HAVING criticised Dr. Grant Gibbons in the past, I feel it only fair to applaud his reply to the Budget and urge Bermudians to heed his warnings about the consequences of further Progressive Labour Party economic failures. If he had made that speech before the election the United Bermuda Party would have won.

Dr. Ewart Brown's fatuous and strident attempt to dismiss that speech as being obsessed with "details" has earned him a spot on almost any short list of silly people.

The devil is, of course, in the detail ? in this instance, the detailed recitation Dr. Gibbons provided of PLP fiscal mismanagement and creative accounting on a scale so epic that Hollywood would be hard pressed to compete. Bermudians should view with consternation and dismay the possibility of Dr. Brown becoming the next leader of the PLP.

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, himself a physician and renowned psychiatrist, has recently written about the unhappy history of physicians as national leaders.

Dr. Dalrymple was terrified that the unpleasant (and seemingly unbalanced) Dr. Howard Dean might become the next President of the United States ? he gave very compelling reasons why he feared the transposition to the political of the clinical.

Fortunately, for us, fate and intelligent Democratic primary voters intervened and we have been spared the prospect of a Dean Presidency. Dr. Dean is no longer a concern.

Dr. Dalrymple's list of doctors who forget the underlying tenet of the Hippocratic Oath ? "First, do no harm" ? when they entered the political arena includes the former dictator of Malawi. He has written at some length about his visit to the life president of that benighted country, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

Checking into his hotel, Dalrymple was handed a piece of paper headlined "Information for Terrorists". It read: The people of Malawi so love their Kamuzu that if any visitor has come to Malawi with the intention of overthrowing or insulting His Excellency, the Life President, Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda, he will cut him into pieces and throw him to the crocodiles."

Incidentally, when he practised medicine in England, Dr. Banda required that his patients stand as he passed through the waiting room. An elder of the church of Scotland, he was always immaculate, in a three-piece suit, which couldn't have been easy in the tropics. He was scholarly as well. Unfortunately, despite his intellectual interests and accomplishments, he left Malawi in a terrible condition ? politically, economically and socially. However, the most famous doctor-president was not Banda but Francois Duvalier, Haiti's fearsome "Papa Doc", another president for life who, unlike Banda, actually died in power.

Duvalier began his career as a modest doctor employed in the Rockefeller Institute's campaign to eradicate yaws in Haiti. No doubt the campaign aimed at the eradication of the germ (which I am told is indistinguishable from that which causes syphilis) suggested to him methods of dealing with his political opponents. We all knew the tragic results of his rule in Haiti.

Post-Independence Africa has produced two other bizarre doctor-presidents who mistrusted the people's ability to choose their own leaders. Dr. Felix Houphouet-Boigny was president of the Ivory Coast from 1960 until his death in 1993. He loved his country so much that he owned half of it.

His political philosophy was simple: "There is only a number one, that's me, and I do not second-guess my own decisions." Doctor-knows-best became official government policy.

The other African doctor-president, Dr. Agostinho Neto of Angola, was also a doctrinaire Marxist who led his country to catastrophe. Across the South Atlantic, another Marxist doctor-president, Salvador Allende of Chile, held power for three years. He loved the good things of material life, and he so loved humanity that he espoused and enacted ideals that had been responsible for the deaths of scores of millions of people ? Communism.

The CIA-backed that ended his reign of terror was bloody, nasty and unprecedented in Chilean history ? but arguably it saved the lives of thousands of Chileans whose names Allende had placed on his enemy list for subsequent elimination, including virtually the entire officer corps of that country's military services.

No survey of doctor-presidents would be complete without mention of two others. The first is Dr. Bashar al-Assad, the current president of Syria.

True, he inherited the job from his father. But he has never condemned his father's slaughter of thousands of his countrymen in the aborted uprising at the city of Hama, near which he spent some years in the military academy.

He deserves some sympathy, however, because he had a limited choice: the presidency or being hanged from the nearest lamppost by a mob.

Dr. Radovan Karadzic was president of the Bosnian Serb Republic and is still on the run from justice.

He studied at the Tavistock Clinic in London, the foremost Institute of psychotherapy in the country and evidently discovered the healing power of mass violence.

Perhaps his researches into the psyche of humans has convinced him that people are hateful, worthless, or at least of no account. Certainly his contact with suffering humanity did to induce warm feelings in him.

I am not suggesting that such extremely bad things could happen in Bermuda.

I am suggesting that, all in all, doctor-presidents are probably best avoided. Because the fact is that doctors have not generally comported themselves at their best when they have reached supreme political power.

PLP Parliamentarians might like to reflect on that.

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A BERMUDA hillside that for several thousand years had been the recipient only of seed to foster woodland has, in just a few days, been revealed as primordial sand dune.

So desperate are the developers of this dune to make a profit, and seemingly aware of the absence of bedrock, they have begun building on non-existent foundations.

Concrete is, at this moment, being poured directly onto sand ? alongside the odd and very hopeful reinforcement rod.

I am sure there are those who could say that these amateur-looking building methods, which include a retaining wall leaning at an angle that the Tower of Pisa would envy, are structurally sound; that no amount of rain or wind will simply wash away these foundations, but I'm waiting to be convinced.

The force with which Fabian obliterated a $250,000 piece of scientific equipment on top of Gibbs Hill Lighthouse ? not far removed from this site ? and went on to rip apart houses that have survived everything the elements have thrown at them for the past century or so is the worst-case scenario for the projected million-dollar-plus residences due to replace what was, until recently, a rural woodland .

This site has a history. When first approached by developers just over a decade ago, the project was rejected by Planning with the damning indictment that it was "an exercise in pure greed".

Prior to the second application, several deep pits were dug into the hillside, presumably in order to find the ever-elusive bedrock. Despite not finding any foundations, the project went ahead.

The only other thing that has changed in the succeeding years is our national viewpoint that greed is somehow not just acceptable, but somehow laudable.

"If I don't make the fast buck, someone else will," is rapidly becoming the national motto of a people scrambling like lemmings.

This development may never slide downhill into the sea, but for even allowing it to happen, we deserve to be swept away as particles of dust, victims of cerebral erosion.

THIS Government, the current kernel of which mounted an internal party coup if not quite technically a general coup d'etat (we did not get what we elected and what we did get only got there by a very slim majority of about 100 votes), is now heavily engaged in the politics of manipulation and concealment.

At a time where the judiciary in the UK is seeking ways of anchoring and legislating for a system of politically independent appointments, key PLP politicians (especially Alex Scott) are trumping up charges of "political interference" when Government House seeks to remove political influence from the appointment of a Chief Justice!

Why on earth would there be a move afoot to demonise the UK and thrust us into Independence?

In the words of someone who should have become Premier under the United Bermuda Party after the last Independence fiasco, "the prize, he said, is this beautiful little island."