20 Replies to “New Zealand Swings Right”

  1. The most right wing country in the world is now gone left as the rest of the free world goes right.
    I think Obama’s four year reign will just be a blip and once the American people see his polices and screw ups it will be back to the same ideas. Let’s just say this is a way to teach them a lesson and they will be taught this lessons many times in the next four years. Now if the Republicans can get their stuff together and stop hacking each other we can get on with getting ready for the next election. The other good thing that will come out of this four years of Obana is that we will never see a Democratic President again for many, many years…..Amen to that.

  2. More like America’s media still out of touch. This was a media event, not a political campaign.
    Amazing what one man can do with the total cooperation of the media eh? Going to be reeeeealy interesting to see what happens when that cooperation starts to break down.
    That breakdown should happen right about the time when The One announces the Federal Goody Bag is running on empty. You buy votes on credit, all those voters are going to be showing up wanting to know where their big screen TV and their free mortgage payment is.
    Better be a pro quo for that quid, as the Brits like to say. 🙂

  3. Used to stop there almost everytime we went to OZ, not this last while but will start once again.

  4. They haven’t gone left…not by a damn sight!
    I see the vote for Obama as an indication that the old guard Nixon-era neo-con republicans are past their due date and need to be put out to pasture (or taken out back and shot), not an indication of an ideological shift. “Pinko-liberal” (sic) California rejected homosexual marriage for crying out loud. A two party system will often produce results like this. Obama is still in many ways ideologically conservative…religious and traditional family oriented. Probably still further to the right than so-called conservative politicians in Canada. The lefties who are trumpeting his victory as though “their guy” won (especially Canadian lefties) are in for a bit of a rude awakening.

  6. Edward,explain the term ‘neo-con’ that you use so liberally. I take it to connotate a nazi-like agenda.Please enlighten…In NZ,the defeated leader promptly resigned,wise move.

  7. Edward,
    I agree. There is a reasonable argument to be made that Obama is more “conservative” than the W and the neo cons. Certainly in foreign policy. I suspect we wont see many more wars of liberation, which is hardly a conservative concept.
    We will see on domestic policy though.
    I wil say that two things the last time a Bush transitioned to Dem admin.
    1) Bush raised taxes and Clinton kept them in place
    2) The got the budget under some contrl which led to a reduction in rates and led to there being even more money available. Best thing Clnton ever did.
    Problem is we could be facing the reverse this time, ballooning deficits and increased interest rates which causes higher finance charges…we have seen this movie before from the mid 70’s to the early 90’s. The seeds of which were sewn in the guns AND butter policies of LBJ.
    Obama needs to cut spending in one and/or both places and may need to find a way to get more revnenue into the Treasury. Ideology comes in at the level of where you cut and where you raise your $$$….the market is non ideological and will punish anyone who fails to address the US national balance sheet and income statement.
    It is one big “effin” mess. Time to prioritize because you cant keep doing both now that the whole finanical system got dangled over the molten magma because of these subprime mortgages.
    Like an airline crash there may be a trigger but the crash is caused by a cascade failure across multiple systems, anyone of which could have contained the issue if they had been working properly.
    Big effin Mess…..

  10. Obama ain’t going to be no blip. He and his Democratic fellow travellers will ensure their permanent majority by “legalizing” 15 million Mexican illegals, ensure the undisturbed permanence of left-wing policy and constitutional application by appointing 3 leftist Supreme Court judges, and so vandalizing the culture that there is nothing left to be conservative about, a la Canada.
    Along the way, the abusive nations of the world will kick the enfeebled US aside, by defying and ignoring it.
    The world is about to become a harsh and dangerous place again, and Canada is going to find it even chillier than most of the rest.
    Good on NZ. Helen Clark – who abolished the NZ airforce amongst other leftist inanities – was long past her sell-by date.

  11. It seems that those claiming that America did not go Left in electing Obama must have a very different definition of the Left. Actually America has been gradually going Left for some time and in the last election she took a huge leap in the same direction, even surpassing Canada as time will confirm. Mark Steyn has written a good piece on the subject and as usual he is spot on.

  12. Walleyj: the term neo-con is short for neoconservative. Wikipedia describes it’s origin: “The term neoconservative was originally used as a criticism against liberals who had “moved to the right”.[1][2] Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist, coined the usage of neoconservative in a 1973 Dissent magazine article concerning welfare policy.[3] According to E. J. Dionne, the nascent neoconservatives were driven by “the notion that liberalism” had failed and “no longer knew what it was talking about.”[4]
    I would suggest the last sentence in the quote says it all. And that’s why the term is used in a derogatory fashion by lib-lefties. It describes a liberal who has at last seen common sense.

