Celebrity quote of the year
It’s our Joey’s big day tomorrow, when he is sworn in as Opposition leader in the presence of the president. I can just imagine the dry, caustic observations that will be coursing through the president’s mind, only to be left unsaid. Their last high profile encounter in front of the cameras was five and a half years ago, when our Joey was Charlon Gouder’s forerunner on Super One and the president was the prime minister, fighting a referendum campaign to get Malta into the European Union. I sat there in front of the television, stupefied by this ginger Cheshire cat with the eyes that widen and pop when he grins, like Alice’s acquaintance in Wonderland, and watched him yell and heckle and chuck insults around, insisting that ‘parrrtnerrrrship’ (in those days he hadn’t yet travelled to Brussels and didn’t know how to pronounce the English R) was the only way to go for Malta. It’s a safe bet that some party donkey or elf has already been commissioned to wipe the tapes of the lengthy series of anti-EU programmes that our Joey produced and presented for Super One before we voted Yes. What was the series called? Ah yes: Made in Brussel. Now listen to him go. Unbelievable. Ghandu wiccu u x’imkien iehor l-istess.
“I admit that, with hindsight, the ‘yes’ vote won in the referendum and that we were wrong on certain issues. However, on others, like the future of the shipyards and agriculture, we were spot on.”
– incipient Opposition leader Joseph Muscat, interviewed by The Sunday Times
28 September 2008
With hindsight, eh? It takes five years of hindsight to bring out the calculator, tot up the Yes and No votes, and work out which were most numerous. U hallina, trid? The amazing thing is that he’s not shot down from all quarters, including his own, when he says something so unbelievably, wretchedly stupid. Let’s hope that by the time he walks into parliament tomorrow he’s got hold of a razor and whizzed off those pathetically sparse gelled spikes of hair sitting forlornly on his otherwise naked scalp, which were on display on Super One yesterday. Oh, and the goatee, too. It’s OK for men to be bald, Joseph. The last thing this country needs is another Labour leader with hair issues. If these were physical afflictions he was born with, nobody would say anything, but they’re entirely self-inflicted and make him look like somebody, in the famous words of Sex & The City’s Miranda to a date who’d just had a hair transplant, who’s practising crop rotation on his forehead.
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‘ we were wrong ‘ about time after 5 years but then no apology not even to the FIDILI that were called to marsa to celebrate the victory
Was the interview conducted in Maltese or in English? I’m betting that it was in English and that Joey confused “with hindsight” with “looking back” …
Or maybe I’m just cruel.
A
[Daphne – Whichever word he used, it would still have been insanely stupid. You don’t need to look back or to use hindsight to read the fact that more people voted Yes than No. He didn’t need any facts or information other than that simple result to know who won. This is just another way of refusing to say the words: “We were damned wrong.” That’s all he has to say: “We f***ed it up, and we’re sorry for having caused so much trouble for nothing, and for having led 100,000 people up the garden path, and for getting them to celebrate drunkenly outside the party headquarters, in front of an even more drunken party leader who had lost the plot.”]
The cheeky little f***.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually takes your advice and does shave off the facial hair. If you can get away with successfully metamorphosing into Mr. Europe qisu ma gara xejn, a few strokes with the razor biex toghgob lin-nies shouldn’t be such a big deal.
I suppose it’s ok to admit to a mistake. Better that than having mental acrobatics defending the indefensible for endless years and treating everyone like imbeciles. (That minister who never admitted that not hedging oil prices was not a mistake comes to mind).
[Daphne – The point is that he didn’t admit making a mistake. There is a huge difference between saying ‘with hindsight the Yes vote won’ and saying ‘With hindsight we really screwed things up.’ The result of an election or referendum stares you in the face there and then. There’s no room for analysis or hindsight. You can use hindsight to reassess your reaction to the referendum result and conclude that it was wrong. But you can’t use hindsight to reassess the result itself. Surely you see the difference?]
Daphne, lets say it. Wiccu u sormu xorta, m’ghandux misthijja minn wicc in-nies dan ? As S said, you have to be so overtly cheeky to present this volta faccia that it beggars belief.
