ADVANTAGE MINNIS

cialis generic cialis times;”>The young PLPs were excited again.  Within minutes of the show put on by former PLP MPs Renward Wells and Andre Rollins in crossing the floor and becoming FNM MPs, check they slashed and burned the reputations of both men.  Mr. Rollins had been trashed before.  They found him to be unstable and disrespectful and worse than that a bad representative.  They repeated those statements about him.  They wondered how he could be in a party where the sole woman MP Loretta Butler Turner had slapped him.  Then with Mr. Wells there was special treatment by them of him.  This was the man whose career had been wrecked by the FNM, yet here he was finding common cause with them.

As they ( the young PLPs in their chat rooms)  looked at the move, it appeared that the move was cold and calculating.  Hubert Minnis, the Leader of the FNM, was in great political trouble.  He had de facto lost his majority in the parliament to be the Leader of the Opposition, with most of his members prepared to go to the Governor General and relieve him of his post.  He encouraged the two former PLPs to join him, he says, without promises of anything, and that changed the math.  The move to the Governor General could no longer be made.

The two young men, they were also coldly calculating.  Their view is that the PLP is going to lose the next general election. Having determined that and with no ethical, ideological, philosophical  or moral grounding, they simply chose the side that will give them a nomination and then get them back into Parliament.  But prostitution is a political blood sport, so let’s not get carried away by that.

Their target is the leader of the PLP who Mr. Rollins described as an emperor without any clothes.  He told the Parliament that he had been put out of the PLP because he dared to say that the Emperor had no clothes on.  He was not put out of the PLP.  He left.  But don’t let the truth interfere.

Then Mr. Wells explained away his  violation of the rules on signing the letter of intent on a still born waste to energy proposal which caused him so much political grief with the FNM, said in a fancy bit of  revisionism that he was led to sign it by the leader of the PLP but he took responsibility because he could not prove that the instruction had been given.  That shows a fundamental weakness in the man.  But at least he having left the PLP, he stopped with regard to leaving the PLP trying to fool the party that he was still one of them.  Christians who are born again shouldn’t live a lie.  He admitted that he had been lying all the time to the PLP, because he had mentally left the party from the time he was fired because of signing the letter of intent.

Even the mercurial, imperious and enigmatic Dr. Duane Sands ( FNM) admitted that the two may have some answers to give but in his view  “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.  In other words, they may be sons of bitches but they’re our sons of bitches.  C’est la vie!

None of that matters much though. The question in politics as always is who controls the narrative.  Right now the opponents of the PLP control the narrative and in their anti PLP message, they are being helped by some PLPs MPs.  The Prime Minister’s response did not resonate with the country as it ought to have. Sometimes silence is golden. The chairman struck the right tone when he said that he wished Mr. Wells well.  Move on.

It is not the truth that resonates.  Sometimes there is a time in politics that no matter what the truth is, no one listens anymore.  The PLP has this issue right now.  Is anyone listening?  There is this sea of troubles and there is a need in response to it not to appear to be thrashing around, but to double down into fundamentals.

Grand Bahama has serious political issues to face, with an economy that is teetering on being moribund.  Attention! Attention! Attention!

What is needed is a real hard, cold, truthful look at life in the political universe and a new direction struck, otherwise 2017 will be fatal. It requires diligent, balanced reform out of the public eye… a decided shift in the way business is done and conducted.

What counts is the situation on the ground.

So while all that is said about those two men, the way it comes off is this is yet another cut in the death by a thousand cuts strategy.  They were part of the PLP’s coalition in 2012 and helped the PLP to win.  The narrative will say that the coalition is falling apart.  That narrative must be counteracted.

The PLP has a job to do to turn this around and turn it around quickly. On way to do that is to hunker down in the constituencies and do the things that make for peace and build up the common life.  Also take plenty of what U S President Barak Obama called “ walking round money”.

For the moment though, if you were  a tennis commentator and you saw what happened last week, despite the haplessness of Dr. Minnis, and particularly in the face of the stony  faced FNM front bench in response including the grumbling of Loretta Butler Turner ( outfoxed again) you would say about last week’s events” “ Advantage Minnis”. 

Number of hits for the week ending Saturday 7th November 2015 up to midnight: 235,587;
Number of hits for the month of November up to Saturday 7th November 2015 up to midnight: 235,587;
Number of hits for the year 2015 up 7th November 2015 up midnight: 18,391,079.