If ever I was ashamed to be Maltese, and I haven't had this feeling ever, except in the time of Mintoff, when the excesses of his foreign policy, to say nothing of his domestic one, made me squirm, it was this week.

I know I'm not being in any way original, Facebook and other media have been alight with expressions of disgust at the Neanderthals who spluttered their incoherent viciousness onto Malmstrom's page, for all the world to see.

I'm not entirely sure what filled me with revulsion more, the sheer insular bigotry, the outright misogynism or the abysmal command of language those morons demonstrated. You can virtually see the wheels in what passes for their brain grinding together in an effort to produce a sentence, only to come up with a stream of grunts and emissions that rival the spew of a congenital idiot.

Now I know that it is unfair to classify these people as Labour supporters: I know many Labourites, to use the old-fashioned word, who are coherent, measured and who use their brain. I know, or at least fervently hope, that your average Labour voter looks at these people with same level of disgust I feel when I read their garbage.

That said, I have no doubt that the people who comment on this will vilify me for saying that these are Labour supporters (many of them are, but they are not the majority of Labour supporters, at least I hope they're not) and that many Labour supporters agree with them, even overtly sometimes.

How else would you explain it that people like Eddy Privitera, who I had long ago resolved to ignore when he comments on this blog, but it's my resolution so I can break it when I want to, do not appear to condemn these thinly-disguised racist thugs?

In fact, he and people like him, while not vomiting racist bigotry themselves, give a veneer of respectability by commenting in less rabid vein, generally with a "let's get out of the EU" slant.

Labour's sweeping win at the polls has empowered these people. Many of us have seen an upsurge in mindless arrogance in all walks of life, people who perhaps felt intimidated by the swing towards European civility, hypocritical as it might be at times, of the last twenty-five years now feel that they can cast off the yoke of decent behaviour and give vent to their true feelings.

You know what I mean, you can feel the sub-text in their writing and vocalising: we won the elections, we won the elections with a landslide and we can do what we like, and you bloody Nationalists can do nothing about it.

And the stark truth is that Joseph Muscat with his push-back foolery, his snide tweets, his tolerance of all manner of injustice when people's jobs are played around with, his smug "well, if you think this is bad, remember what we told you the Nationalists used to do" is very much at fault for this.

His latest stunt, leaving the rescued immigrants outside port until the Italians did what we should have done, is yet another signal to the sub-stratum of society that loves this sort of thing, and who cares that it makes you and people like you ashamed to be Maltese.

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