Well it wasn’t Sidney Poitier, when PN Mayor Robert Musumeci and Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera organised a private dinner party at their home.
Amongst the invited guests were: a newspaper editor (who lost his job at The Independent specifically after publishing a column by the same blogger); John Bonello, PN international secretary, legal consultant to Malta Enterprise, board secretary at the Malta Resources Authority, and brother to Charles Bonello in the PM’s secretariat (phew!); Victor Scerri, the former president of the Nationalist party; and the one and only Lou Bondi – a Nationalist and a PBS presenter renowned for his media bias in favour of the administration.
Days later, the blogger from Bidnija – protected and apparently blessed by the Prime Minister himself – makes reference to the private conversations at this dinner party on her blog.
The blogger said that she had been texted during the dinner. I thought I had bad manners, but this rat betrays a lack of breeding.
Who could it be? Any guesses? I know. Do you?
Well, the Bidnija blogger was informed during this dinner party that the police report made by her husband on the 8 December – i.e., that he had been attacked by her good self – would be published in MaltaToday (in fact it was published in l-orizzont almost a week later).
What followed was a torrent of abuse against anyone (not the PM, of course) but most particularly against Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera and of course MaltaToday – her bête noire.
Next time you invite any dinner guests to your party please ask them to sign a non-disclosure agreement; or better still, make it a point to invite only friends... not people who are more interested in gossip and rubbishing you behind your back.
And yes, in all this torrent of abuse, there may have been some worthy points for discussion. But this is not the time to raise them, least of all by a person who is clearly trying to deviate attention from her husband’s embarrassing police report.
This, by the way, is the only reason for such bile.
When Saddam Hussein accused the US of having a ‘two weights and two measures’ approach to the Middle East, no one sat down to listen to Hussein’s line of reasoning. Yes, the US does have a two weights and two measures policy, but no one justified or supported Saddam Hussein’s claims at the time.
I tried explaining this point to a Press Club Golden Award winner. I tried comparing the fact that this argumentation reminded me of those who said that Adolf Hitler had ‘done some good’ for the German people. No doubt he had; but any overall assessment of Hitler has to be negative, indeed disastrous, and that is an understatement.
Today, modern despotism exists on the blog, and is matched only by the utter lack of shame by someone such as Lou Bondi, who finds no indignity in hosting a TV programme on PBS tomorrow to discuss the very subjects that are linked to the person who invited him and his partner to this dinner party. A dinner party where one of the guests leaked the contents of a private conversation to the blogger! This is a perfect case of conflict of interest and abuse of state-funded PBS.
The same man who was present at the dinner party, when the whole muck raking exercise commenced, finds it perfectly normal to organise a programme about the blog and its terrorist attacks on the very person who invited him.
Anyone who knows Lou Bondi will tell you that the man is capable of looking at himself in the mirror and stop short of noticing his own hypocrisy.
Indeed, the subject of public figures and conflicts of interest is worthy of discussion; but one could offer a few other examples to help Mr Bondi in his programme. Can I start? But if I do, he should not be too shocked if many of the examples involve people both he and the blogger would find great difficulty in even mentioning by name.
Yet, what is surprising in all this confusion is that the special guest on this TV show – indeed the ONLY guest, at the time of going to print – is Fr Joe Borg, that soft-spoken man whom I would like to think has a mind of his own and is a Christian.
Here is a man who, as some of us will remember, forms part of the same coterie of groupies to have rotated and hovered around the present power-base. Here is a man who concocted the newfangled muddle that is PBS today: a veritable mess which allows for a Chairman (Clare Thake Vassallo) on the administrative side of things, an Editorial Chairman for editorial matters (Joe Pirotta), supposedly controlling yet another government-leaning individual, Natalino Fenech... one of the most respected and loved figures in the media.
Fr Joe Borg is not my friend, he is perhaps an acquaintance. But he is a good friend to both Lou Bondi and the blogger. Gone are the days when he described Joe (Peppi) Azzopardi’s programme Xarabank as a Maltese version of Jerry Springer. Today, he thinks that Where’s Everybody is the best thing that happened to Malta since St Paul’s shipwreck.
