'Suicide bombers' - PNP stalwarts labelled as damaging to their own party
Published:Monday | July 25, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Nedburn Thaffe, Gleaner News
The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) bandwagon rode into Franklyn Town, Kingston, yesterday with one central message - that the party will not rollover and play dead as it faces an ongoing verbal assault from the People's National Party (PNP).
"After I listen to all the PNP suicide bombers, there is one conclusion; if they came out of the bowels of the PNP and give the PNP a 'F-minus', the PNP corner dark fi true," JLP Senator Hyacinth Bennett declared to a band of supporters at the party's monthly Area Council One meeting in Franklyn Town.
"If the PNP leaders can condemn them own party and party leader in such shocking terms, why should any Jamaican with sense, why should any Jamaican follow this party," Bennett said before adding that the leadership of the Opposition was bereft of ideas.
'Cock mouth kill cock'
It was a case of 'cock mouth kill cock' as Bennett reeled out a sheet of paper loaded with a string of utterances from several top brass PNP members over the years, that have cast their own party in a negative light. She said the statements were evidence that the PNP is in crisis.
At the top of her list was the recently publicised United States Embassy cable which stated that Dr Peter Phillips, the PNP's national campaign co-ordinator, had made disparaging remarks about his party's president, Portia Simpson Miller, in the past.
The JLP senator also seized the opportunity to cast in the spotlight recent disclosures by former water and housing minister in the PNP administration, Dr Karl Blythe, in which he blamed the economic policies of the then PNP administration for the collapse of the financial sector in the 1990s.
KD Knight, the PNP's lead attorney at the Manatt-Dudus commission of enquiry and the man at the helm of last week's PNP near-islandwide protest, was another target of attack.
"The comic relief for the sound bite 'pack your bags and go' has expired," Bennett said in reference to Knight's advice to Prime Minister Bruce Golding during the enquiry, which has become a popular slogan for the PNP.