Bocca to the rescue!

Amusing, and also highly revealing.

But first, a little background. Apart from being a lawyer and a former president of the Chamber of Avocados - a post he held until he ate them all, presumably - Andrew Borg Cardona (aka Boċċa) is also the press contributor who was consistently and repetitively critical of the Labour Opposition before the last election.

After the election? Oh, let's just say his tune changed slightly... but I'll come to that in a minute. For the moment, suffice it to say that Andrew Borg Cardona this week took time out of his busy schedule to single out little me for an onslaught on his Times blog, describing me as a "snivelling pup" (or an acolyte of the same, which is even worse) - while in the same breath accusing me of "attacking fellow columnists" in other newspapers.

OK, I'll pause a few seconds so that you take in the sheer enormity of the hypocrisy staring us all in the face here...

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Got it? Well in case you didn't, this is Boċċa's argument in a nutshell: it's perfectly OK for a Times columnist/blogger to lay into a MaltaToday columnist like a pitbull terrier on PCP, and to reel off a string of insults of the sort that would quite frankly sound childish in a kindergarten playground. But it is absolutely unacceptable for a MaltaToday columnist to level legitimate criticism, no matter how justified, at a PBS 'journalist' for abusing his position of public trust in order to whitewash government policies and decisions... as I did last Sunday.

What can I say to that? The Boċċa universe must be a fascinating one to inhabit. But if you ask me, the real eye-opener in his blog was another. For while my article last Sunday may indeed have come across as somewhat slightly critical of Lou Bondi - and that was part of the intention, by the way - Lou fully deserves to be criticised for his outrageous and quite frankly revolting double standards; and if he thinks he's going to get away with reinventing himself now as a Joseph Muscat 'lecca-culo' as if nothing happened... well I can assure him he has another guess coming.

But where was I? Ah yes. What's interesting about Boċċa's reaction is that the real target in my article was not Lou at all. It was Joseph Muscat.

Ah, did you hear that? Sounded just like a penny dropping. But in case Boċċa missed it the first time, he may wish to go back and read the headline again: 'New government, same old crap'.

And there you have it. The man at the helm of this 'new government' is not Lou Bondi at all, but Joseph Muscat... which, perversely, also means that the man in whose defence Boċċa came charging this week was none other than the same Prime Minister who, until recently, was the object of all his own, now-forgotten opprobrium.

What did I criticise Joseph Muscat for, anyway? You won't get the answer by reading Boċċa's blog. In fact, you'll come away with the impression that I somehow compared Muscat with Eddie Fenech Adami (which, coming from Boċċa, is not exactly criticism at all). For the very little they are worth, these are his exact words: "Raphael Vassallo has constructed a fabulous tale about Joseph Muscat appointing Bondi to High Office (for the sake of the literal minded, I have my tongue in my cheek) in order, amongst other objectives, to achieve greatness by emulating Eddie Fenech Adami."

Huh? What are you on about, Andrew? Too much vino with your 950g fillet last Sunday, perchance? Or maybe you were just trying to do to my article what your friend Lou had done to Joseph Muscat's 100 days in office: that is, totally distort the issue and confuse the facts, in the hope that none of us would notice what you're really playing at?

Anyway: I won't bother setting the record straight here because my article is still available for viewing online... And guess what? You don't even have to disable Javascript to read it. Nor will I defend what I wrote, which was after all not very different from all the other stuff I wrote in years gone by about the Gonzi government.

In fact this is the crux of the entire matter: I am not the one holding two different governments to two different sets of standards here. If, in months and years gone by, I criticised the Gonzi administration for abusing State TV for political ends... well, I will do exactly the same when I feel Muscat is guilty of the same shortcoming.

The word for this is 'consistency', by the way, though I suspect that Borg Cardona himself probably only ever uses it to describe different textures of food.

Either way it doesn't really matter. What really matters is the answer to the following question: what interest would a prominent lawyer who has benefited (and continues to benefit) so enormously from government largesse - for which he was once criticized in the Labour press, though significantly this has not happened since the election - possibly have in defending the present administration of government from a "snivelling pup" such as myself?

Moreover, why would he take umbrage at little me for pointing out how Muscat was using the exact same media strategy employed by his immediate predecessor Lawrence Gonzi... that is, picking and choosing which 'journalists' get to stay on PBS, and which (like Norman Vella) have to pack their bags and go... based not on any legitimate criterion, but only on how useful they are to his own political purposes?

Oh, and please note these are not rhetorical questions: I will be coming by to collect your written answers at the end of this examination.

Meanwhile I find it enormously interesting that I am not the only one asking these very questions. Well, perhaps I am insofar as only Borg Cardona is concerned. But when it comes to Lou's evident hop across the Rubicon, there are others who seem to be just as bemused (to put it mildly).

One of these is Daphne Caruana Galizia, who informed her dear friend Lou in no uncertain terms what she personally expects him to do in the light of the Norman Vella interlude.

According to Daphne there are only three options open to him at this stage: "to cooperate with them, remain mistrusted, but take great care to keep them happy; to bow out of the scene and avoid any involvement whatsoever; or, to fight back while saying 'bring it on and do your worst.'"

I'll leave you to guess which option Daphne herself recommends (I'd tell you to read the blog for yourselves, but I don't want to be classified as a health hazard by the Association of Mental Health Specialists)... but quite frankly she needn't have bothered, as we all saw his decision with our eyes. The message was subliminally encoded in the pale pink of his tie two Tuesdays ago. It was implicit in the kid-gloves approach he suddenly adopted with the man at whose mere name he once used to froth at the mouth.

Oh well, so much for Lou. Now let's look at the options facing Boċċa. My, what a surprise. They're exactly the same. How can they be otherwise, when the people you used to support through thick and thin no longer have their fingers on that button marked 'DISH OUT GOODIES' at Castille? And what do you do, when it is suddenly the people you used to attack day in, day out, who now control that button instead?

All this brings me back to the reasons for my partial disappointment in Joseph Muscat so far. The trouble is this: Muscat has assumed power in a country which still adheres to a purely medieval culture of patronage.

This is incidentally what I hated most about Lawrence Gonzi's 'way of doing politics'. It was always about buying support: silencing critics by offering them cushy little positions here, there and everywhere... or, if that fails, bludgeoning them into submission through multiple libel suits against newspapers, or by allowing others to intimidate and threaten by means of online terrorism in his name.

This is precisely what Joseph Muscat had promised he would seek to change if he won: that he would scale back the sheer breadth of dependency that keeps people like Lou and Boċċa enslaved to the machinery of power in this country... and, more pertinently, keeps everyone else outside the loop.

And to be fair there have been areas where Muscat has tried to improve things: his government's decision to embark on a root-and-branch reform of the prison system is one example. Another is the sheer speed and determination with which the Commission for Justice Reform is taking on its remit.

But in public broadcasting, it is evident from all that happened this week that everything will simply remain as it was before. It's just going to be 'suck, suck, lick lick' until the next election- even if gay porn is technically illegal in this country - and anyone who complains will be singled out for attack by columnists and bloggers ensconced within the independent press.... just like what used to happen under Gonzi.

Andrew Borg Cardona may well be thrilled and enthused by the prospect - he has good reason to be: how else can he keep himself firmly plugged into the government's pjaċiri machine (without which he would probably just deflate)?

But snivelling pups like myself are unimpressed. And I don't think we're the ones being unreasonable here.