NO LINE YET

When in my Beck column I suggested that it was time to draw a line under what, boiled down to its basis, is a sordid exercise of self-glorification by that lawyer from Ghaxaq, I reckoned without the various Sunday columnists who just love taking pot-shots at the PM and his PN.

It's not that I mind that they do this, of course, they have as much right to do that little thing as I have to try and annoy the MLP and its Chorus Girls and Lil'Elves.

Noel Grima, to his credit, has never been in those ranks, and his lengthy piece in the Sunday Independent went into depth on the current situation without mentioning that lawyer.

On the other hand, Alfred Mifsud, generally regarded to be an erudite writer, failed to eschew the temptation to lionise the Ghaxaq man. For writers like Mifsud, the important thing is to have a platform from which to project his party of choice, and since his party of choice doesn't have two policies to rub together, he had to fall back on pretending not to notice that what Dr Debono has been doing has nothing to do with content but everything to do with motive, the motive being to continue the "me, me, me" refrain of which we have all become so sick.

Mifsud might counter, as will all the other media people who choose to ignore Debono's fundamentals, that I am attacking the messenger and failing to notice that his message is akin to the scribbles on the two tablets Moses had with him on the way back down from the mountain.

My own counter to that is simple: the messenger in this case chose a means to impose his message (virtually blackmail) that reflects right back on said messenger and therefore it is the messenger who has compromised fatally whatever merits his messages might have had. To put it bluntly, you don't go around behaving like an obdurate toddler, chucking your toys out of the pram, and expect to be taken seriously, except by sanctimonious, agenda-driven commentators who smirk all the way to the keyboard, ecstatic that finally Gonzi has found someone to drive him nuts.

For Michela Spiteri, in the Sunday Times, Gonzi's mistake last Thursday was not to walk out of the House with Debono but then she also thinks that Debono is the best thing that happened to the PN. For that matter, she seems to think that Dr Manuel Mallia is the same for the MLP, which must please the learned gent no end.

The other regular Spiteri, Lino of that ilk, also dedicated his column to the Affaire Debono, using it as a vehicle to carry his multitude of beefs with the PM and his way of doing things. I couldn't help but laugh cynically at Lino Spiteri's faux horror that Gonzi's remarks after the vote showed that "state and party are again dangerously merged", for all the world as if he wasn't around back in the days of Mintoff and KMB when to criticise the MLP was tantamount to committing high treason.

It is clear that since the MLP has put nothing into the public domain other than its naked lust for power, the columnists who would so love to laud them to the heavens have to fall back on its stalking horse, a lawyer from Ghaxaq who will become inconsequential as soon as the whistle is blown.

Presumably, we'll then get a whole raft of policies to discuss.

Or will we?