Mike's Minute: I've struggled with the Jacinda Ardern book

I've struggled with a couple of authors this week – Jacinda Ardern and Jake Tapper. 

What I struggle with is one of them is making money out of the fact they made an astonishing hash of their job, quit, bailed out of the country and is now collecting money for retelling what happened in a way that would suggest no carnage was left behind. 

The other is making money by exposing what he watched unfold in front of his eyes for four years and really did nothing about. 

I'm not sure who the bigger fraud is. 

The Ardern book is widely traversed and has been marketed very well internationally. My wife showed me a snippet from Oprah. 

Let's be frank: post WeightWatchers and Ozempic Oprah is not exactly reputationally untouched herself. She's fascinated with Ardern, and it appears to be around kindness. I bet you anything you want Oprah doesn’t have the slightest idea about how the country was wrecked under Ardern. 

She sees what Ardern wants you to see: fragile, huggy people who run things with good vibes. 

In the meantime, at CNN, I have no idea what Jake Tapper was watching between 2020-24 because we all watched the same thing. Except CNN wasn’t spending a lot of time saying "hey, have you noticed the old guy is getting worse by the day?". 

Given that was CNN's job is it any wonder they rate the way they do? But for Tapper to then go out and monetise what he was already, allegedly, being paid to do, seems a new low of sorts to me. 

But back with Ardern. In one review former Labour Party leader David Cunliffe runs the classic line of "I have a different recollection”. That's in response to Ardern's attack on him whereby she essentially calls him a fraud and how she couldn’t understand how he got the top job and not her mate Grant. 

You had to, she said (probably in tears), question his authenticity. 

Are you serious? Authenticity? From Jacinda Markle? The only bit of marketing that seems to have been missed along with the hand-wringing interviews on Radio New Zealand and TVNZ is some Ardern jam or cake recipes. 

If she had just been useless, it might have been alright. Hopeless, but didn’t break the china. 

But she wasn’t. She was dangerous, she was the pulpit of truth, she was a control freak, and she was a narcissist dressed up in Kate Sylvester pretending she wrote back to all the kids. 

She wrecked the joint then collected the dough in Boston. 

Tapper and Ardern made money for failing to do their job. 

There should be a law against it. 

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