The title this week is the first half of the typing exercise that continues “to come to the aid of the party”. It does not fit if quoted in full but now is, indeed, the time.
It is the time, I humbly submit, for the people who decided to vote Labour for the first time at last year’s general election to take a good hard look at the mirror and ask themselves the obvious question: was it worth it?
Yes, you’ve got rid of the heinous Nationalists, true, though why you should have wanted to, even with – especially with in fact – the benefit of hindsight, remains a mystery. But do you realise that by voting as you did, as it was your right to do, you allied yourself, wilfully, with a bunch of people who have scarcely, to put it mildly, repaid the faith you put in them?
The two questions apply in equal measure to those who have chosen to insist on making themselves out to be collaborators with the government, irrespective of how they might have voted and behaved before the election.
Joseph Muscat is fine when it comes to populistic posturing and pretty sound bites but when it comes to taking responsibility for his Cabinet, meuh, not so much
Do you also realise that you are now perceived as cast from the same mould as Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, as Franco Debono, as Robert Musumeci and as Ian Castaldi Paris, to mention but a few high profile travellers across the thin line of loyalty? You have seen the way these – and others like them – have acted and been reported, in other areas of the media, as having acted. The first named, if even a tenth of what has been said about him is true, is surely hardly someone with whom you want to be associated, even peripherally.
If you were persuaded to change loyalties by the comfort of emulating someone like Manuel Mallia, who said he was at Tal-Barrani and defended Peter Paul Busuttil, are you now repenting at your leisure, confronted by the sight and sound of the gaffe after gaffe after gaffe that he has perpetrated, if not worse?
Joseph Muscat’s ‘Three Wise’ Men might, indeed, they likely will, find him as pure as the driven snow.
I suspect that on the basis of the quality of the evidence they will be allowed to hear, they are going to find it difficult to have Mallia sacked.
By doing so, and by choosing to lie in the bed that Muscat made for them, they will turn themselves, for many, into an emulation of the Three Monkeys, hearing, seeing and speaking no evil but that is their problem.
On the bulk of all the other evidence, however, is Mallia even remotely fit for purpose anyway?
Does someone who would surround himself with the type of people that Mallia has chosen to be his closest collaborators fit in with the promised land of milk and honey which was dangled in front of us by the spinners of Labour’s tapestry of accountability and transparency?
I think not, and when you remember that this chap is in charge of the police and the army, you start to wonder there isn’t a clear and present danger that fact will outdo fiction.
Did you vote for Konrad Mizzi to reduce your utility bill by the equivalent of a pizza and soft drink per week or something ridiculous like that?
This is a man who thinks a freezer full of groceries costs €25, for Pete’s sake, and whose promises are worth about as much, at least when it comes to putting power stations on line.
Did you vote for his wife to earn a princely salary out of public funds, for that matter?
Did you vote for people like Joe Mizzi, whose gross incompetence has turned our traffic and transport situation into a tragic joke?
The situation in the Lija-Birkirkara-Naxxar area, for instance, is utter chaos, with Transport Malta proving beyond reasonable doubt that the only perception available is not that there is a traffic problem (there is and it’s no perception) but that they are clueless dolts.
How else would you describe an outfit that jams up one side of the Three Villages and then allows the road behind San Anton to be closed at the same time? These twits also closed all bus lanes to motorbikes and created a Rubik’s Cube at Msida, to say nothing of painting a ‘buses only’ sign in the middle of the road with no advance warning.
Or was it the thought that Louis Grech would be involved in government that constituted some consolation to you, when you consciously decided to cast your lot in with this lot?
If so, well, that didn’t quite work out did it? Not his fault, of course, he’s only guilty of allowing himself to be used, cynically, to give a veneer to this government that was never too solid and that has now worn thin to the point of disappearing.
As I’ve made amply clear on occasion, I’m all for a bit of earthy vulgarity on the odd occasion but the sight and sound of Evarist Bartolo doing a very poor imitation of a mediocre stand-up comic from the misogynistic vulgar 1970s grates and then some.
In England, a Labour shadow minister was made to resign so quickly after tweeting a relatively innocuous, but deemed to be offensive, picture that her feet didn’t touch the ground.
Here, not only do we have a (Labour) minister (of education, delicious irony) making a crass and vulgar remark, he is unrepentant when challenged and his boss, our Prime Minister, actually sticks up for him.
This was hardly surprising, of course, because the Prime Minister himself is such a fine upstanding representative of good manners in his turn, given his euphemistic expletive at Simon Busuttil on telly last week.
Muscat is fine when it comes to populistic posturing and pretty (or not so pretty, especially when he sneers) sound bites, but when it comes to taking responsibility for his Cabinet, meuh, not so much.
He’s abdicated his responsibility in respect of Mallia, that we know, and he’s certainly not about to grasp the nettle in Helena Dalli’s respect either, preferring to allow her to spin the story by coming up with a brave new legal world where construction works are carried out by people who haven’t paid for their property yet and where the community of acquests only comes into being when your spouse pops his clogs.
I wonder how Muscat would have reacted if he had been hysterically challenged to a TV debate by, say, Tonio Fenech’s wife back in the day. He’d probably have treated the challenge with the contempt it would have deserved, except that nobody in their right mind would have made such a challenge in the first place. Today things are different.
Are characters like these the people who you consciously had decided should be running the country? Your excuse might be that you were duped at the time but that is no excuse, the writing was on the wall, if you had chosen to take even a cursory glance at it.
Last week, I remarked on how it seems that the NCPE, formerly so diligent in slapping down anything in the media that was even slightly sexist, has taken a different tack of late. I wasn’t hallucinating because during the half-time break of Chelsea’s demolition of Spurs, the 89.7 Bay came on and it remains as questionably suggestive as it was on the big screen.
Not that I have anything against that sort of thing, of course.
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