Political Notebook: International edition

These days it seems like there are too many political events happening too fast for anyone to keep up with. One thing is no sooner reported before another pops up. When one is following political events in several countries, things get even more complicated. This post is the start of one solution for me.

When I began these Political Notebook posts, I saw them as a way to talk about subjects that would never get a post of their own. But these days there’s too much to keep up with, things that ordinarily would get posts of their own, so these Notebook posts have taken on new duties—and more frequency.

Jacinda superstar

The world has learned something over the past couple weeks that many of us here already knew: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is pretty awesome. Sure, she’d been feted before, like last September. Which I mentioned in “New Zealand’s very good week (https://amerinz.blogspot.com/2018/09/new-zealands-very-good-week.html).

Now, of course, the world has taken note of the calm, rational, compassionate, strong, caring, and stunningly admirable leadership shown by the Prime Minister after the terrorist attacks in Christchurch. Bryce Edwards, a politics lecturer at Victoria University in Wellington, does a Political Roundup column in the NZ Herald. I frequently disagree with his conclusions, but this time he seemed genuinely taken with the “International fascination with Jacinda Ardern”.

There’s been some grassroots reaction to her, too. I heard there was a petition for Jacinda to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which actually seems a pretty reasonable thing to happen. I don’t know how serious that is. However, there’s definitely a petition on Change.org: “Speaker Pelosi: invite New Zealand’s Prime Minister here to America to address Congress”. I have no idea whether anything like that could or would happen, but I’d love to see it happen, not only because Congresscritters need to hear what she has to say, and also for the entertainment value that would come from the inevitable Twitter Tantrum that a certain someone would be sure to descend into.

Meanwhile, this past Friday the Prime Minister spoke at the National Remembrance Service. Newshub reported: “'The nation that discovers the cure': Jacinda Ardern's anti-racism speech sparks standing ovation”, and it was pretty awesome (the transcript of the speech is at the link). But, then, by now we pretty much expect her to say just the right thing, don’t we?

Random notes

A couple other pieces caught my attention this week, too:

“Trump Warned Us He Would Be a Terrible President” because he did, really, didn’t he?

“Associated Press offers new guidance to media on 'racially charged' vs 'racist'". This is motivated, at least in part, by the racist motivations of the Christchurch terrorist and some newsmedia’s reluctance to call it that. Meanwhile, a debate has broken out over whether the newsmedia should mention the Christchurch terrorist by name (he should not be referred to by name). Radio New Zealand’s CEO and Editor in Chief published a shallow defence of their plan to sometimes name the terrorist in their news coverage: “Explaining RNZ’s mosque shootings coverage – and why we’re naming the accused”. I couldn’t possibly disagree with him more, and I found his excuses self-serving and a bit arrogant. Your mileage may vary.

Time to start next week's page in the Notebook.