NPP: running high on rhetoric vs. run-of-the-mill corruption

IT would seem in the week or so past of horse-trading post local government elections that there has been a smidge of a slide in the government's standing. And an attendant debit to its social credit ratings and political capital. If this is rumour, a reputational setback or reality — the truth be told — only a day ahead would reveal.

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While the aura of a nation is still majorly a lighter shade of red to judge from the polls results, there is cause for some governors' countenances to go from being in the pink to puce if not purple.

Not that the incumbent administration doesn't merit being in the pink... because until recently at least, it has toed the straight and narrow on social justice planks, and fuelled the ethically loaded fantasies social justice, crime and punishment, etc. of a now-forgotten citizenry.

Who, though they're all but juggling cost-of-living curve balls, still desire more than three basic meals a day for themselves and their children... as if lighting hopeful Vesak lanterns in the rain is better than bitterly cursing the darkness?

But as reported severally in the media, in a discernible shift amidst the gathering gloom of more than the May-onset southwest monsoon, the National People's Power's ostensible abandonment of its anti-corruption rhetoric has tilted the playing field a tad.

That field is now leaning at a tangent towards moral nullity in which the old, oft-lamented political culture of deals, double-crossing the electorate and stealing election victories by hook or by crook can come creeping in on little cat feet... and try to pussyfoot around with the new tyro government's highfalutin principles.

And a smug opposition that would be better occupied turning the torchlight of scrutiny on its own twin houses - UNP and SJB, showing that political blood is thicker than the cleansing waters of AKD's Kalawewa bucketing isn't pulling any punches in their fighting nose-bloodied corners.

The latter in particular has levelled nasty allegations against the NPP political machine that is supposedly greasing the wheels of an engine gearing up against the underhand mechanism of coalition politics.