A political gang rape

Chris Trotter blogs thus:

It has been made uglier, however, by the way in which this particular dog-fight is being stage-managed. Taking advantage of your opponent’s gaffes, and seizing your chance to drive a wedge into fragile intra-party alliances, is one thing. A carefully orchestrated campaign of character assassination – the political equivalent of a gang-rape – in which members of the news media have become as deeply implicated in the planning, timing and execution of each assault as the polticians themselves, is something else altogether.

I’ll leave it to the feminist blogs to get upset about comparing newspaper stories to a gang-rape. I’ll just focus on the substance of this gang-rape analogy:

• Phil Kitchin is a political gang rapist for revealing the existence of a secret trust that takes money for NZ First but does not disclose it
• Audrey Young is a political gang rapist for revealing that Owen Glenn did donate $100,000 to Winston Peters
• Bill English is a political gang rapist for getting the PM to reveal she had known about Glenn’s donation for six months and said nothing

Do I need to go on?

And what did Chris Trotter call it, when Helen Clark “gang raped” Jenny Shipley in 1999 over a trivial dinner with Kevin Roberts?