By Bernard Headley, Contributor 
Seaga
POOR EDWARD SEAGA. Any which way him turn, dawg bite him. Just over a week ago he and his Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) were being taken to task, by the media and sectors of a disaffected civil society, for their near absence, if not total invisibility, from the political stage. The Government in the meantime was systematically wrecking the state ship, after shamelessly plundering it.
Common talk was that, despite their largest representation in Parliament in almost 20 years, Seaga and the JLP had pretty much "sold out", succumbing to fat paycheques, and had indeed been made irrelevant by a dominant and calculatingly shrewd People's National Party (PNP), to whom the JLP had only narrowly lost in the election of October 2002.
Super critic Don Robotham only a few days ago ridiculed Seaga and the JLP for being a "non-Opposition". To keep intact his presumed objectivity, and reputation as bona fide equal opportunity basher, Professor Robotham did, though, in the same sentence, refer to the Patterson-led administration as "our non-government". But now, in a screeching turnaround, Robotham, and seemingly the entire pundit class, have jumped all over Seaga for talking subversion; of expressing in public what he must be hatching in private with his nefarious henchmen: they're planning to do dark and terrible things to the nation.
What Mr. Seaga has said he will do, or wants to do, Professor Robotham argues, is "worse than anything" Dr. Omar Davies said, he did, or said he didn't do. Would that also go, I wonder, for "anything" the PNP Government has done, or has been accused of doing, particularly over the last year? And if so, how much credence should I now give to anything from here on my friend Don Robotham might have to say on the political state of affairs in his home country?
TWO LITTLE WORDS
And what is it Seaga said that's so shockingly treacherous, at a time when we are so badly in need of healing and unity? He said he and the JLP will, from this moment on, be withdrawing "all co-operation" with the governing PNP which, as Seaga and the JLP see it, have been running a corrupt Government. And that (this is the part that has really riled things up) Seaga and his party will be engaging in a campaign to "bring down" the Government.
In a single statement, and more so in the choice of two little words "bring down" Seaga and the JLP may very well have shifted national focus on the mal-administration of the Patterson administration, and placed it squarely on the ill-fated JLP and (once again) on its beleaguered and insistently tempestuous leader.
That unfortunate, luckless man: he never was able to, the poor man, from the earliest days of his political career, keep a tight, politically correct lid on his language, especially when he was outraged.
He has not, when all is said and done, come a terribly long way from his early 1960s days, when for him politics wasn't something you did for effect, understanding therefore that you had to choose carefully, and wisely, your words and language.
Politics has been for Seaga something you did from the gut. You believed passionately in, and remain steadfastly committed to, an idea; or you didn't believe at all. (One of his Harvard University classmates tells me that, way back in the late 1940s, when he would have been no more than 18 or 19 years old, Seaga was furiously ranting in Eliot House, a campus dorm, against any sort of political federation among the soon-to-be independent West Indian colonies).
Gussying things up with nice, fanciful, indirect language, so as not to not offend, has never been his forte, or of his "essential being", to use theologian Paul Tillich's term. Call a spade a spade. Look dem in the eye and tell dem exactly what you mean, and what you think about dem!
WILD OR OUTRAGEOUS
But is there anything wild or outrageous in a leader of a recognised opposition political party in a Parliamentary system expressing, at a time of widespread disaffection, an intention to "bring down" a Government? Especially if the intended methods are constitutionally appropriate that is, to oppose? It happens all the time. Happened in that model democratic nation, the United Sates; and in the lifetime of most readers, in 1974.
After select committees in the U. S. Congress, led by members of the opposing Democratic Party, had brought to light significant and substantial evidence of corrupt wrongdoing by officials in the President Richard Nixon administration, votes against Nixon, in both Houses, served to "bring down" his presidency.
The American electorate didn't bring down Nixon by them voting against him, as would normally have happened under a Parliamentary democracy. The American people, whom if facts be facts had elected Nixon, never had a chance to register in a ballot or referendum their disapproval of his conduct.
Rather, less than a year into his second term, Democrats and the media, led by the influential Washington Post, began hounding and in the end successfully ejected him from office. (That important bit of history has been subsumed under the catchall, "The Watergate Scandal."). In the years since the Second World War, Italy has not had a Government ruling as long as one of the Patterson-led PNP turns in office.
At one period in the 1980s, the country was changing governments every six or so months, because of waves of orchestrated opposition to, and disaffection with, whichever Government was in power.
Regular disputes in the Israeli Knesset over how best to deal with the Palestinians, and with surrounding hostile Arab nations, have brought down Government after Government well before they were given a chance to carry out "the mandate of the people", as PNP spokespersons have been self-righteously fulminating.
And in our own Caribbean backyard, in Trinidad and Tobago, the Basdeo Panday and Patrick Manning-led coalitions seem for a time to have been playing musical chairs; one side bringing down the other while in Government.
No shots fired. No allegations of subversion or of destroying the Republic. Just one side going about lawfully and justifiably what it felt was its moral obligation: to oppose and channel mass protest and discontent into constitutional change of regime.
Hasn't also the George W. Bush administration in Wash-ington, in conjunction with Venezuela's disaffected middle elites, for close to a year now been doing all it covertly and overtly can to bring down, through in this case extra-constitutional means, the Hugo Chavez regime?
And let's not even "go there" with that Iraqi thing. Finance Minister Omar Davies has let slip, whether as chest-thumping braggadocio or plain oafishness, that his party was not above manipulating taxpayers money to gain temporary political advantage.
Some would probably call that smart politics. To others, it's corruption. Is Seaga saying that he and his party can no longer co-operate with a Government they deem corrupt, and that the Jamaican people ought to be given a chance to say if they agree with him, such a terrible, subversive and destabilising thing? I think, Absolutely Not
Bernard Headley is a Professor of Sociology & Criminology UWI, Mona. And currently working on a book on Opposition Leader Edward Seaga
