"Grow Up. Wake Up."  From Politics.bm

While the UBP's Wayne Furbert and Darius Tucker may have started the latest piling on against the press, Derrick Burgess needs to grow up. (And at least Darius had enough integrity to back up his complaints by showing up to greet the cricket team himself - that's more than can be said for the other holier than thou media whiners.)

Are our Ministers such thin-skinned babies that every time someone hurts their feelings they need to ask to see your passport and threaten deportation?

Or engage in economic retribution and vilification if the press doesn't simply transcribe their press releases? Trying to punish them financially, as Senator David Burch has suggested by canceling subscriptions and revoking advertising.

Is this really what Bermuda has come to?

Have we all become so concerned only with our own narrow self-interest, so intimidated by second rate big-fish-small-pond aspiring power players that we won't stand up to defend a newspaper sports editor's right to free speech without the threat of deportation by an immigration gestapo, or an investor's ability to not have Government take their business by force in an overt act of unadulterated cronyism and random political and social payback and scapegoating.

I fear the answer is increasingly yes.

Our apathy is mind-boggling...and getting worse. Apathy and cynicism about the political process is exactly what unscrupulous self-interested politicians and their cronies count on. They feed this cynicism with the process as a whole so that they can engage in political and economic muggings in direct view as we're witnessing on a regular basis.

So when some media outlets think they can endear themselves to the political leadership by playing into the idea that their competitors are biased but they're not, or business owners sit mute while Government drives out ownership of a business they don't approve of, one wonders when they'll realize that they're next.

When will our politicians grow up? And when will the public wake up?

Posted by Christian S. Dunleavy"

Good rant but Christian, has your gun jammed? You've got plenty of ammo... get this thing started. Get the truth out now.

Meanwhile back at the Plantation, here's a few questions for the Premier:

Do you agree with Burgess that ex-pats should be threatened with deportation?
If not do you think Burgess should apologize to the sports editor?
Is Burch's approach to limiting access to the Royal Gazette simply a ploy to open up a reason for government employess to be forced to buy/read your new newspaper?

Fair enuff dunleavy does run a blog and i guess you could say he provides information to people about politics, but besides blogging like all of us what's he doing?

I mean, what are we really supposed to do once we wake up? I'm not trying to criticize him or anything like that, it's just whats he expect people to do? Go around convincing everyone that they shouldn't vote for the PLP?

I don't know...maybe my 'apathy' is too strong or has fully set in...

Is it that high?  Word is that all government departments have been told to stop advertising in the Gazette. 

The big hammer that Government has is Immigration - word is that the Gazette is going to have serious grief with respect to work permits, whether they are new or renewal.

   That's funny. I was just back in Bermuda - I live away, have done for years - and that outrage in the House of Assembly over the Friday Forum in the Gazette had me astounded. I guess it would seem like a bigger deal to me if I lived there. I didn't like what Mr. Burgess said about the reporter, though. I'm 33 years old, and Mr. Robson's lived in Bermuda for pretty much that same length of time. He's got as much right to comment on cricket as any Bermudian, the way I see it.
   That whole situation between government and the Bermuda newspapers appears to have become a self-perpetuating mess. But an op-ed is an op-ed. I don't even see how it merits any comment from the House.
   I worked for the daily and the weekly in Bermuda over quite a number of years. People always get annoyed over what goes into an article, and they definitely get themselves in an uproar over opinion pieces. That's just the ball game in a small place. But that whole threatening part ... give the man a gin and valium. I worked pretty close to Adrian Robson's desk for months. I think Bermudian cricket will survive Adrian Robson's Friday Forum.
    I live in Ireland nowadays. One thing I like about the people here is their brutal capacity to make fun of themselves. Bermuda could learn from that.

You know my brain! Naw, but seriously, who? That's a beaut of a name. Nope, no, I'm plain old Bell. And you know what's really scary, that's a big old-school Protestant name up in the North, apparently. Maybe my ancestors were Black & Tans. What can you do?