Letters

THE EDITOR, Sir:

Your correspondent, Kevin K.O. Sangster, in a letter of Friday, August 20 in The Gleaner took a very scathing aim at Everald Warmington for his outburst at Contractor General Greg Christie and, perhaps with some rationale, poured out a stream of acerbic castigation at the embattled MP and junior minister - which has also been echoed by other readers.

But is all of this necessary? Aren't we sometimes getting a bit carried away by some of the shenanigans in Gordon House? While I hold no grief for Warmington, it must be established that he certainly has no monopoly on crude parliamentary behaviour. In politics, everyone has his/her own style, approach, and methodo-logy, and not everyone is going to be as polished as we would like them to be. Indeed, any belief that politicians should be paragons of virtue is nothing more than an excursion down the corridors of a pipe dream.

Picturesque language

From the days of Bustamante and Norman Manley right down to the present period, Jamaica's political history has been littered with people whose responses and expressions were not always endearing and whose language was oftentimes rather picturesque, graphic and ostentatious. In fact, not much attention was really paid to the antics and outbursts of folks like 'Russian' Thompson, Tony Wedemire, Roy McGann, Terry Gillette, 'Bully' Josephs, 'Dutty Shut' Jackson, Felix Toyloy and even back to the time of Maxie Carey and 'Slave Boy' Evans.

The same people who are now expressing alarm at Warmington's outburst are largely the same ones who were clearly tolerant of characters like Danny Buchanan, Harry Douglas and A.J. Nicholson of the previous administration, whose frequent abrasive behaviour cha-racterise its entire tenure.

It might be easy to dislike Warmington, but in 66 years, far worse people have been made Cabinet ministers (much less junior minister) and also accorded with the title of 'Honourable'. And many of those could have been considered by Kevin's description "to be largely devoid of the capacity for cerebral sophistication and a proclivity for civility and decency".

Sure, Warmington is usually caustic and abrupt, but at least he speaks his mind. How many other politicians generally display that level of courage?

There is so much of an overdose of political hypocrisy by an unrelenting crusade of 'holier-than-thous' since the inception of this administration. Hardly any politician at all has been either willing or able to keep political promises and this Shylock-like indictment on the present prime minister to fulfil all of his pledges, in spite of national and international circumstances never envisaged in 2007 is not only dishonest and hypocritical, but also downright naïve and idiotic.

I am, etc.

TROY CAINE

trodencorp@gmail.com