Pointing out the faults makes it your fault
Thursday, April 26th, 2007Via Blogorrah comes a pretty spectacular piece of spin by Bertie Ahern on the issue of e-voting.
Rather than accept that public money was spent on a system that turned out to be lacking a number of core security measures to ensure transparency and legitimacy, he elected to blame the opposition because they “took off on a political exercise getting in a few people from around the world to try and find flaws with it.”
For a start, Fianna Fail are in a position to bash the opposition on a number of issues, but criticising them for demanding accountability at the very heart of our democratic system is not one of them. Secondly the opposition didn’t need to travel the globe to find critics - the commission set up by the Government did enough of that and it was their report that led to the system being canned.
If Ahern had any dignity on the matter he’d admit the technology needs improvement, admit they made a mistake and stop trying to force Ireland to agree with him by playing up to our insecurities.
Blogs elsewhere
April 26th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Sad thing is, so many people have such short term memories when it comes to Irish politics, what with the constant barrage of PR and mudslinging, that some people will be happy to believe this.
Bertie et al trade in soundbytes, and anything so long-winded as a government report on e-voting is, sadly, way beyond the attention span of Joe Punter.
The press, of whom I consider myself a part, are accomplices in all this, willingly boiling the facts down to a thin and barely palatable consomme.