He can’t take the heat, so he pulled out (or maybe he planned to send Franco instead and was let down)
There’s going to be a press conference broadcast live on NET TV in a few minutes. Joseph Muscat has pulled out of the head-to-head debate between the two party leaders, scheduled for the last few days of the campaign on 1 March, on Xarabank.
The reason? He first demanded that tonight’s head-to-head between him and Lawrence Gonzi be cut down from two hours to one, and the same with the March debate, and when the request was refused, he pulled out of the March one.
The excuse the Labour Party gave on his behalf is that there are going to be “several” debates in the last week of the campaign, including one organised by The Times (which is watched only by a small group of invited guests, incidentally, not the entire country) so he should only be expected to do an hour on Xarabank and not two.
That’s what happens when you promote a Super One reporter beyond his level of competence and turn him into Karmenu Vella’s glove puppet.
Party leaders seek out as much media coverage as they can get and would kill for two hours of prime time television, but Joseph Muscat would do anything to avoid it.
Including this, and looking like a cowardly, incompetent ass who’s just not up to it.
Well, you can’t take a teleprompter to a television debate, can you?
One foot on the pedal and the other hand on the control, and he reads his speech word for word, following the written prompts on what he should do (raise hand, make emotional pause). PATHETIC.
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There we go. The first sign that he can´t take the pressure. It´s bound to get worse in February. I suppose telling a bunch of lies and promising everything under the sun is exhausting.
Will he be recovering after some other bogus operation? Or what was it last time he disappeared a couple of years back?
A failed hair transplant, masquerading as a leg fractured at the August Moon Ball.
Michelle represented him at all official functions, elbowing the deputy leader aside.
He wasn’t even there for the unveiling of the party’s new logo exhibition, remember?
As though a fractured leg would have kept him away.
Louis Grech has cancer. But he doesn’t stay home.
One foot in the grave, more likely.
The photo caption says “One foot on the pedal and the other hand on the control”…
His foot is actually on the gas pedal. Gas down ghal gol-hajt.
Did somebody mention chickens?
Cluck, cluck, cluck.
Well yes. Xarabank does not dictate the way the country debates politics. It is just one of many fora.
[Daphne – No it isn’t. No more than this is just one of many blogs. But you’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? People actually stay in on a Friday night to watch something like that. Nor is it about Xarabank dictating politics. As a bred in the bone Laburist, you are still unable to get to grips with freedom of expression, free media and above all, the DUTY of party leaders to expose themselves to scrutiny by the widest audience possible.]
Sorry Peppi. You can always invite comedian-cum-hypnotist Alan Bates, or else some witch doctor or a voodoo practitioner on March 1. Might even influence the way people vote.
The reality is that today, Friday, will be the first time since the campaign began two weeks ago that the Prime Minister will face some sort of questioning. Not once has he faced a press conference since this year began. So who is the one pulling out?
[Daphne – Kemm iddum biex tifhem, jahasra. Mur arak tezamina xi policy. Nobody has pulled out of today’s. They’re both going. The Labour leader pulled out of March’s debate because he wanted both that and today’s cut down by half. This is because he hasn’t the stamina for a two-hour debate, not just physically – I noticed he was out of breath when talking to reporters after going round the Valletta monuments to place wreaths, taxing stuff – but also in every other way. All his speeches are read off a teleprompter and when faced with press questions, he becomes defensive or evasive.]
Pity not everyone will watch it due to another power cut.
The first question I would ask:
So…
you’re going to pay back taxes on imported cars
you’re going to provide free childcare
you’re going to build a new power station
you’re going to reduce water & electricity bills by 25%
you’re going to keep all positive measures of the PN budget
you’re going to slash taxes on rental income
you’re going to splash out God-knows-what in your electoral programme
But at the same time…
you’re going to reduce the deficit
Back to my question, which is…
What fairy tale did your granny read to you before tucking you in bed last night?
[Daphne – He didn’t have the sort of grandmother who read him fairytales. He had the sort who took him to Mintoff’s mass meetings.]
‘Ghax se nkabbru l-ekonomija’, he says. He was a magician in another life.
