National's Blogger Calls the Shots in By-Election

David Farrar's attempts to single-handedly deliver the Mt Albert seat to National are becoming tiresome.

His first trick was to convince the media that if Labour selected Phil Twyford (a strong candidate and a local who would probably have romped home) they would get Tizard. The underlying assumption behind this theory was that having Tizard back would be a terrible thing indeed. Poneke has a good blog post on these machinations, and Farrar's retort is unconvincing.

His next trick was to paint David Shearer as being to the right of the Labour Party and in favour of privatisation of the army. After cherry-picking quotes from articles written by Shearer Farrar went on to say:

I think Rodney should grab David Shearer for ACT. I want this man to be our Defence Minister.

Almost immediately after Farrar's postings on Shearer the news media picked up on Shearer's past articles. The Herald tried to invent a divide between Shearer and Goff. Matt McCarten, who had the previous week criticised Goff for falling prey to the influence of right wing bloggers, then showed the same weakness by bagging Shearer:

The Labour Party is opposed to the privatisation of prisons, but I'm not sure how Goff spins his way out of his candidate supporting the privatisation of war.

Nice work, Farrar. Even your ideological enemies are swallowing it up.

I can only assume that Farrar's game is to scare the pants off the left voters so that a good number of them vote for Russel Norman, the Greens candidate. If this happens, Melissa Lee, the National candidate, could take the seat.

His latest trick is to paint Shearer as being soft on crime. So will we see an article on the Herald tomorrow about how the Labour candidate thinks we should go easy on crims? Let's hope not.

David Farrar wears his National Party affiliations like a badge of honour, so it is surprising that the journalists who pick up on his articles don't scrutinize them a little more.