Last week, former MP Pierre Dupuch sent out an email titled “Gerrymandering Districts and Questionable Citizenships?”
Mr Dupuch is a former FNM MP who left the party in a well publicized spat with Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham, during the FNM’s previous time in office. Much like Bran McCartney did in Mr Ingraham’s most recent administration.
Mr Dupuch’s latest missive objects to the FNM, namely the Deputy Prime Minister Brent Symonette, giving out citizenship to Haitians in exchange for votes in the upcoming election. Mr McCartney and various PLP websites have made similar accusations. Mr Symonette is also the minister in charge of Immigration.
Dupuch showed no mercy in his criticism of Symonette, going so far as to liken the DPM’s actions to Nazis during the Second World War.
Blogger Responds
Within 48 hours, blogger Rick Lowe publicly responded to Mr Dupuch’s accusations with a blog post titled “Whatever happened to policy prescriptions from politicos?”
Lowe felt that Mr Dupuch’s message was void of any meaningful policy prescriptions to, “fix the ills he himself suggests have been around for generations.” In fact, Mr Dupuch did make one suggestion, noted by Mr Lowe, that it might have been better to grant permanent residency rather than citizenship to many of the people involved in the immigration process.
Lowe continued by asking Mr Dupuch several relevant questions and ended by saying that for most politicos, “it seems easier to try to inflame the electorate rather than discuss and offer reasonable policy prescriptions to resolve these matters that are used to cause dissension, election year after election year?”
Round Two
Next up was blogger and newspaper columnist Larry Smith, whose rebuttal to Mr Dupuch was not as diplomatic as Mr Lowe’s. Labeling Mr Dupuch’s emails as, “poisonous political rants with no constructive proposals or substance,” Smith says it is, “obvious that Dupuch has a ‘thing’ about his former leader in the FNM, Hubert Ingraham.”
Smith goes on, in his usually detailed manner, to attack Mr Dupuch’s email point by point, and ends by saying:
“The only point I want to make here is that we should always be suspicious of folks who switch deep allegiances and strongly held positions overnight.
“It is one thing for your views to evolve over time and after due consideration.
“It is quite another to express diametrically opposite opinions over a relatively short period and shout them from the rooftop – as Pierre Dupuch and former Guardian editor Oswald Brown have done.”
What do you think? Has Mr Dupuch raised valid points or, as the two bloggers suggest, is he merely inflaming the electorate and playing out a personality clash with Mr Ingraham’s administration?
Please leave your comments on any of the articles linked to above.