  13. me thinks that events will shape the man and his policies, that and those pulling his puppet strings
    first thing to take care of is the “economy”, and even the democraps kno what caused the problem. So the solutions are limited and will be damn disappointing for those who are waiting for their “cheques-in-the-mail” to pay their mtgs and gas bills, and thusly his popularity will tank, as that of GB and both houses, politicians ain’t a popular breed today

  14. Gunney99, IMO, the term “neoconservative” was coined by those with little or no understanding of the ideology of liberalism, which was ignorantly and crudely equated to socialism.
    As political liberalism morphed into socialism, cognitive dissonance (confusion) developed on those who believed, for instance, that PET was a liberal (no he was a socialist in the Liberal party).
    Then liberalism, and its libertarian cousin, classical liberalism, reclaimed its roots, and moved away from socialism and its completely wrong (in practice for sure) assumption that large government intervention improved our lives. The confused neoliberals (socialists who thought they were liberals), protested, and needed some way to articulate their confusion and ignorance.
    They came up with the term neo-conservative, which actually means someone who is truer to liberalism, rather than socialism. Why? Because socialists consider “conservative” to be a derogatory term, which describes a mean-spirited bigot he doesn’t care for the societal good (again, a totally wrong and self-serving critique of conservatism).
    IOW, liberals weren’t socialist enough for them, so in their confusion, they came up with the term neo-conservatism, which has been used by socialists as a derogatory term because it has a connotation of conning someone.
    The only neo-conservative I can think of is Jean Chretien, but that is a generous opinion, as he was more socialist than anything else.
    Thus, the LPC “ideology” is socialist, with a neo-conservative bent. The CPC is now classical liberal,with a slight conservative cant. Harper has them in that ideological space, which was abandoned by the LPC, which continues to lurch left, especially within the spectre of a Bob Rae leadership.
    Actually, the defining philosophy of the LPC has become cronyism, with socialism mixed in, with the natural result of corruption. Just read Jane Jacob’s book “Systems of Survival” and you will get a great insight into the dangers of cronyism, masked as compassionate liberalism.

  15. Nice to see some good news out of NZ. There is a classic text book case of what becomes of a Nation who went wonky left right into the debt drink. I hope the new Government handles this right.
    Its apparent now that like the our Liberals today, along with Brian’s boys before. America needs to be cleansed electoral of the many opportunists its plagued with in a fat overweight government.
    To bad the only option was a Jimmy Carter with a red book.
    The GOP has to go back to basics, small government being just the tip of the political ice breaker. I say this because after 4 years of Obama the system will be so blotted by sycophantic limpets, brining it down. No one sane will vote for more of the same, as their checks shrink before inflation, or worse taxation to support making societies abuser users, feel safe.

  16. IMO, do not count on an ideologue to make rational decisions. Stalin didn’t stop to think of economic consequences of his actions & he sure didn’t give a f*** about what people thought. Look at O’s background & the people he associated with. Did Ayres regret killing people? Heck no!
    Do not forget that the normal state of the human condition is to live under tyranny. The American experiment, individual liberty & freedom, was a flash in the pan. Nice while it lasted. It has been fading from the moment the ink dried on the paperwork & will soon be snuffed out entirely.

  17. I seem to recall a NZ story recently, whereby they were on the hook for a huge amount of money to pay for carbon credits under the Kyoto treaty. They had to pay 100’s of millions, maybe billions of $$ to China and/or Russia. Anybody know what happened with that? Was it a political issue in their election?

  18. Shamrock: I agree, a modern conservative (small c) is very much a Classic liberal. We have had 2 1/2 years of a CPC government which the Liberal press likes to call “Tory”, which they are not. A “Tory” was of the privileged class in the days when there was only the beginnings of a “Middle Class”. This association is meant as a derogatory term as is neo-con. I always regard a Liberal (capital L) as a modern day Liberal which is a socialist, and not a social democrat. They don’t believe in democracy at all. An example is the CRTC in Canada which rules that FOX News does not meet the standards to be included with the standard cable or satellite package offerings and of course in the US it would be the “Fairness Doctrine”. Fear of being critiqued.

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