Diane Philips Is Not As Innocent As It Appears

Her column 20 December titled: Let’s Resolve To Do Something A Little Different In Life

Here is what she wrote with which we take issue:

First, can we please stop looking at everything through partisan eyes in The Bahamas? We love our freedom of speech but hate that if we really speak freely it will be held against us. How we vote should not determine how we are viewed. The consequences of red, gold or green are so intense that one man I know refused to have red in his house at Christmas. He bought white poinsettias and his wife decorated the tree with turquoise and silver.

Partisanship is so divisive that I once saw a prime minister I was traveling with to inspect hurricane damage hightail it out of a small restaurant/bar he had entered to grab a cold drink because one of his cronies told him the owner voted the other way. What was the man going to do, poison the soda? So if we love our freedom of speech, can we please be free to speak without fear of retribution? That would be a good NYR (New Year’s Resolution). 

On the face of it, the words of the columnist Diane Philips seem benign, except that this is a lady who was connected with Fred Smith and his attempts to defame The Bahamas and undermine the PLP when in office.  It is not as innocent as all that.  This is the beauty of FNM propaganda, seeming like its innocent, making the PLP the victim anonymously.  It is pure bunk.  Stacking the deck, while saying it aint me or that’s not what I mean.  Let us assume that the Prime Minister she was speaking about did what she said he did, we are sure the explanation is not as she says but more innocent than that.  But now that her friends are back in power, we can say all kinds of seemingly benign things.