Cam Slater: Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Ardern chaired caucus meeting that discussed entrenchment

Jacinda Ardern has been caught, yet again, telling lies. She’s now constantly telling us lies, sweet little lies. There is no other way to describe it other than lying. How else can this not be lies?

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern attended a Labour Party caucus meeting where a last-minute entrenchment clause in the Government’s controversial Three Waters legislation was discussed, despite her saying on Monday it was “not necessarily something I would be aware of”. …

Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta confirmed, through a spokesperson, the change to the bill was discussed with the Labour caucus – a meeting of all its MPs – in advance of the House sitting.

“We knew it was novel and may not pass the constitutional threshold, but it was still worthy of consideration,” Mahuta said, in an emailed response to questions.

Stuff

Nanaia Mahuta has shown us all now that she is the one pulling the strings, and she’s chucked Ardern under the bus with this. She has effectively made Ardern and Chris Hipkins look like shabby little liars. Which it appears they are.

David Farrar outlines the dissembling:

…the reality is that Mahuta took the Green SOP to the Labour caucus, and it was either explicitly approved, or there was no objection to it.

This makes it a huge credibility issue for the Prime Minister. I can only think of four explanations, to reconcile what she said, to what we now know.

She wasn’t listening in caucus

Maybe she was bored with Three Waters, and despite the fact she chairs Caucus, she wasn’t listening to Mahuta and didn’t think she had to pay attention to what was being said.

She didn’t understand

Maybe she simply didn’t understand what Mahuta was saying. She may have got confused.

She forgot

Maybe she forgot it was discussed at caucus, even though it was just a week ago.

She lied

This is the fallback option, if none of the other three explanations are credible.

Kiwiblog

None of those is a palatable option to explain Ardern’s words and deeds. If she wasn’t listening, even though she was chairing the caucus then that says a great deal about the attention span of the Prime Minister.

If she didn’t understand then it appears her legendary status of a detailed and intelligent prime minister falls to its knees with embarrassment.

If she forgot, then her short-term memory appears to be as bad as Joe Biden’s.

Which leaves the only option left, that she lied. Occam’s Razor says that it “is generally understood in the sense that with competing theories or explanations, the simpler one, for example, a model with fewer parameters, is to be preferred.”

It’s OK if she lied, all politicians do it, some more than others. But she told us all in 2017 that she never tells lies.

Newshub’s debate provided one of the most memorable moments in the election campaign year. Patrick Gower asked Bill English if it was possible to survive in politics without lying. He received the roundabout kind of non-answer you would expect from any politician with a history.

Gower asked the question again. And, once more, English declined to give a straightforward, unequivocal answer. Gower continued the grilling.

The question was then put to English’s challenger, Jacinda Ardern. Her response could not have been more emphatic. “Well, I actually believe it is possible to exist in politics without lying and by telling the truth,” the future prime minister declaimed.

Ardern was then asked if she had ever lied in politics. She did not hesitate. “No,” she responded immediately. She then repeated the “no” and moved on to talk about how good leadership is all about owning your mistakes.

Stuff

Even Blind Freddy knows that it was a lie then, and that she is lying now. It seems only the Prime Minister doesn’t know she is lying, and that is even more concerning.

Then again sociopaths and narcissists never admit when they get things wrong.

Sociopaths lie deliberately. Creating elaborate lies for their own gain with no care about who gets hurt is a hallmark of sociopathic lying. Sociopaths are compulsive pathological liars. Sociopaths lie without conscience. That means that they can look you right in the eye and lie to you and not show the usual markers that would give them away. It also means that they don’t care about collateral damage.

A narcissist lies in order to inflate his or her own self-esteem. They lie to the other person, to beat them. By inflating truths, they attempt to make their own skills or abilities seem superior to the other person. In other words, they are a bore, the type of person people avoid at a party.

The dilemma is determining what Ardern is, a sociopath or a narcissist…or both.

Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. This article was first published HERE