The Sincerest Form of Flattery

The top story in Australia is news that Zimbabwe’s Ambassador Jacqueline Zwambila has asked for asylum.

Ms Zwambila, who is politically aligned to Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change, was recalled from her post without being offered another job after Mr Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party won the country’s general election on July 31.

On Friday, Ms Zwambila said Mr Mugabe and Zanu-PF had stolen the election and increased the number of arrests of MDC supporters on trumped-up charges.

The ambassador said she feared indefinite custody if she returned to Zimbabwe. She plans to pursue her activism from abroad.

Her request for protection and her public statement that the election was stolen ends a sunny period for Australia-Zimbabwe relations. During Ms Zwambila’s time as ambassador, Australia became a significant contributor of aid to Zimbabwe.

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Zwambila is undoubtedly correct about Robert Mugabe’s criminal behavior. It is cruelly ironic, however that she should seek asylum in Australia, a country which Australian activist Trenton Oldfield resisted being returned to after disrupting a boat race in England because such events were  ‘elitist’.

Mr Oldfield swam into the path of the Oxford and Cambridge rowing crews as they raced down the Thames in April 2012 to protest over elitism. He was subsequently jailed for seven weeks….

Mr Oldfield had insisted if deported he’d be separated from his family.

He said his wife, who is of Indian descent, couldn’t live in Australia because some Indians in the community had suffered violent attacks.

“Australia is a particularly racist country,” Mr Oldfield said.

Too racist for him to return to, yet not racist enough apparently, to deter Jacqueline Zwambila from seeking asylum in it.

One of the truly amazing things about the world is that people routinely flock to places they are subsequently instructed to hate. They cross deserts, stow away on planes and hire smugglers to reach America, Europe, Australia. Once there the Left descends on them, declares them oppressed and exhorts them to resist assimilation.

Yet those same left wing advocates are remarkably reluctant to settle in places these refugees have fled. Why is it that people who professionally extol communism and hate ‘racism’ never seek asylum in North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela or Zimbabwe?

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Maybe for the same reason that those who advocate Obamacare exempt themselves from it. They’re like cooks who won’t touch anything they’ve prepared who think the public is stupid enough to do as they say and not as they do. Unfortunately they are mostly right.

Pity the person who trusts in their advice.  Perhaps the most famous example is Oh kil-nam who abandoned South Korea for North Korea because his German marxist professors told him there was free healthcare there.  Oh’s family is now languishing in the gulag.

Recently Robert Pear of the New York Times complained that “The Obama administration has told Vista volunteers and other AmeriCorps workers that their government-provided health coverage does not measure up to the standards of the new health care law, and that they may be subject to financial penalties unless they obtain insurance elsewhere.”

The coverage provided by the agency — the AmeriCorps Health Care Benefits Plan — “does not satisfy the individual responsibility requirement of the Affordable Care Act,” which takes effect on Jan. 1, Ms. Strasser said. Accordingly, she said, Vista members may be required to pay a tax penalty if they do not have other coverage and do not receive an exemption.

The impact on community service workers is another unanticipated consequence of the health care law, which is making coverage available at little or no cost to many uninsured people but disrupting coverage for others who already had it.

Vista volunteers are wondering how the Federal government can say their own insurance was not compliant. Maybe for the same reason that president Obama can endorse his own website and not register on it.

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President Obama symbolically registered for a Bronze Plan to inspire the public to do likewise and event lavishly covered by the media. But in reality it was only a photo op. He had instructed his aides to complete the paperwork in person back in the Washington. The Washington Post reports:

Aides said Obama’s unique situation as president meant that he was unable to sign up for a plan online. The databases that HealthCare.gov and related sites use to verify people’s identities did not contain Obama’s personal information, aides said, so staffers had to go in person to the D.C. exchange offices over the weekend to get him enrolled.

The president’s refusal to entrust his details to the website is a vote of no-confidence in its security. And well might he be cautious. “According to news reports, a government security expert at the heart of Healthcare.gov told Members of the House Oversight Committee that she informed HHS that the website was too dangerous to use.”

In the days leading up the Obamacare rollout, Teresa Fryer, the Chief Information Security Officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees Healthcare.gov, recommended “a denial of Authority to Operate (ATO)” because she viewed it as “a high risk.” Despite her expertise on security issues and her responsibility for the security of the website, Fryer’s multiple warnings were overruled by her superiors.

It’s do as I say, not as I do: the Trenton Oldfield train of logic again. He hates elitist England so much he’s fighting to stay there.  He hates racist Australia. But what would he say to the Zimbabawean ambassaador seeking asylum there?

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It is said that stoneage men used to watch what animals ate to see what was edible.  People were smarter then. Today we trust the packaging and if the previous consumers of the comestible are all lying dead at our feet, what of it? It says “delicious” on the label, doesn’t it? And so we open the package and eat.

The scam works only because we’re too stupid to see things for what they are. Ethan Krupp, aka “Pajama Boy”, the face of Obamacare, described his political motivations in these words. “I am a Liberal F**k. A Liberal F**k is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views and sarcasm to win any argument while make the opponents feel terrible about themselves. I won every argument but one.”

Would you buy a used car from this man? Of course you would. Millions may do it even now.


Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.

The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres
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No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action.
Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific
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