According to a spokesman for Muscat's Movement or Outfit or Crew or whatever misdirection they're using to disguise the fact that they're the Malta Labour Party, the Nationalists' campaign has been characterised by mud-slinging and negativity.
Frankly, that someone can make this statement and not blush is evidence not of the truth of it but of the bare-faced effrontery of its maker. What mud-slinging, pray? Are they referring to a recording made by a Labour local politician of Labour's Deputy Leader telling a group of Labour local politicians, or giving them to understand, to put a charitable tinge on it, that he had approached a Labour police-officer and insisted with him not to press charges "for now" because of the adverse publicity?
This is not mud-slinging, this is simply putting certain facts before the public, facts which should give the public pause for thought come March 9.
Labour are not averse to screeching like stuck pigs whenever they see even the slightest hint of impropriety, but then they come over all sanctimonious when someone points a finger in their direction.
The stench of hypocrisy pervades this sort of deportment. When the Cabinet met urgently - as soon as the PM returned from Brussels with another very significant achievement under his belt, for all the thanks he got - to consider and recommend a pardon for someone allegedly involved in the "oil scandal", the reaction of the mealy-mouthed was expected, though nonetheless despicable for all that.
Consider it: the Cabinet has opted to give free rein to an alleged main player in the affair, allowing him the freedom to implicate anyone, including any of its members, and the so-called lovers of transparency and open government carp and cavil because it should have been someone else who granted the pardon.
Bull, my friends, total bull, and it's only out of respect that I don't tack the obvious word onto those two bulls: the important fact was that the Government didn't shy away from giving space for the investigation to progress and all the barrack-room lawyers can do is pick nits out of each other's hair, smirking all the way to the polling booths.
Look at the events of Thursday, for instance: Minister Austin Gatt makes a categorical denial that he is involved in corruption but the smirking twerps carry on with their sniggers and smarmy smiles.
Mud has been thrown and, in the nature of mud everywhere, some of it will stick, especially to a target like Gatt. No matter that such evidence as exists is the poorest of poor quality, Labour's hangers-on and new Best Best Friends will lap it up like the tame little lap-dogs they have become, bereft of critical faculties or the slightest inclination to question the torrent of cheap little innuendos that falls like a bloody monsoon every time a Lil'Elf opens his mouth.
How would Joseph Muscat like it if I were to float the idea, utterly fictitious and completely invented, that he has made a Faustian Pact with a South African blood-diamond dealer to use the proposed Gozo cruise-liner terminal as a transhipment port for heroin, with orphans being used as mules? Quite obviously, this is a load of codswallop, but hey, if he can make throwaway remarks about an un-named Minister corrupting the Police, and fail to back them up when asked, why can't I make a patently ludicrous statement about him?