Joe Borg, who once described Malta under Labour as Beirut – thus earning the nickname ‘Fr Beirut’ – is also a consultant to the Education Ministry on media matters, not to mention a very good friend of Georg Sapiano (who has praised the blogger), Edgar Galea Curmi (who controls the PM’s mind) and Richard Cachia Caruana (yet another very good friend of the blogger).
And then we have Joe Pirotta, a political appointee who has served this administration well. A first-rate but patronising historian, who saw no conflict of interest in defending his son-in-law, a certain Joe Mizzi, who was involved as the go-between in the scandalous Enemalta multi-million power station extension.
Pirotta lambasted the newspaper l-orizzont for carrying the story about Joe Mizzi, but failed to declare the family connection. Well done Joe, very good for someone who is supposed to ensure fair news reportage on the State-funded PBS.
Moreover, the day before he was sermonising on Campus FM (run, by the way, by Fr Joe Borg), in his weekly newspaper analysis, he said that he did not agree with an article by Alternattiva Demokratika chairman, Michael Brigulio.
Pirotta said – and listen to this – that Brigulio could not comment on the limitations of democracy, because he was too young to appreciate what people like him went through in the dark 1980s.
Coming from the chairman of the editorial board and a historian to boot, I would not only call it rich, arrogant and patronising, but simply not on.
What is the chairman of the editorial board doing analysing newspapers, anyway? If Magistrates are expected to be elusive and social misfits, then chairmen of editorial boards should be completely aloof. You dig?
But there’s more. Pirotta is also a good friend of Fr Joe Borg and shares plenty of time with him reminiscing on anecdotes from the past on Campus FM, when both these two men were too young to remember anything!
But that, I guess, does not matter. It only matters if the context is one that embarrasses the Labour administration.
And more importantly, when on Friday an Illum journalist asked Prof. Pirotta if he saw anything wrong with Mr Bondi’s programme being screened on PBS, in view of the criminal judicial proceedings against the said blogger, he answered in his atypical style that he did not know of cases where judicial proceedings or sub judice cases precluded discussions on PBS.
Well, good for Prof. Pirotta and his short memory. I would need a whole newspaper to write down all the sub judice cases which could not be debated on PBS.
I should say that I am all in favour of everything being discussed, but not of a pick-and-choose exercise. However, what was even more sinister is that minutes after this email was sent, the blogger uploaded a comment specifying that questions had been sent to PBS from Illum about Bondi’s programme.
As usual, the comment came complete with a tirade against the editor Julia Farrugia.
Naturally, no word from Prof. Pirotta about who could have leaked these questions to the blogger. In another country, he would not be answering questions, but would be asked to leave or resign.
But back to Consuelo, and the programme that is being hosted by one of her own dinner guests, in order to put further pressure on her to resign.
The blogger has made references to the use of drugs (as everyone understood the meaning of talcum powder) at Consuelo’s party, and she has made other serious allegations without any hard evidence. I wonder whether she asked Lou Bondi if he saw anyone dabbling in drugs, while he was busy munching away at Consuelo’s dinner table.
Well, the point here is that Consuelo Scerri Herrera’s culinary skills – unknown to me, but known to Nationalist diehards – is not the real topic of discussion. That should be the public lynching on the blog itself, and which has the blessing of the Prime Minister. Otherwise, he would condemn it publicly – something he has not yet done. Nor have others who mumble and whisper but never speak clearly about what is wrong or right.
And it makes me wonder, too, whether Robert Musumeci is in dire need of a reality check, when he writes on his Facebook page that he thinks the Prime Minister is a genuine man, but insinuates, in his usual tame way, that it must be the people around him who are the culprits.
Anyone ‘genuine’ would condemn this terrorism, whatever its origins and whoever it is aimed at.
Meanwhile, the contempt for court shown by this blogger even in the case of Magistrate Micallef Trigona (she has attacked him over his personal life too), who will be looking at the criminal case brought against the blogger, did not even raise an eyebrow from those who usually leave no stone unturned when it suits them.
If you turn up in court without a tie, or wearing a Lacoste T-Shirt instead of a suit, there is 120% chance of being landed with a contempt of court fine.
But if you play God and start hitting out at the judiciary, it is perfectly OK.
Once again, I have to thank the blogger, our new marketing executive, for all this fuss. Last Sunday our sales reached a record high, the lower she stoops… the higher our sales.
And a final word, this overdose of bile by the blogger should be treated for what it is: “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”.
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