Actually, as far as the Dutch people are concerned, most of them take a dim view of our social democratic Internal Affairs Minister Ronald Plasterk. In Dutch, “Plas” means piss, and “sterk” means “strong”. You start to get the picture. Mr Plasterk’s Phd dissertation concerned genetics research about the flatworm, no kidding.
Mr Plasterk was forced to admit, not only that the spy agencies of the Dutch government had been engaged in mass spying on Dutch people, but that he had also handed over the data to the NSA, and had done stuff on behalf of the NSA. He was saved from dismissal from his post for treason, by a parliamentary vote, carried by the Lib-Lab coalition. Fairly arrogantly, the cabinet forecast they would win the vote, that was a simple calculation for them (“Order reigns in The Hague”). The progressive liberals D’66, Wilders, Christians and the Left voted for the motion of no confidence. In the imagination of the Dutch populace, Mr Plasterk is really the “piss minister”, the minister of piss, although people do not say that openly much, staying polite and trying to keep it clean (what do you do with a Minister like this?). He “takes the piss with Dutch citizens”, and “pisses on them”. For a while now, to me Dutch politics has in fact been looking pretty much like piss sex, with a BDSM angle. In the Dutch slang for pissing, “zeiken” means “nattering on about nothing”, “whinging”, “prattling”. There are things to avoid over here, right now. There’s a lot of puddles, and there is a political drainage problem. The serious political question that remains is, what the security reasoning of the Internal Affairs Ministry has actually been, to gather and transmit mass spying data to a foreign power. Where was the mandate for that, what sort of official justification was there? Was it just that it would be cheaper, if the NSA did the meta-data crunching, rather than the Dutch Ministry itself? The Dutch media haven’t said all that much about it that is very significant, so far. There is no commission of inquiry, or anything. I suppose the standard of public discussion has to be kept out of the sewer. Well, anyway, we know now that the Social Democrats are a rather “wetted” party. My guess is, that they will be pissed out of power in the next election, by a lot of pissed-off voters, who have had a gutsfull of this shoddy betrayal of what we stand for. Such is our glorious democracy right now. J.
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