Are Fine Gael actually TRYING to lose the votes of rational people?

You say Tomato, I say you Fianna Fail F**king bastards!

You say Tomato, I say you Fianna Fail F**king bastards!

Fine Gael’s attack on the suggested Commission scrutiny of national budgets is infuriating to people like me, who should be natural FG voters. The fact is, our currency is in big trouble because there has not been enough scrutiny and peer review of national budgets, and we know damn well that if FG were in government now they would have no problem with this proposal.

FG can’t keep opposing things just because Fianna Fail suggest it. They just can’t. The country has just witnessed an exciting and fascinating electoral contest next door, and an exciting outcome. Meanwhile, our chief opposition party is still engaged in a school yard jersey pulling level of politics. It’s time for FG to grow up. We can’t afford this shit anymore, and if they don’t cop themselves on they’re going to drive people like me to Fianna Fail if only because they are actually (by forced necessity, admittedly) doing the right thing.  

Boris Vs. The Bland

I have found myself unable to watch, in particular, most New Labour politicians on telly, because they seem to speak in an endless stream of vapid slogans, where they just list out areas of policy that their pollsters have told them people are concerned about. What is most disturbing about modern British politicians is the blandness, candidates who are not willing to show a human side.There are exceptions. Ken Clarke has always been willing to mouth off message, and Mandelson has recently really started to enjoy himself as the mischievous rent-a-quote of the campaign. But the prize must go to Boris Johnson, who not only manages to do an important job well, but also manages to be laugh-out-loud funny in his interviews, primarily by thinking out loud actually during the interviews. See here, and here for example.

From an Irish perspective, whom are our characters? Michael Ring, who is basically a big-mouthed constituency grafter? It’s almost impossible to watch our guys speak too. FG/Labour people just mouth off about how hard everything is for everybody, which is true but I don’t need them to tell me, and FF people just talk about the need to “move forward”. The only govt politicans who seem actually capable of getting into detail are Lenihan, Harney and Hanafin. But characters? Our problem is that our characters are characters because they’re clowns. I refer you to the Independent deputy for Kerry South.