Apologise or we'll burn you down again

The Labour Party tells us that it plans to ‘revisit’ its history as part of its 90-year anniversary celebrations.

If its constant detachment from reality is anything to go by, we can expect to hear nothing of the events of 15 October 1979, which condemned Labour to 31 years (and counting) of paying the price.

Unbelievably, Labour is currently having a major hissy fit and demanding an apology – from The Times.

What Labour needs, of course, is to be told most forcefully where to put its demand. But The Times won’t do that.

The dwarf jester who the party calls its Director of Communications – a big name for a midget, but then he does have rather a large head – has written to the newspaper to declare that offence has been taken at an article written by Austin Bencini.

Apparently, this article ‘smeared’ the Dear Leader.

Well, if the Dear Leader has been smeared, then the Dear Leader should sue. It costs nothing if he gets the police to do it like his fellow Laburisti do.

Or he can do the grown-up thing and write a response explaining why the smears were wrong. I’m sure he has some more ‘that my was my father’ anecdotes to tug at our heart-strings.

In the absence of an apology from The Times (imagine that – they burn down the building and 30 years later they demand an apology for a ‘smear’), Maltastar has taken matters into its own hands.

MALTASTAR LEADER
The Times owes an apology
20 September 2010

Recently Austin Bencini penned one of his nastiest attacks to date on the Labour leader Dr. Joseph Muscat, and Dr. Owen Bonnici.

Following the well known poor maths of the four plus four equals ten gang of the usual PN rotweillers who don’t represent PN moderates at all, Austin Bencini made nasty assertions which he knows he cannot substantiate.

He was challenged to give evidence for his attempted smears, and he has so far chosen to remain silent.

The Labour Party’s Director of Communications again wrote a letter to The Times asking it whether it stood by the smears in Austin Bencini’s Talking Point.

The Times published the letter but practically disassociated itself from Talking Point, and from Austin Bencini too.

This disassociation is very telling.

Where exactly does The Times stand?

Does it allow unfounded slurs to be published or did it just not thoroughly vet Austin Bencini’s Talking Point?

Was it a slip or a deliberate slur?

Either way The Times should apologise to the Labour leader and to Dr.Owen Bonnici.

That would show good character, good will and a willingness to accept that it’s time for a fresh start in PL-Times relations. The Times could then start to once again re establish it’s former role as a media protagonist that is respected for being non-partisan by all voters

It really is about time….
———-

Fascinated, I hurried to look up Austin Bencini’s smear-attack, which I had missed. I read the article twice and couldn’t find anything remotely smear-like.

I had to conclude that it must be this paragraph:

The Church has moved on and, one genuinely hopes, so has the Labour movement. The likes of Joseph Muscat and Owen Bonnici, make no mistake about it, sound culturally more in the mould of the Spanish Zapatero than anyone else, but they should recognise that any radical social reform involving such Zapateran reforms as divorce, euthanasia, abortion and stem cell technologies are not to be rammed down the throat of that part of Maltese society who consider these as harmful to both the individual person perpetrating them and equally so to society in general, without at least obtaining the minimum electoral mandate.

The Dear Leader and his Dwarf Jester must be worried that electors will think them in favour of euthanasia and abortion. We know that he’s in favour of divorce because he told us, so it isn’t that.

And we know that he’s in favour of stem cell technology because he and Michelle paid EUR4,000 to store their twins’ stem cells and helped advertise the company that did it.

But he’s also declared himself against abortion and we know that he’s not into euthanasia because he visited Mintoff’s sickbed twice and didn’t pull the plug.

So what’s the fuss about, Kurt?

If you want smears, keep a tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter in the Maltastar fridge and use that.