Quite frankly I don’t care about all the above. I just don’t want to see those blue Chinese vans taking those poor workers to Delimara like when they worked at Marsa during Mintoff’s time. How many thousands wil we see working on this new power station?
L-aqwa li mitna ghall-barrani.
Excellent point, the style of this project will be typically Mintoff’s.
When it came to building the grain silo in Kordin, the site chosen had to be the worst possible, ships unloading at sea level, determining a fleet of trucks trudging up and down a road excavated at such an incline that most couldn’t go past first gear.
There was no space, money nor the will to lay the road along the contours of the hill crest.
Of such decisions are their projects made.
The 5000 students graduating next year can look forward to an ‘ibni u ahzen’ sort of paramilitary corps then.
Just the sort of job I’ve been dreaming for my son to take up once he’s finished his course.
I can just see his prospects going down the same route as my own. At least he would have made it through university without mishap before another PL calamity takes hold of the island.
It amazes me how people, schooled people no less, are so dense. I used ‘schooled’ because even with their Masters and Doctorates they remain largely uneducated.
Mintoff’s mass meetings were fairy tales – but it was all about bad fairies. Hence the nightmare that is now facing the nation.
@Futur imcajpar (quote):
Very true. I know a few who I thought were just Labour sympathisers, only to learn they attend meetings “Taht it-Tinda” with Labour banners and all just to have a buzz.
It’s like going to an important match involving their favourite football team. They just need to celebrate (already).
Unbelievable.
Power outage: I’m beginning to think the Labour Party has friends at the power station.
You actually watch Xarabank?
[Daphne – Of course I do, when there’s a debate like this between the party leaders or deputy leaders. BWhat sort of political columnist would I be if I didn’t bother to keep myself informed? But it’s not just that. The show is professionally done. I can’t bear to watch the fascinating political shows on Super One because the production is always so shoddy.]
“The show is professionally done.”
Teehee.
[Daphne – It is, indeed. Like many others, you make the mistake of confusing genre with production standards.]
No, I do not. No amount of fancy 3D graphics will make up for its poor content.
[Daphne – That is exactly what I mean in saying that you are confusing genre with production standards. They are two separate things. There are different genres of films, television shows, newspapers, magazines: some are lowbrow, some are more highbrow (to use simplistic terms). All can have excellent production standards. Here’s a simple example. A magazine with lowbrow content (say, street pictures of people and what they’re wearing) can be produced to excellent standards in terms of design, photography, paper quality, print quality, attention to detail, & C & C. I respect good production standards even if I might not like the genre. I know what it takes to have that level of attention to detail.]
I had a different definition of professionalism. Having a look at how Peppi starts every programme is already disastrous enough. “Mela illum ha nitkellmu fuq id-drogi, waqfa qasira ta reklami u nibdew”- good God, take lectures.
[Daphne – It’s the genre, it’s the genre.]
The genre is an essential part of any programme. It’s not the just the subjects chosen that are particularly wrong, the way audience could communicate, the host is a total disaster, the boring owejo owejo and the list is endless.
Peppi should thank god his programme has become a tradition which Maltese follow as much as they attend church every Sunday.
[Daphne – They watch it because it works, and it works because it is perfectly targetted. It obviously doesn’t work for you. It doesn’t work for me most times, either, but that doesn’t stop me seeing that it’s a near-perfect example of the genre.]
Don’t knock Xarabank Mik, most folks of your ilk watch it. Would they miss one hour of glorious enlightenment from boy wonder, Joseph?
After debates (when Labour decides to participate), the electronic media, invariably, is flooded with comments that your guy (or gal) won hands down, so they must be watching, no?
The content makes the programme and the result could be good or bad independent of the genre it belongs to.
What the hell would they be able to cover in an hour?
Can you imagine Joseph Muscat arguing Malta´s case, for endless hours, within and around the EU? It would wear him out, poor thing.
Excellent point.
EU summits notoriously go on late into the night in an effort to reach a compromise between 27 countries.
I can’t for the life of me imagine the man who comes up with such weak excuses (fractured ankles, personal schedules and whatnot) to fob off responsibility bothering to stay up so late.
