Thursday, February 25, 2010

How To Blow It All In Four Days, LDP Style

That Liberal Democratic Party boycott of Diet sessions that Ethan Chua found so inexplicable? Turns out even LDP Diet members could not understand it.

So the party is giving it up.

Inexplicably, yet typically, the LDP leadership has managed over the course of four days to squander the momentum and publicity it gained from last Sunday's elections.

Just to make matters worse, LDP party president Tanigaki Sadakazu explained that his party's decision to return to the Diet was due to the sessions having become "supine and confined to their beds" (neta-giri neta-kiri). Aside from insulting the elderly infirm, for whom the term neta-giris neta-kiri is most usually used, he also opened the door for the smart cookies to respond, "No, the ones looking supine and confined to their beds are you and your party."

Furthermore, with the LDP not able to eat up Diet time with their demands for special testimony on the prime minister's and DPJ Secretary-General Ozawa Ichiro's political fundraising, the DPJ was able to put on entertaining show-and-tell sessions, like the one yesterday put on by Nakajima Masazumi on the 49 million yen donated to present and former members of the Diet by contractors working on the ill-starred Yamba Dam megaproject. It turns out that 95% of those donations went to LDP members.

Ooops! Time to get out butts back in the seats and start complaining about the DPJ's disgusting "politics and money" (seiji to kane) problems!

7 comments:

  1. netagiri: I think "bedridden" would be a good, concise translation.

    In Sweden, where you can write in the name of any party - existing or not - for your vote, a few hundred people vote for the "Donald Duck Party" every election. There's people voting for the Jedi, The Beer Party, the Extreme Centrists, "Me!" and many others. Newspapers often publish a list of the most popular or nutty non-existing party votes after each election.

    I wonder what Japanese voters would vote for if they could vote for anything and have it show in media afterwards?

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  2. Herr Moren -

    "Bedridden" is a concise translation. However, I felt it insufficient to transmit the sense of decrepitude and powerlessness.

    As to your question, the answer is the "Asada Mao Party."

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  3. A nit to pick. Shouldn't it be neta-kiri?

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  4. An actual Asada Mao Party would beat the DPJ, the LDP and every party out there!

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  5. Anonymous11:47 AM

    "supine and confined to their beds" (neta-giri).

    Pretty sure that should be netakiri.

    Otherwise, good analysis.

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  6. All and sundry -

    The correct Romanization is neta-kiri. However, I had never heard it pronounced other than neta-giri.

    One of these Ibaraki/Ibaragi things.

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