As one of the latest (I’m writing this on Monday due to travel commitments and the uncertainty of wifi connections) in his apparently never ending series of promises for all, Joseph Muscat has undertaken to clean up politics.

It’s not immediately clear if this will entitle him to another mug, with ‘Sweepster Extraordinaire’replacing ‘Fearless Leader’, but he’s obviously hoping that it will hoover up a few more votes to help him along the rocky road to triumph.

...Mud can only be slung at someone who is a target- I.M. Beck

I wonder how he intends to achieve this laudable aim. All his aims look laudable, incidentally, it would be pretty naive to expect otherwise.

Is he going to send the word down the line to his Lil’Elves and Peculiar Pundits for them to stop vomiting their hate and venom on the comments boards of Facebook and of this estimable portal? They use as their excuse, in the manner of fluent speakers of 1984 English the repressive world over, that they are simply responding in kind but I challenge any one of them to cite a single example of my stuff that entitles them to write the way they write. Make no mistake about it, the stuff you see below here online and on Facebook is as nothing to the poison you see being spread on the “private blogs”. One such is put up by that Għaxaq lawyer. His own writing is bad enough on its own, varying between quasi-incoherent spluttering through gleeful “I told you so” to thinly-disguised innuendo but the comments he allows to be put up, given that he is presumably the moderator, are vulgar slime, no doubt imagining that they are taking their lead from the owner of the blog.

Don’t visit it, you’ll only fuel his ego and drive him to worse excesses. And don’t try to find the equivalent of this Labour-leaning output on the PN side: for some reason, which is pretty obvious to me, the viciousness and the hatred seem to find a natural home elsewhere.

What other sort of political rubbish is Muscat going to sweep out of the political stable?

Is he going to ask people like Evarist Bartolo to stop sneering and smirking on live television and for Bartolo in particular to use language that is less reminiscent of the schoolyard in its vulgarity and pettiness? Is he going to ask Toni Abela to be less concerned with protecting the political interests of the party and more with making sure that the law is respected? Is he going to ask his media managers to stop making personal attacks on Tom, Dick and Harry, especially when these attacks are clearly predicated mainly on rumour and fabrication? This is merely a continuation of their ‘warfare’ by other means, as anyone who remembers the systematic and cynical attack on Michael Frendo in the 1990s knows.

Muscat, in his usual disingenuous fashion, seeks to point fingers at his political opponents, making it very clear that it is their rubbish that he wants to clean up, failing to realise that when it comes to slinging mud, his own party is a past master, cum laude.

The twee and the smug, the ones who go around bleating about how sick they are of the PN and singing the national Anthem in some sort of epiphany of adulation for Muscat, the ones whose watch-phrase is “maaaa, how corrupt the Nationalists are, we need a change” fail to grasp one, important, point.

Mud can only be slung at someone who is a target: people who have been in opposition for the last 15 years, and who have done nothing, can’t really be got at, although in the little they’ve done or failed to do, that is administer their own party and its clubs, they have had a pretty good bash at making themselves into very valid targets.

There’s an old adage that it’s only people who do something who make mistakes. Labour have done nothing for so many years that they can hardly be criticised for anything. Their problem is that even in the little they’ve done, or failed to do, they’ve managed to attract adverse attention.

And then they have the nerve to grumble about the public being made aware of the way they’re acting, as if it isn’t a matter of importance that their arrogant manner of assuming that they can do what they like is exposed. It is important to know how Labour will behave if they are in power, how they act internally being a pretty good indicator of how they will act if they have bigger clout.

Yes, it’s axiomatic that news such as that concerning allegations of corruption and graft in oil purchasing is big news and that it needs ventilating. Obviously, this is the case, who, except for people like certain Labour exponents, would even begin to think otherwise?

But Labour’s immediate - and opportunistic - grab of issues that need careful and professional investigation, turning them into sticks with which to beat politicians around the head, is cynical and creates merely an atmosphere that diverts attention from their electoral programme, which is poor, plagiarised and popularist.

The irony is that they don’t shy away from shrieking in faux horror but when someone does it to them, they come over all prissy.

At the end of it, very few people, and no-one who really matters, seem to think that Austin Gatt is actually involved in corruption but this hasn’t stopped Labour from using the story for their own ends and from making use of an utterly childish angle, Gatt’s ‘Swiss bank account’, which is so patently irrelevant that only an abject Lil’Elf comments about it.

It’s not as if we have Gatt’s dulcet tones on ‘tape’, telling what he did to ensure that party interests were not prejudiced by criminal activities coming to light.

imbocca@gmail.com

www.timesofmalta.com/articles/author/20