He’ll probably send his wife to replace him. Or Franco Debono.
He couldn’t follow through a sentence during the press conference at the Palace last Monday.
He just had to refer to the notebook-sized piece of paper held out below camera view.
Even George Bush Jnr did better.
George Bush Jnr was a great president, an American patriot who stuck to his principles no matter what.
Please don’t compare him to the likes of Joseph Muscat who is trying to achieve the impossible task to applying Mintoffianism to modern, European Malta.
George Bush was a success. Look at the mess America is in now under an Socialist-leaning president elected by public sector employees and an underclass who just want to continue to milk the state into oblivion.
If you want to make a true comparision, compare Muscat to Obama. Not with regards to Obama’s incredible style, or charm, or charisma, or strategy. Only with regards to his failures.
George W. Bush, Jr. was the worst US President in modern times–we still are in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq–but there was plenty of oil.
I think Joseph Muscat would do much worse than Bush, Jr. He certainly is no Obama, who is a rationalist and pragmatist in the best of the American tradition. Obama is not a Socialist; they don’t exist in American politics; he is, however, a Liberal-Democrat, who truly respects the diversity of American society. Obama is not a fake.
George Bush was a cretin who couldn’t string a coherent sentence together (on the same lines as Anglu Farrugia) and whose policies (expanding signiificantly on those that came before him) created the world economic crisis in the first place.
If ever there was a demonstration that private universities sell degrees to the really rich, George Bush Jr is it.
That crisis spawned the tea-party movement within the Republican Party, many of whose supporters are the same kind of paranoid conspiracy theorist nut jobs who vote Labour.
The parallels are there to see for those who look.
Malta has a moderately left of centre party (PN) and a bunch of whining nut jobs (MLP).
The USA has the same, only in that case the nut jobs are the so called Republicans. I say so-called because Republican heroes like Eisenhower and Reagan would be branded as socialists and expelled from today’s Republican party.
Not quite. Bush Jr. cocked up the economy and built the massive load of debt. Also, don’t confuse the financial stimulus and large deficit with bad financial management – that’s proper way to handle a recession. The UK experimented with austerity (unlike Italy and Spain, it had a choice).
Unlike the UK economy (which provided only a brief similar stimulus under Labour), the US keeps seeing consistent growth and is due to beat the UK’s deficit (as percentage of GDP) by next year and start reducing its debt sooner. That’s using the OBR’s own predictions which have, without fail, been optimistic.
Chicken
X’ meskinita ta’ persuna. Imagine him as PM of Malta addressing the EU Commission.
Didn’t he walk out of that one as well? No Maltese, no speech.
Imagine him holding the presidency of the European Union.
He’s already way out of his depth locally, can you imagine what an embarrassment he’s going to be then?
Running around with his stupid teleprompter, speaking only in Maltese, arriving late for everything, and dictating where and when and how to give interviews and speeches.
Does the man have any idea what he’s getting himself into?
Is there no way out of this nightmare?
Hear, hear! Rather than action forward strategy, we’re already seeing avoidance strategy. Never mind “Hawwadni ha nifhem”, it’s “ma fhimtx, hawwadtuni.”
Just yesterday I was having a discussion regarding whether one should believe Dr Fenech’s interpretation of the S&P downgrading.
My view is that the name Franco Debono should feature more often in any reasonable assessment of what happened during the budget vote, but clearly PL had a golden opportunity to show that they were thinking ‘country first’ and refused it.
One can easily see that a vote with the government, say following some discussions to change bits here and there, would have been a vote-catcher in the inevitable election, but clearly Labour did not want to gamble Debono’s vote that night.
This, together with Labour’s many other opportunistic stunts, particularly last year, at the very least show that the ‘moviment gdid’ is just the same old Labour.
If it was not for a successful rebranding exercise (change, unity, blue backdrops, logos and all that) there should not be anyone with an ounce of brain matter to believe that PL is not good old MLP.
In brief, two other clear attestations to this are (i) the usual electoral promises, going way beyond anything remotely realistic, (ii) the use of anything under the sun to discredit PN, even when there is ample proof that facts do not back them up, including alarming people with falsities about CANCER and asthma and (iii) their abysmal handing of the media.
