The veritable thrashing that the PN suffered at the polls has many underlying causes, if you'll forgive me what can only be described as a statement of the bleedin' obvious.
It also led to a number of effects, which can only be described as another of those statements. Some of those causes, and equally some of the effects, lie at the feet of Joseph Muscat's Labour Party. A word of caution to the gentleman: remember and take on board your party's vilification of GonziPN. As they say, "just saying", for when josephmuscat.com starts to lose its shine.
The effects to which I refer include the various spasms of triumphalism, sometimes thinly disguising vengefulness of the less attractive sort, to which we've borne witness.
You can't blame them, really, for all that it's not fun to have to take on, triumph does have that effect on people, and if certain of the less civilised amongst them feel that they have to take it out on those of us whose opinion, and the right to have and state it, grates on them, then so be it, they are far the lesser for it, not us.
Getting back to those causes, they were multiple and various and not all attributable to Labour's management of the campaign, tellingly effective as it turned put to be, and then some.
For instance, Lawrence Gonzi clearly was unable to handle governing the country, and doing that well, while being sniped at by the whelps. The job of handling them fell to the PN side of the equation, and it was not up to the job.
Indeed, if I might make so bold, it was left at the starting gate, pointing the wrong way, to boot. While Muscat managed to divest himself of one embarrassing Deputy, and neutralise the faux pas of the other, the PN was incapable of handling - admittedly in different circumstances rendered virtually impossible by the one-seat majority - the cracks in its structure.
That these cracks were caused by people whose motives and make-up are debatable, to put it mildly, is now irrelevant. Whether handling them would have made a difference is equally immaterial. The size of the defeat makes it obvious (isn't 20/20 hindsight a wonderful thing?) that the 2013 election was pretty much lost in 2008.
That said, the Pullicino Orlandos, the Debonos, the Dallis and all the others were such an unedifying sight, with their eternal whining and posturing, that they contributed heavily, proud of it as they clearly now are, to the PN's walloping.
Their apologists, amongst whom of course, they count themselves as premier, say they were merely pointing out what was wrong with the PN, at which, you'll again forgive me, I blow my nose.
Where I'm sitting, it remains obvious, the Lil'Elves and Peculiar Pundits notwithstanding, that if that bunch say something is negative, the mere fact that they say it makes it a positive.
Equally unedifying, and I should say that this rumination doesn't purport to be anything except a few almost random thoughts, amongst many that will no doubt occur to the people charged with analysing the defeat, was the sight of two PN guys who felt that this was the right time to have a scrub of what they seem to think is dirty linen.
I mean seriously, did Robert Arrigo and Jean Pierre Farrugia genuinely think that this was really the right time to void their guts? Did it not occur to them that a seemly silence, perhaps a private word in the right ears, would have been preferable to coming across like a pair of sneaking teacher's pets?
They, and many like them who are mounting high horses and pointing fingers of blame in every direction except the mirror, should wonder whether us ordinary mortals don't feel that there are quite a few thousand reasons to be more than a little unimpressed with the way they conducted themselves, now and in the past.