Apologia (pro causa mea)

Jacques warns:

Fausto has had an idea. He came up with an allegation. He has thrown it in this direction and notwithstanding any denial from our part he has gone on to milk it. Why? Because it pays. It pays to try and distract from the “apologista” label that seems to have stuck with Thermidor notwithstanding its revamp (which is cool).

That’s what happens when you use the royal “we” too often: you assume that what you think is shared by the multitudes. And unless hate mail addressed to me is landing in Jacques’ mailbox and he’s reading it without forwarding it to me, Jacques is referring to very few people.

The only one I know of is the Green Party PRO who once called me an “apologist” who “parrots whatever comes out of tal-Pieta’” oblivious to the sweet irony that his post as PRO requires him to defend (“apologist”) and disseminate (“parrot”) whatever his Party’s Executive Committee thinks (an entity which, it should be reminded, have much stronger political and electoral interests than yours truly).

And that’s the impression I always get with the label “apologist” whenever, for example, I see the likes of MaltaStar use it with regard to former Nationalist Minister Michael Falzon. It’s little more than a defense mechanism of people who are either too lazy or too stupid to engage in any exchange that goes beyond superficialities (not to mention taking an occasional look at the mirror).

Jacques should put down his MLPN bible and notice that I’m not in the least interested in ignoring Borg-Olivier’s mess up. On the other hand, I’m actually concerned that the Nationalists might be heading towards the next election with their own Jason Micallef. If Jacques and his commenters think that by saying that Borg-Olivier should consider stepping down, as I did, is something that should have given me a choking fit or anything requiring Rennies just imagine what symptoms I’d suffer if Borg-Olivier were the wrong man and he’d cost the Nationalists the next election. Just ask Labour about the consequences of saving (political) face and keeping up (political) appearances: two decades of opposition.

Jacques says that he has repeated time and again that he does not condone of the violation of citizens’ privacy. Bravo and let me add that very much the same can be said of Thermidor. The only difference is, as his blog’s archive attests, when our privacy was so blatantly and brazenly violated by Alfred Sant he had nothing to say.