Last week the big red-eyed white wabbit of wonderland politics hopped out of his wabbit hole just long enough to deliver two public pronouncements. The first was at once a mealy bug mating call and a reminder to the commingled crapulous that their once pristine leader-for-life had singlehandedly retooled their party’s 1996 transparency-and-accountability mantra. Delivered in a style vaguely imitative of the white rapper Eminem, the revised incantation went like this:
When dey tell you Kenny dis, Kenny dat, tell dem sorti la sorti la! When dey tell you Grynberg dis Grynberg dat, tell dem sorti la, sorti la rarara!
The second bulletin turned out to be stale jol cochon wrapped in suspect bathroom tissue. It had been offered anonymously several times in 2009 to an unimpressed Timothy Poleon via Newsspin, then just last year chauffée-d and served up again to peanut addicts on the steps of the Castries market, by all accounts most of them only half sober. This being the silly season, however, the white wabbit was guaranteed sucker-buyers by the score—or so he imagined.
Holding aloft a canceled check and what he referred to as “an affidavit,” he said he now had in his clean hand documentary proof that Taiwanese money entrusted to a knight of the yellow table, to pay for council projects, had been diverted to corrupt use. Yes, yes, I know the particular anti-Tom Chou anthem is at least four years old, but then the election-time atmosphere has a way of bringing the long dead back to life. Besides, in his newly acquired red bag of Chinese tricks the white wabbit concealed a new trump card.
With great flourish, and much to the amusement of his bibulous brethren, he pulled it out: a fluffy little bunny wabbit of a gimmick: “I fully intend to have the integrity commission investigate what government ministers do with the money they receive from the Taiwanese government,” every single one of them except the lone lady knight of the yellow table who alone had given a “faithful, true and satisfactory account of her stewardship.”
In truth, the bedazzled damsel under stress had simply read out aloud some scribbled notes at the same House session during which she had spat on her colleagues’ announced plan to erect a statue in her deceased father’s honor. No one saw the need to verify the lady’s math, not even the attendant chairman of the coffers committee. If only he had demonstrated half as much faith in her father when he was still alive, there might’ve been no reason to waste scarce tax dollars inquiring into the measly $30,000 he had spent on a project for the needy and neglected people of Vieux Fort, most of whom could not remember a single Christmas when they got a break from the town’s criminals.
In any event, the inquiry commissioner had not only exonerated the beknighted Sir John, he had also directed that his graceless and benighted accusers offer him an apology, alas never delivered.
And now the latest accused knight of the yellow table has challenged the red table’s wonder white wabbit to quit playing Alice in Wonderland parlor games. “Put up or get back to your burrow” was his unvarnished response this week, upon learning what had transpired in his neck of the woods while he was off turf.
“If you think you have evidence supportive of your wild-wabbit ramblings, then take me to court.” The phrase was hardly original, lifted as it was shamelessly from the white wabbit’s well-pawed book of trite clichés.
Meanwhile the integrity commission has issued a timely reminder to the conveniently amnesiac on both sides of the House, that investigating how foreign aid and money from the Consolidated Fund is disposed of is way beyond their mandate. Otherwise, the integrity commission might long ago have poked its nose into Frenwell and other similarly smelly activities involving the people’s money.
In any event, according to its last published report prepared in the time of the previous administration, thanks to continuing official neglect the integrity commission is little more than a neutered poodle, flat broke and half blind. Consequently, it is forced to rely on the famously unreliable office of the DPP to do for the commission what in its shameful circumstances the commission cannot do for itself.
As for the several unanswered Grynberg questions, it appears the white wabbit has recruited his own amen corner of avocats. At least, Astaphan de Banjoman knows better than to depend on hardly disinterested parties with their own headline-making credibility burdens to bear.
And anyway: when the white wabbit and his red hornets were demonstrating throughout the city and demanding the King fire certain suspected knaves (doubtless in the best interests of transparency and accountability, to say nothing of our impressionable youth) the King had rightly insisted on first seeing evidence linking the accused knaves to money laundering, drug trafficking, abuse of office, the duping of the King’s immediate predecessor and to felonious friends (if I be permitted to borrow from the obituaries) too numerous to mention!
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