This refusal to call a spade a spade instead of a hand operated earth moving implement is just a pointer to the waffler this man really is. All words, and no substance. Touchy to the point of going to court at the slightest criticsm. Do we deserve this?
Daphne – I’m not my brother’s keeper but I don’t think he meant it in an arithmetical way. His english may not be precise (or it may have been reported wrongly) but it seems to me to be a case of saying the ‘yes’ group (read ‘votes’) were right and he/they got some issues wrong.
[Daphne – I get very impatient with people who take words at face value. Half of what is said is usually unsaid – in this case, too. What Joseph Muscat is saying here is that he can’t bring himself to say that Sant was a twerp and he was an even bigger one for following him blindly – or opportunistically.]
Yesterday we went to eat at a restaurant even though one of our group said that she had heard that the service was lousy and the food so so. We were very pleasantly surprised as the service was excellent and the food more than acceptable. My friend said `It`s a good thing you didn`t take any notice of me`
Don`t you think that Joey seems to put a politician going all out to make the partnership win and trying to convince all and sundry about how the EU would swallow us up giving us peanuts in return in the same category as my friend`s `mistake` ?
[Daphne – Yes. But a more likely scenario is that it was crass opportunism. In 2003 he selected the bandwagon he thought would win. And when it didn’t, he turned a major problem for his party into a personal opportunity for himself and secured an MEP seat. When the party put out its Situations Vacant notice, he saw another personal opportunity but was left with the problem of how to square his European position with Labour’s anti-EU heritage, without looking like an opportunist, a pinnur, or a plain idiot. So he concocted this rubbish about how he now realises that the Yes vote won. Note: not that he now realises the EU was good for Malta and he and his leader were wrong. Maybe it’s taken him the last five years to learn how to count, possibly using an abacus.]
Look at it this way: if Muscat actually needed “hind-sight” to finally get him to realise that the “Yes” vote won the referendum, he cannot be very perceptive, can he? One wonders what further treats the future hold in store for us. I can’t wait!
[Daphne – Yes, it’s going to be a thrill a minute. I loved the Super One show last night: they put Joey in the studio with Louis Grech and John Attard Montaldo and got them – poor things, really, because they’re worth more than that – to eulogise him. Then they showed a ‘docu-drama’: they took the Super One camera to ‘Brussel’ and vox-popped some of his fellow socialist MEPs. I was struck by the fact that – natch – they were all deeply unattractive women who clearly doted on him for reasons other than his political astuteness and Large Brain. Two of them were actually simpering. And the only comment from one of them – my God, how embarrassing – was not about the contribution he made to the socialists group, but about how she is going to miss him because she used to swap baby photos with him via their mobile phones. The only man MEP they interviewed, a French person, glared at the camera and said curtly and dismissively: Goodbye and good luck. In other ways, I barely know who the hell you are and what is your television camera doing stuck in my face; I will never see you again and it doesn’t bother me at all. I have taken to watching Super One again. It’s wonderful. No wonder it has so many viewers.]
@Mario P
What Jospeh Muscat is saying is that the Labour Party lost out by insisting that they won the referendum , because this eventually led them to lose two successive elections.
This is incredibly selfish, her is only regretting the effect that this had on the Labour Party. The implications of this is that he is justifying the Labour Party stance, in denying a blatant referendum loss.
He is NOT admitting he was wrong, what he is admitting is that events proved him wrong, thats what he means in HINDSIGHT. Pathetic.
Just like when your partner cheats on you, and then you find out and are devestated, and he says “I am sorry you took it so badly”, he is not sorry that he cheated on you, he is sorry he got found out.
For crying out loud Mario P! Daphne is absolutely spot on here. It’s VERY VERY convenient for Muscat to come out with this ‘iva nammetti li zbaljana’ line now. He has NOTHING to lose by saying that now. Where was he when Labour were lying through their teeth on EU issues? Ah! He was a front line soldier in Sant’s loyal army of reporters, that’s where he was. The ‘with hindsight’ bit makes it all the more obscene because ‘with hindsight’ in this case means ‘after I kept my mouth shut up for 4 whole years up to the moment I was crowned leader’. It’s important that at least one journalist in this blessed land points out how damn cynical this whole charade is.
