance.

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Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

I will send you off to the weekend with a high dose of TMI courtesy of Rosemary McLeod who writes on Kate Middleton and in the process deems all women with children victims of gravity.

She still has a decent figure is why, and hasn’t had any sprogs, so she’s had no gravitational pull, unlike some of us who are well along the alphabet in cup size. Any day now we’ll be doubled over in special harnesses, so great is our burden. But I digress.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

Rosemary McLeod unleashes her bitchy vitriol on Charles Chauvel for his sneaky little tricks:

Chauvel leads an exciting political life of cut and thrust. He has been parrying shadowy National figures who he believes hacked into his emails and tried to paint him as a gay “rich prick” after a Right-wing blogger accused him of subterfuge.

The blogger published a copy of an email allegedly written and sent by Mr Chauvel as a possible draft letter to this newspaper. It is framed as if it comes from a firm of Auckland lawyers, attacking an article that supported the Criminal Procedure (Reform and Modernisation Bill) – the brainchild of National’s Justice Minister, Simon Power. He gets more praise than Mr Chauvel, and to add insult to injury, has landed a lucrative job in Westpac.

This was the sort of letter we’d all write in praise of ourselves if we could get away with it. True, it fell short of praising Mr Chauvel’s youth and beauty, but less is always more. It praises his efforts in opposing the bill, and gives a pat on the back, too, to ACT MPs Rodney Hide and John Boscawen for negotiating changes to it. The inference is that Mr Chauvel penned the letter in praise of himself, and asked others to sign it. And say what you like, that’s smart thinking.

Except when it isn’t and you get snapped:

A version of it happens with book reviews, when authors organise their friends to write in praise of them. I suspect they are often supplied with not only the free book, but a list of rarely used words to baffle the general reader with as well. A spot of Greek is especially useful; one needn’t pause to consider whether other people understand the lingo.

If the inference is accurate, the draft letter is a bit like that. Mr Chauvel didn’t choose members of the proletariat to sign it, after all, but possible chums in the legal world.

“This is what they have to resort to, try to paint me as a rich prick, or gay, or somehow devious, or all three and try to blacken my character and make me less attractive for election,” Mr Chauvel complained, as if the very words “rich”, “prick”, and “devious” did not amount to a description of the very people who quite naturally run the world, and strive manfully to earn these coveted descriptions.

As to whether Mr Chauvel is attractive, that’s for others to decide. He was not exactly tasty when he said he wished that a crying young child on a plane would shut up last year, and he leans toward the podge, but that never stopped anyone having an active romantic life. As for being described as “gay”, Mr Chauvel is happily out, and among Labour supporters that’s bound to be more in his favour than otherwise.

What really is unattractive is complaining when you’ve been caught out at a particularly crafty piece of footwork. That’s the time to crow, surely, knowing that everyone else, whatever they may insist to the contrary, is only jealous that they didn’t do it first.

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

from the tip-line

Having disapatched as a columnist the repeat Qantas Award winner Steve Braunias in recent weeks the axe continues to fall at the Sunday Star Times.

Pinko Finlay McDonald and the ever morose Rosemary McLeod have been given their marching orders, being told this week’s column was their last.

It remains to be seen what brilliant commentators are to replace them but as evidence of where editorial thinking is headed, note that the ever rabid Michael Laws is the only columnist to survive the purge.

Perhaps David Kemys is planning of having Conor Roberts just write pieces under pseudonyms straight from the office of Len Brown.

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz

I had a conversation with another blogger about the likelihood of another maori child being based to death by the end of January. We both reckoned iPredict wouldn’t even offer stocks on that, since it was a near certainty.

Unfortunately we were both proved right.

A five-month-old baby who died in an alleged manslaughter in Hastings last week has been named.

Mikara Ranui Jarius Reti, of Flaxmere, was admitted to Hawkes Bay Regional Hospital last Tuesday night and “subsequently died”, police said.

A 21-year-old man, who has name suppression, has been charged with manslaughter.

He is due to appear in the Hastings District Court tomorrow.

Senior Sergeant Dave de Lange said members of the Mikara’s family had been “co-operative and helpful” with a police investigation.

Three things strike me here. First is of course the occurrence once again of Silly First Name Syndrome. If these people took even as much care of the child as they do in giving them stupid names then we would be a whole lot better off and the children may well be alive.

The second thing is we have a 21 year male, not from the family by the looks of the press details. Judith Collins in her Summer Series interview likened this to being the same as Tom Cats going around killing the offspring of other fathers.

“Vio­lent offender who acts very much like a tom­cat and goes around basically killing the young of the pre­vi­ous partner”.

I have coined a new syndrome for this:

SOCKS – Some Other C*nts Kid Syndrome, an affliction that sees the SOCK victim brutally killed by another male involved with the family.

The third thing is that the alleged animal who beat this child to death has name suppression but yet again the victim does not. The law is ass-backwards and clearly criminal friendly.

Of course the liberal hand-wringers like Rosemary McLeod will say it is whitey’s fault and society’s fault, and haters and wreckers like Hone Harawira will just blame whitey, but at some point Maori are going to have to own their own sh*t, because with all the vast sums of money pouring into their laps they still seem overly represented in all the wrong statistics. At some point we as a nation have to say money isn’t working, time to turn the tap off.

Ask Rosemary McLeod, if she cares about Blanket Man so much would she shower. clothe and take him to Shed 5 for lunch? Thought not, so she should STFU. Caring is what “other people” do. The fact she got paid to write that drivel just galls me, if Steve Braunias has to go then it is high time she crawled back into what ever liberal elitist tent she came from and then the Sunday Star Times can have some columnists with a grasp on reality.

Brutal killings of children require brutal solutions and brutal honesty. Sue Bradford said that these children were going to be protected, in actual fact it looks more like they are being killed in increasing numbers since her law was brought in. She lied to the nation and criminalised good parents in the process.

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.co.nz