I had resolved to ignore Franco Debono’s blog. It is a combination of self-aggrandizement, repetitive ranting and spluttering bordering on the incoherent and the comments that the blog’s owner allows to appear, while naturally banning outright anything that is even slightly critical of him, vary between frankly strange to downright racist, taking in defamatory, insulting and provocative in the meantime.

Insofar as concerns the latter three attributes, well, more power to his elbow, this is a free country and if anyone feels defamed by any comment, they can always sue the blog’s owner as the publisher.

For myself, I have better things to do with my time than suing Debono for libel.

With the racism, I draw the line and I invite the Commissioner of Police to take a look and see if he is moved to do anything, though I won’t be holding my breath because it seems that requests like this are processed for months on end.

If they were actually acted upon, instead of being merely processed, a complaint of mine against a so-called journalist who perjured himself in my regard (not in any racist context, I hasten to add) would have been acted upon by now.

But my resolution to ignore Debono has had to be put aside for a moment.

Since the dear fellow has been in the news recently, I thought I’d have a look through his blog and see what lurks beneath that particular stone. If nothing else, I’d perhaps get an inkling as to why Debono thought he had truth on his side when he declared to the media that wherever he goes, he is respected by all.

I have an inkling now: he must believe the comments that he lets appear below his blog.

This is not the point in my making public reference to the blog in this column, though. For obvious reasons (obvious in that it is obvious that someone like Debono lashes out against anyone who dares treat him in less than an awe-struck manner) the blog’s owner and only writer (apart from those comments which aren’t written by him) on occasion lays into Times of Malta and its management, calling them all manner of names.

I have to point out that, apparently, Debono has the notion that if you remove something from the ‘net, it is removed permanently.

To start with, it isn’t, you can probably, if you have the inclination, delve into some recess or other and retrieve a cached copy and, anyway, people have memories and a cut-and-paste function. By the time you read this, some of the more colourful diatribes may have been removed, or censored or otherwise changed.

One of his main gripes, now no longer visible, was that Times of Malta didn’t manage to get Mario de Marco made leader of the PN, though why someone who has abjured, by act if not overtly, that party should give a monkey’s is lost in the fog of Debono’s broadsides. Still, Debono doesn’t like Times of Malta and he doesn’t care who knows it.

We have a grown man who runs whinging to his peers when he is criticised in the media

He also made a rather serious charge against the newspaper though. He implied that it is involved in a cover-up of the truth about what happened in this country in the 1980s. Yes, that’s right folks, this whippersnapper, this parvenue, this political genius who thinks that what he went through (poor lamb) is anywhere near as important or serious as that through which Dom Mintoff and his motley crew put us when Debono was a ruddy child, keeps spreading it about among the terminally bewildered who form his audience and support-base that the 1980s were nowhere near as bad as we - who lived through them - know they were.

He has since removed the particular post and its attendant comments but what he wrote, namely that “The Maltese people have a right to know what happened in the 1980s – who provoked who and who sparked the flames of unrest and civil disobedience. No country deserves to live a lie. The country deserves the truth, a full version not one edited by censorship” was captured by little me and the remarks within quotes here is a c’n’p of it.

The reference, given the context of the post as a whole, is to Times of Malta and its role as the only newspaper of record in those days.

At this point, to be honest, words begin to fail me.

Here we have a grown man, a man appointed to public office by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who thinks that he has such good advice to give that he imparts it to a baying bunch at five in the morning outside a pastizzi (cheesecakes) bar and then boasts about it.

We have a grown man who runs whinging to his peers, as he wrote himself in his blog, when he is criticised in the media, forgetting that, in his own blog, he allows attacks on colleagues which, were it not for the fact that they are irrelevant by dint of the very fact of their appearance in that blog, would render him liable to sanction, rather than deserving of protection, even if such protection were conceivable.

We have a grown man who in the not so distant past used his secondary school mid-term report to illustrate his intellectual prowess, who thinks nothing of importuning colleagues in the street to whine about their (perceived) treatment of him.

And this grown man, for Heaven’s sake, who really, really believes that he is respected everywhere he goes by everyone also believes that the 1980s did not happen as we know they happened but actually as his new best best friends wish they happened.

Maybe he really does have a magic mobile and it is receiving text messages from the past, revealing the truth. In the meantime, he’ll have to live with posts such as the one quoted being treated with the contempt they deserve, even if he does remove them in the meantime.

Just as we’ll have to live with the vileness, the sheer horror, of the moronic comments posted on European Commissioner Cecilia Malmström’s FB page, the torrent having been released after the Prime Minister let the racist genii out of the bottle and despite his frantic, and pointless, efforts to stuff it back in.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20