By resident guest George Farrugia Calleja:
As soon as last Sunday’s CSN event ended, and probably even before, Joseph Muscat’s paid and unpaid trolls and assorted idiots were posting triumphantly that the relatively small crowd was evidence of how awesome Muscat was.
At the same time MEP Marlene Mizzi’s daughter was bitching on-line that demonstrations such as Sunday’s should take into account the fact that her commercial interests were prejudiced. Muscat’s fan-babes should really take the time to get their stories straight: either there was virtually no-one at the event or the crowd was stopping people shopping at Mizzi’s Baby Clothes Emporium.
The size of the crowd means the sum total of bugger-all except to those for whom size is everything. Even if sixty or seventy thousand people were to descend on Valletta (probably Ms Mizzi wouldn’t object to the interruption of her raking in the euros in that case) and wave MLP flags to support their hero, criminality and corruption wouldn’t be magicked away.
All it would mean is that these sixty or seventy thousand people are blind or stupid or both.
Or, even worse, they are the sort of sleazy mid-range Labour-leaning business types who approve of this sort of thing and think that standing up for what you believe in is a waste of time.
As Di Pietro said, the message was not being delivered only to the people who turned out (not that the people who didn’t bother don’t need to feel ashamed of themselves) but also “over there”, pointing towards Castille.
The same trolls and assorted idiots were out in force, in some cases even before Muscat finished (or even started) speaking on Monday about the ten arrests in connection with the Caruana Galizia murder that had taken place.
Leave aside serious questions about the way Muscat chose to announce the arrests rather then the Police Commissioner, the way he clearly jumped the gun and prejudiced any eventual trial, the fact that he shouldn’t even have known – or at least been comfortable making public – anything about the arrests in the first place and the cynicism with which he jumped on the band-wagon.
Leave aside all these questions and many others: precisely what were the trolls and idiots so happy about? Yes, fine, it’s very good that progress might have been made, but even at a glance, the people arrested don’t bear the hallmarks of the real instigators of the crime.
Di Pietro put it perfectly: it’s not who pulled the trigger, but who ordered it pulled.
And the Green MEP Gielgold was also spot-on when he said that these arrests should not be allowed to serve as a fig-leaf to cover up the bigger picture of corruption and criminality that still threatens the rule of law here.
This is the point, not the shiny gee-gaws dangled in front of the trolls.