Joseph Muscat neglects to point out that Alfred Sant was elected in 1996, freely and without any issues about the democratic process, unlike when this country was ruled by Dom Mintoff, clearly Muscat’s role-model. Photo: Department of InformationI could hardly believe it when I saw the title that Dr the Hon. Etienne Grech MD, MP (Lab.) chose for his piece of opinion in this august paper on Tuesday last. Evoking, whether deliberately or not only he knows, the lout John McEnroe and his imprecation to the umpire when one of his whims wasn’t pandered to, Grech let it be known that he thinks that Nationalists “cannot be serious”.
I confess that, given that Grech was rabbiting on about pensions and similar issues of great pith and moment, I didn’t actually bother reading on beyond the heading, therefore, for all I know, the dear fellow was demonstrating feats of erudition and socio-economic brilliance that would have struck me dumb with awe.
Somehow, I doubt it: from the little over which I could bring myself to cast my eyes, Grech was more concerned with slavishly imitating his great leader and telling the whole wide world that the Nationalists were wrong, negative, useless, negative, late to the party and negative.
Hence, his smug dictum about them not being capable of being serious. This from a gentleman who, Lor’Luv’Us, thinks that the solution to the Greeks’ problems is for us to export Premier Joseph Muscat, for whom Grech clearly has an unbounded admiration because the sun shines out his nether regions (most probably, he thinks, literally), to them so that he can rule their roost and bring his enormous brain to bear on the economic woes they face.
Presumably by flogging a few passports and making a couple of dodgy deals to boost the private sector, say by shovelling over a few millions for a coffee-smelling establishment or guaranteeing investments that not even Bank of Valletta will touch.
Inconvenient truths are swept under the carpet, in order to impress Labour’s progressives
Grech also thinks that pristine beaches, pristine only because they are virtually inaccessible, should be made accessible so that more people can visit them, thereby rendering them... well, you can work out the rest, even if he can’t.
And he has the nerve to tell us that the Nationalists cannot be classified as serious.
Oh well, this is a politician who militates within the ranks of a political party that has supplied us with such a big number of serious, worthy, deep thinkers.
For instance, consider the Minister of Finance, who, to be fair, is a real deep thinker but who thinks there is nothing wrong with telling us that his salary is peanuts, ignoring the obvious rejoinder that, well, with peanuts, you get monkeys.
He also thinks that telling us the details of the way in which the government has guaranteed the wonky investment mentioned earlier will bring the economy to a grinding halt, endangering civilisation as we know it.
And he is one of the more serious members of Cabinet.
This doughty body of men and some women contains within its ranks none other than Dr the Hon. Konrad Sai Mizzi Lang’s Husband Mizzi, who is so serious that he goes to meetings with commoners in unmarked cars, rather than receiving them in his ministerial office. One can only conclude that he was not eager to let us, the Great Unwashed, know what he was up to, which he would have had to had the meeting been conducted in the manner in which these things are properly done.
There are so many other manifestations of the seriousness of Mizzi’s profile that I would need a whole column just to list them so we’ll let him off for the moment merely by intoning “shame on you Minister, you’re not fit for purpose” and let your imagination take it forward by repeating the phrase obsessively 54 times a minute.
Moving on with the Mizzi patronymic, another serious one with the honour to carry it is none other than Joe “Oily Fingers”, whose solution to the traffic problems that have proved beyond a shadow of doubt that he is unfit for public office is for schools to open earlier and for little kids to drag themselves out of bed at the crack of dawn.
This stroke of genius was immediately shot down by Mizzi’s Cabinet colleague, Evarist Bartolo, more commonly known in days gone by as Mary l-Mouse, so it is said, a pseudonym used while he used to pen fond reminiscences and lightly humorous diatribes in Labour’s rag, KullĦadd.
The fact that Bartolo disagreed with Mizzi should not be taken as evidence of seriousness in and of itself, of course, as we all know the straits into which the education sector is sailing, all hands on deck, with degree factories and coin-operated universities poised to ruin the environment, literally and figuratively.
Any more jokers needed for the pack of cards over which Premier Muscat sits in primal triumph?
How about the ones responsible for the physical environment, whose names are legion? Leo Brincat, Michael Falzon and Roderick Galdes are but three names that spring to mind when you look around yourself for a monument to the chaps who are supposed to be protecting the land we live on and in. Serious, you cannot be.
The pack, however, would never be complete without the top man, the king, or joker-in-chief if we’re going to be true to our theme this Saturday.
Premier Muscat took time out of his well-earned holiday to stand at a podium in a sartorial mishmash that makes even my eyes water and also took time to pen an epistle to “Progress” a publication of Labour’s Progressives in the UK. You can read the whole letter in another sector of the media, where you can see many things that the mainstream media, for reasons that are known only to itself, ignores, until, that is, they become a good story.
For starters, the choice of this forum by Premier Muscat should be worrying in itself for his supporters: he seems to have absolutely no grasp of political realities beyond these shores. If he did, he would avoid being associated with the bunch of losers that is the United Kingdom Labour Party, especially in its arcane and proto-socialist incarnation as “Progressive”.
For someone who clearly thinks that everyone blindly swallows everything he dishes out and questions nothing, the word “progressive” is like catnip.
The content of his letter is nothing if not revealing of the real workings of Premier Muscat’s mind.
He has convinced himself, for instance, that Labour had been in Opposition for 25 years, even going so far as to imply that the Nasty Nats were almost dictatorial in their grasp on power. He neglects to point out that Doctor Alfred Sant was elected in 1996, feely and without any issues about the democratic process, unlike when this country was ruled by Dom Mintoff, clearly Premier Muscat’s role-model. That Sant was brought down by the very same Mintoff is inconvenient, so it is ignored, and the myth maintained that Labour were in the cold for 25 years.
Other myths are given legs by Premier Muscat, such as the one about how free university education and stipends were a recent creation of his government, rather than the truth about the stipend system being created by the Nationalists being acknowledged.
Again, inconvenient truths are swept under the carpet, in order to impress Labour’s progressives.
I wonder how impressed the real ale supping, pipe smokers would be to read the truth about Premier Muscat’s chumminess with Big Business or about the way he is creating exclusive big-money degree mills and passing them off as “presents to the peasants”.
I wonder, finally, how impressed Labour’s progressives would be to read that the Malta Labour Party, led today by Premier Muscat, erstwhile journalist who had done his level best to keep Malta out of the EU, compares itself with their party in this regard, when history is clear on the matter of how anti-EU the UK Labour Party was not.
Jokers to the left of me and clowns to the right, who cannot be serious now, Dr Etienne Grech?
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