The collective leadership of the National Liberal Party, or PNL, decided over the weekend to strip Monei Musca and Ioan Ghise of their party membership because of their alleged collaboration with the communist times intelligence services, called Securitate.

Ghise said in a press release that the decision ran against the party statute, which listed at Article 17 the reasons to take out a liberal from the party ranks, among which the cooperation with the Securitate was not.

Furthermore, he pointed out that only the party congress had the authority to make changes to the statute; the PNL leaders answered that the party changed its moral standards in the mean time.

This stance of the liberals accomplishes to things.

One is to prove right President Traian Basescu, who stood by the liberals fallen out of grace, when he said that the PNL evolved with leaving its stranded members behind, as the Communist Parties did.

The other result is that rank and file PNL members get all jittery thinking that indeed the hardliners in the party leadership are an omen of a dictatorship ready to take over the party reigns.

Basescu’s stance that people cannot be punished based on evolving party lines got answered by the PNL leadership, which said that each party was entitled to its own moral standards and guidelines, and that the latter evolve with the society at large.

This answer is reminiscent of the answers former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu gave Moscow each time the Soviet Union criticized Romania’s leadership.

Some remarks Moscow made were way off, but some where right on the mark, particularly during the last years of dictatorship in Romania.

This is why the answers the PNL leadership gave were reminiscent of those Ceausescu gave during communism’s last years.

There is no way to tell what will be the consequences of open