The latter should be the easiest to notice by anyone.
Am I the only one to remember the report commissioned by the Labour Party following its election defeat in 2008? Can they acknowledge their own mistakes in the past and avoid repeating them?
‘….The PL had never accepted to take part in the March 1 leaders’ debate on Xarabank so it could not pull out, a spokesman for the party said this afternoon…’
Everyone will ask whether they will, to which they’ll repeat the above.
And so on.
Just parroting Labour’s lame explanation, Josef?
Muscat should grab every opportunity to explain to the nation what his proposals are, how they will be financed and by whom and the mysterious ‘experts’ reports justifying the fangled PS project.
Instead, he ducks, he runs and he chickens out because he knows that he has nothing legit.
‘He can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but he cannot fool all of the people all of the time’. Thanks Abe.
If I were Dr. Joseph Muscat I would have asked for as many hours as I could get, not protested because I was given too many.
Agree
He is not interested in a debate. He thinks (and is probably right) that the election is in the bag. He has a fixed programme of events and promises between now and election day and these debates do not fit in the scheme of things because, as we all know, they could go anywhere.
This Muscat has been lying low for years and just needs to continue to do so for a few more weeks. Then his real self will come out, when he walks into Castille – a laid back, inexperienced politician surrounded by Mintoffian-era rats.
He has one strategy – eyewash.
Forget the essence, values, principles… All he has to do is add the disgruntled Nationalists, the opportunists and the gays to his diehard supporters and he’s got it made.
Why should he debate?
He has created an unholy alliance between vested commercial interests, homosexual men who are too young and politically inexperienced to know better (the older ones seem to think differently), conservative Labourites and, worst of all, turncoats who are ready to cut off their balls to annoy the wife, as the old adage goes.
If he manages to pull this off, Malta does not deserve better.
Agree whole-heartedly.
Amen to that.
Erring on the side of caution: saying less is preferable when you have nothing of substance to add.
So, that explains the power cut we had during the press conference and the meeting with Enemalta employees behind closed doors. What a coincidence…
When you don’t know what to say, it is time to be silent – for one out of two hours, at least.
What a pussy
Spot on Leslie & M..
O teleprompter, where art thou?
Imagine if they went missing.
Ghadu ma tellax it tarag ta Kastilja u diga qata nifsu, ma jiflahx ghal saghtejn dibattitu, ahseb u ara ghal hames snin responsabilta ta’ pajjizna.
U mhux jirrizenja jista, hekk qal, mela pajjizna hija borza pastizzi, li jekk ma toghbokx tgharmija?
Taf min jahrab mil-ilma ta vapur li jkun qed jereq, le mhux il-bahrin, dawk jibqghu hemm jikkumbattu, imma il-grieden.
As the saying goes, the devil is in the detail and two hours are too long to expose oneself to public scrutiny.
He knows full well that he has no chance to come off looking any better when pitted head to head with Dr. Lawrence Gonzi.
Even if you’re comfortably ahead, you wouldn’t like to be made a fool of, especially not so close to Election Day.
Il-vera ‘Malta Taghna Lkoll’
From timesofmalta.com:
J Scicluna
Today, 18:04
Tal-‘where’s everbody’ ahjar ma jdardrux l-ghajn li minn hawn u ftit gimghat ohra jridu jixorbu minnha.
That’s sorted out what they plan to do with the national station, not that we didn’t know already, of course.
Back to the ‘Bongu Malta Socjalista’ theme it will be. Can’t wait.
I watched yesterday’s debate on Xarabank and I could feel that there was no continuity on Joseph’s speech to that of the Prime Minister’s. It’s as if he was prepared for a set of points, and when he was asked specific questions, he was evasive or ignored him completely.
That teleprompter is reason enough not to vote for Joseph Muscat.
During his speeches, you never get the feeling that he is talking about his personal beliefs, convictions and principles. He is, very woodenly, reading what someone else thinks the crowd and the media wants to hear. Period.
Regardless of whoever writes Lawrence Gonzi’s speeches, you can tell that he says it all with genuine sincerity.