No shame. Those two words sum it up. The fact that most journalists are happy to let politicians get away with this shameless behaviour says a lot about us as a nation.
New Leader with new ideas: http://www.di-ve.com/Default.aspx?ID=72&Action=1&NewsID=54660 … so much for privacy !
They might as well try to sell some redtouch fone top-ups during their home visits … la dahlu fil bisniss issa :)
By the way it would be fun if they had to issue warning messages on Super 1 that the website ends with .com.mt and not just .com, just in case some visit http://www.redtouch.com :)
[Daphne – I’m fascinated to see that they took my advice via this blog that they should never have tried to call it One anyway, because the most obvious brand for a Labour mobile phone service is Red. But of course, they couldn’t give me the satisfaction of using my idea as was, so they brainstormed on red and came up with RedTouch, which erodes the potential strength of the brand at…one touch. Well, if they knew anything about branding they wouldn’t be in that mess. I can picture the crass ads already, with some sultry chick mouthing: ‘Red Touch….touch me up….”]
It‘s unbelievable how nonchalantly Joseph says he was wrong ‘on certain issues’, as if he’s talking about the weather (“I thought it was going to rain but I was wrong”). More than unbelievable, the cheek of it all is outrageous. He compares himself to Tony Blair too.
The journalist could have pressed him to specify which issues but we already know what they were. Joseph was one of those who did their utmost to rob us of our only chance to someday catch up with the rest of Europe.
It was not a momentary error of judgment, their crusade against EU membership. It was a deliberate, sustained, scare-mongering campaign that placed partisan interests before national ones.
Joseph’s role in that, thankfully futile, attempt carries consequences; it damages his political reputation. If he was so terribly wrong about the referendum and the EU, he could also be wrong about the vote for 16yr-olds, wrong about the national crisis, wrong about the burden-sharing pact . . . in fact, he could be wrong about practically everything. Perhaps he should adopt a policy of waiting for hindsight before pronouncing himself, this new leader with an embarrassing past.
So the prospective leader of our country assesses major, vital decisions concerning the future of all of us with a hindsight of five years. At least he admits his incompetence and poor judgement. Let us all hope that he remains prospective for ever. We must make doubly sure that he does. He is downright dangerous. If he had Winnie’s job in WW11, Angela Merkel would now be commuting between Berlin, Castille and No 10. Good Gracious !
Indeed Antoine. Labour waged a ten-year all-out war against Malta’s EU membership. Then it’s just “heqq nammetti li zbaljana” when we’re sitting cosy. If these were minor details we’re talking about or, suq, an economic policy which didn’t go exactly to plan, it’d be acceptable to say ‘we made a few mistakes’.
Kif gejna qisu jigi Jorg Haider hames snin ohra u jghidlek, “Isma zbaljat ta’ ras, skuzani. Multiculturalism is the future. And Bob Marley is so cool, man, chill brother.”
Daphne: I have taken to watching Super One again. It’s wonderful. No wonder it has so many viewers
Yeah, seems like I’m missing all the fun!
In think you are being a tad naive when taken aback by what you previously referred to as “crass opportunism”. Sorry Madame but have you been around during Labour times and maybe during the last election with the JPO case (which incidentally was shot down after the election by both groups) but was previously presented as a martyr. This is politics after all, what do you expect. Honesty? Come on now! We had honesty from Sant and Gonzi during the last electoral campaign in the same manner that the international community gets it from Milosevic. If its sensationalism you are after I would agree but cannot possibly imagine you being truly surprised …
[Daphne – I am not surprised at Muscat’s opportunism. I am surprised that people can’t see it. And I’m surprised that they see it and accept it, as you do. You can’t compare Pullicino Orlando’s situation with Joseph Muscat. Joseph Muscat is the leader of the Labour Party and putting himself forward as prime minister. You would have to compare Muscat with Gonzi. Pullicino Orlando is an MP. His decisions have absolutely no impact on our lives. And he campaigned for EU membership, not against it.]