The ‘if it’s legal then it’s fine’ mentality doesn’t wash outside Malta

I meant to write about this yesterday but got distracted by the problems brought on when the site got half a million views (despite the two-hour downtime at peak period) in the course of a few hours and crashed when traffic was at its heaviest. So here it is now.

The worst, the very worst, bit of Toni Abela’s horrendous performance yesterday was when he said, with complete conviction in response to the questions about cocaine-dealing from a Labour Party club and his role in covering it up: “This was three years ago. I was investigated by the police and they found nothing wrong. No action was taken against me.”

WHAT? This is just how bad the Maltese hamalli mentality of ‘if it’s legal, then it’s good’ is. Abela actually paraded his investigation by the police and ‘clearance’ as something positive. Those idiots just don’t understand that even being investigated by the police for cocaine-related activities (or any other, for that matter) is enough to bar you from a position like that.

When he said those words, I froze. They clanged into the open room. He might as well have said, “Oh and in my spare time, I like to look at pictures of naked children.” That is exactly how far removed from the norms of European civilisation those village bumpkins are. And it’s not only them. Not so long ago, in the thick of the debate about how Mrs Muscat’s parents took places funded by the state at Villa Messina, an expensive private nursing home, one social butterfly said to me: “But if they got those places properly through the system, there’s nothing wrong.”

OF COURSE IT’S WRONG. The Prime Minister’s parents-in-law shouldn’t be taking two places from those who actually need them.