The police are working overtime to combat crime, including rampant white-slave trafficking, drug-dealing and corruption. They made a major breakthrough yesterday when they succeeded in identifying and tracking down a man who had been caught on CCTV voiding his bowels near some recycling bins late at night. The dangerous criminal had been seen sidling up to the bins after looking left and right, then taking some tissue paper out of his pocket before pulling down his trousers, and…well, you know the rest. Still photography from the security video was disseminated to the newspapers, and the corrupt-government-minister-cum-Paceville-white-slaving-drug-trafficker was revealed to the entire island as somebody who failed to scoop his poop. What can I say? I’m so glad the government reformed the police force and put somebody in charge who thinks the Prime Minister has family jewels.
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Meanwhile, Konrad Mizzi continues to run free, patronising journalists who challenge him at press conferences by using their first name and talking down to them as though they are children. Just like his boss’s wife, Mrs Muscat, did when she got back from her Easter holiday in Dubai and gave an angry press conference about her prison activities while waving her henna-tattooed hands in our faces.
Mizzi responded to questions about his Panama activities, a few days ago, with a defensive retort that those questions were deliberately misleading. When the questions became more specific, the Minister Without an Energy Portfolio simply refused to answer. It looked really bad, but hey, this is Malta, so instead of ending up in the dock and then in jail after a decent and proper police investigation, he will probably be deputy prime minister after 2018. Because let’s face it, Louis Grech isn’t going to stand for election again, not unless he’s planning to move permanently into the Labour Party’s version of the Natural History Museum fossil Cabinet.
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The crackdown on illicit business activities continues. While the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, his non-energy minister and the fancy accountant who fixes their shady offshore companies carry on with blithe immunity, a Serbian man who made 200 pies a day in Malta and sold them, while using a forged Bulgarian identity card to pass himself off as a European Union citizen, has been hunted down by the police, prosecuted and imprisoned for six months. The police, who are unwilling or unable to launch an investigation into the activities of some of the topmost people in the government, acted immediately on the reports of a rival pie-maker, which were accompanied by clippings from a Serbian newspaper in which our man with the pies and the prison sentence boasted about his business in Malta. Next time, he should have sought election with the Malta Labour Party and, instead of making pies, set up a company in Panama and populated it with assets.
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The most shocking thing about Donald Trump is not actually about him, but about the system that let a man of such poor quality get so far in the presidential electoral race, without weeding him out before that. Once you let even the worst kind of person get so far, what you’ve done is given him the stamp of authority and legitimacy, and it follows from this that even otherwise sensible people will consider him a viable option.
It works along the same principle as food stocks on the supermarket shelves. When you’re weighing up your options for, say, cereal, you start off from the point that all of them are edible, safe and have been checked and approved as fit for purpose. If the packets of cereal are on your supermarket shelf, then you take it for granted that they are safe to eat. It’s the same with political candidates. Even if only at a subconscious level, you assume that if the candidate is on the party ticket, then he or she has been approved by the party as fit for purpose, so giving that candidate your vote is safe because he or she is not crazy, stupid, immoral, amoral or bad. Even if common sense shouts out at you that somebody like Donald Trump is not just dangerous rubbish, but a completely amoral individual, you continue to think at some level that voting for him is fine because he comes with the party brand.
Next month’s US presidential election will be the most closely followed, worldwide, of all time. The possibility that Trump will be leader of the free world in six weeks’ time is very real indeed. Brace yourselves.
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