It was his seat in parliament, and not his chairmanship of the Science Council, that Pullicino Orlando used in his collusion with the Labour Party.

I totally disagree with the reasoning in the last bit of your comment. This is not because I agree with using immoral means to get into power, but because your standpoint seems to be that it is somehow more moral to lose as the ‘good guy’ and foist a massively immoral government on the country, where it can do most damage, than to win using immoral means (if you then proceed not to be immoral in government).

It isn’t. It is equally immoral to chest-beat your way into an electoral loss which will translate into a dangerous government for Malta. I would say it is even more immoral than using ‘immoral’ means to get into government without then governing immorally.

Of course, what should happen is that people get their act together to counter the Labour Party’s immorality without being immoral themselves, but please don’t posture with that reasoning that moral behaviour somehow includes not bothering about inflicting a dangerous government on Malta as long as your conscience is clear.

It is only wildly selfish people who put their own need to feel good first and before everything and everyone else.

Your reasoning is that of conscientious objectors in time of war. They won’t fight in battle or kill others of the opposite side because it is against their conscience, but the net result of everyone thinking like that would have been the whole of Europe under Hitler’s and Mussolini’s jackboots, with all the conscientious objectors thinking they’d rather have that as long as they didn’t have to kill anyone or go to war.

Morality is a very complex issue. I am astonished at how many people don’t know, instinctively, what the right thing to do is in a wide variety of situations.

If you were in Brazil and saw a hungry young teenager stealing a wallet, would you report him to the police? I know I wouldn’t. To do so would be an act of evil, not of a law-abider, because of what might happen to him in the hands of the police.

If you are about copying Joseph Muscat’s or his predecessors’ policies, then I’m out. Not because these would be losers (these will be losers), but because the policies utilised by the Labour Party have always been based on dishonesty and lies and I wouldn’t want to have Malta’s two major parties basing their policies on these immoral qualities.

If I were Simon Busuttil my motto would be:
‘I’d rather lose an election for promising the right and correct policies than winning it by dishonest means’

He’d done his bit anyway. All he needed to set up he did, and he’s still not really been rejected, therefore – by default – he’s still at it.

It must have been a blow to his massive ego though.

Ah, you just reminded me of a few pleasant hours reading The Etymologicon.

You are absolutely right, I was fuming at the arrogance of the use of the word ‘classified’ as well as the fact that reporters don’t seem to pass anything through a sieve, and slipped up.

Whereas ‘wage’, of course, comes from the proto-Germanic ‘wadja’, or ‘pledge’, which gave us the word ‘gage’, as ‘love-gage’, all the way to the proto-Indo-European ‘wed’, which gave us, well, ‘to wed’.