Sensitivities

On Saturday Aaron Bhatnagar blogged a parody of the infamous 419 Nigerian scam e-mail. It had John Tamihere as trying to divert funds overseas, and was clearly a parody.

Yesterday Aaron received an e-mail (purportedly) from John Tamihere asking him to remove the parody from his blog.

Now if the e-mail is from Tamihere, it shows a lack of judgement. I would have thought the serious allegations of non payment of tax, electoral fraud, non disclosure of interests would be his concern, not a parody e-mail. Also by asking for a posting to be removed, this inevitably will gain publicity for it, because people will notice if it suddenly disappears.

UPDATE: I am informed by reliable sources that the message was not sent by John Tamihere or his staff, which is good to know. It is a pity the Google blogger feedback system does not include an originating IP address, so the person who did send it can be traced.