Tortured...and torturous, is the only way I can describe Calvin Smith's self-delusional re-writing of history in yesterday's Royal Gazette.
I can't really summon up the energy to give it a total going over but a couple of gems that stood out for me were:
"The Progressive Labour Party first won election to government in November, 1998. The victory was a result of good planning, effective branch organisation and excellent public relations."
Well a decent campaign, better than they'd run before, but a huge part of the victory came courtesy of a UBP that had totally imploded with infighting over Independence and McDonald's coupled with voter exhaustion after having elected the same party for 30+ years.
"The PLP campaign plan was developed by a campaign committee that comprised the most senior and experienced members of the PLP. Chief among these were party leader Jennifer Smith, Alex Scott, Eugene Cox, David Allen, Walter Roban, this writer as campaign committee chairman and deputy chairman Larry Burchall.As chairman, I assembled the many decisions taken by the campaign committee into a comprehensive plan which was endorsed by the party delegates conference without objection."
I'm the greatest. Can you go blind masturbating your ego?
"A major strategy of the UBP to downgrade the PLP was achieved by claiming that the PLP government was corrupt. This charge has continued to play in UBP propaganda despite the fact that the charges of corruption were investigated by the Commissioner of Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions who found no basis for the charges of corruption."
The truth is of course that the DPP said that Bermuda's corruption laws were so antiquated that he couldn't press charges, not that evidence of wrongdoing didn't exist:
"Police said yesterday that evidence gathered over the past two years was not enough under existing legislation – legislation which is nearly 100 years old – to accuse many of anything other than bad ethics in a scandal involving public funds which ran into the millions.When asked if the outcome of the investigation may have been different had that legislation been updated before today, consultant to the DPP, Kulandra Ratneser replied: “Yes, the outcome could have been different”."
Got that? If our corruption laws were up to modern standards then charges would likely have been laid.
That's a lot different than the Police and DPP giving a clean bill of health and said it was all an innocent misunderstanding. They even went on in the ensuing debate over the use of the term "unethical" to say:
"...established practices had been abandoned ... an environment was created which could have enabled criminal offences to occur," among other examples of misconduct and mismanagement.
It's too exhausting, depressing and pointless to go line and by and debunk the nonsense, but another of my favourites was the hyping of the Hotel Concessions Act passed early by the late Tourism Minister David Allen, which resulted in virtually no development of hotels but lots of residential units.
We're still waiting on the hotel components down at the old Palmetto Bay Hotel and Tuckers Point is only now making noises about starting on the hotel for example.
The whole article is so disingenuous, I don't know what is worse. That Mr. Smith is so shameless as to write such nonsense, or that he believes his own spin.
