Belief duly beggared

Most politicians are crooks to a greater or lesser degree, and honesty is a quality that is rarely in their interests

When one writes and reads about the doings of politicians on a daily basis, tracking them from hour to hour sometimes, you get used to the lies. The tricks of the trade that involve never directly giving a straight answer to a straight question. The tactics of diversion. All of that and more. Politics is a thoroughly dishonest business and while I am sure — well reasonably sure — that there are honest politicians out there I rarely bump into one in my peregrinations.

Most politicians are crooks to a greater or lesser degree in that honesty is a quality that is rarely in their best interests. They swim in a pool of calumny that in some cases is centuries old, with the silt at the bottom thick with buried untruths that are long forgotten. Dishonesty falls all the time making a sedimentary layer that like all such eventually become a rock over time, and a solid foundation for the future. A very special strata is in the process of formation, a layer of deceit and dissembling that is of industrial strength and with eons of durability.

Some of you, but probably not many, that are reading this will have gone through every page of the JIT report into the Panama Papers affair. I have. Every. Single. Page. There are a number of noteworthy things about it, perhaps the most significant for me as a regular reader of the JIT reports that manage to make it to the public domain, is that it was completed on time and released as promised without any attempt to dodge and weave. These guys worked their socks off and all deserve a decent holiday in a destination of their choice.

Secondly they have crafted a document that is actually comprehensible to the average reader not in possession of a law degree. It is surpassingly lucid, not unlike the report that followed a double bombing in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa that was in its own way equally damning. The findings are laid out logically and are relentless in their pursuit of answers to the 13 questions that are the foundation of the work of the JIT.

Thirdly the report exposes — and here I am going to dispense with that journalistic cover-all word ‘allegedly’ — a level of dishonesty and deception that really does beggar belief. This is weapons-grade foolery. If even half of what the JIT has unearthed proves to be copper-bottomed truth then the nation has to accept that we truly are ruled by robber barons. No equivocation, no dissembling, a highly skilled and determined bunch of ‘miscreants’ (to use a popular local euphemism) are busy salting away untold riches whose origins are shrouded in mystery and whose extent, its worth in real-money terms, is unknown and unknowable.

And here’s the thing … they are not alone. The ruling family, royal in all but title, are part of the national network of untruths that is added to every time a politician opens his or her mouth. That is probably unfair to a number of the breed but I am in no mood to play friendly. These hornswogglers and whangdoodlies are not some confederacy of dunces, dear me now. This is a bunch of sharp cookies with an eye to the main chance and hang everybody else. Their nests are everywhere that there are elected representatives doing the will of the people…it just so happens that one such nest has found itself laid uncomfortably bare but make no mistake they are but one of many.

They have been schooled in the dark arts in ways that would bring credit to the House of Slytherin; and they communicate in parseltongue, the language of serpents understood by basilisks and all other snake based creatures, magickal or otherwise. Snakes will only tell you what you want to hear and read and the expectation is that you, Dear Reader, will read between the lines. Sound familiar?

The satirist P J O’Rourke wrote in 2010 “You can remove morality from politics like you can remove the head from a chicken and they’ll both keep going — the politics much longer much longer than the chicken.” The JIT may have done us all the favour of removing the head, but that dang chicken has plenty of life yet!

Published in The Express Tribune, July 13^th, 2017.

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