Sorry for the absence, it was a bit longer than usual.  We were away for a short break, doing the culture thing up the Smoke, as they say.

I've always wondered about the extent to which credulity and gullibility find a good home amongst the readers of this august portal.  Electronic media always give much faster feeback, for obvious reasons, than the old way used to, and a quick glance at the comments boards gives the temperature, even if it tends to be skewed in a market this size, because a few eager types, such as Labour's Lil'Elves, can always plant themselves in front of a keyboard and spew out enough spin to make your head, well, spin.

Taking April 1's comments at face-value, you'd be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the electorate at large is one of the most gullible body of men and women to breathe God's good air.

There was a story about how Premier Joseph Muscat had been snapped toting a shot-gun, dressed in camos, and (at least until such time as I was taking a look) there was such a deluge of condemnation and opprobrium being poured over the poor chap's rapidly balding pate.

Now, far be it from me to stick up for Premier Muscat, he's got plenty of breathless fans who do that at every click of a a key, but even I, for whom his awesomeness holds little fascination, didn't give a robin's twitch of a tail's span of time to believing the story.  

The thing is, though, that the people who obviously swallowed the story hook, line and cartridge-belt are so used to Premier Muscat doing things for the snappy political advantage they give him that it didn't even cross their mind that he wouldn't, in a month of Sundays, be crass enough to be seen in public preparing to blast a bird into oblivion.  

That he will be responsible for that happening if the "NO" vote doesn't win is irrelevant, he would never be so silly as to actually fire a gun himself.

It would be as ridiculous, say, as Premier Muscat going out on road-shows himself with Henley & Whosit, to flog passports "cheaper by the dozen", or bailing out a bankrupt cafe' operator.

Or being happy whoever wins when Malta plays Azerbaijan.  

There's also an amusing sub-text to the three spoofs I saw.  

On this portal, as we've seen, people were led up the garden path by their own eagerness to believe the worst of Premier Muscat, which reflects awkwardly on them but really, really, really badly on him, that people are so ready to think he'd do something like that.

On another English language portal, the joke was that Premier Muscat and Simon Busuttil had had a change of heart about hunting and were to address a Press Conference to exhort people to vote "NO".  It would have been nice, of course, had that been the case, but seriously, who was about to believe that Premier Muscat was going to sell the bird-killers up the river like that?

Or that he'd let Busuttil ride along with him while he does it?

The third English language portal had a story about a statue to Premier Muscat being planned for Castille Square, along with the other improvements that were being erected without the bother of getting a Mepa nihil obstat.

I wonder how many of that portal's readers, accustomed as they are to Premier Muscat taking on a heroic mien before their eyes, got the joke.