No doubt, BN will try and portray this Saturday's Himpunan Kebangkitan Rakyat (People's Uprising Rally) as an attempted coup or revolt.

But as always, it's actually the regime itself that's revolting. Ratting on every principle of good government from honest and transparent financial governance, to the rakyat's constitutional rights, to genuine justice, truthful media and peaceful protests.

In other words, the rally is an up-swelling of revulsion at the thievery, thuggery and skulduggery of the government, not an attempt to overthrow it by force.

Meanwhile the regime is desperately trying to clinch victory in the looming general election with a combination of force and farce.

The force it's employing is mostly financial so far, in the form of blatant bribery through BR1M hand-outs and such typically crony-enriching schemes as the 1Malaysia Privilege Card.

Physical force is still largely in the threat stage so far, with calls for the ‘ratyat' to defend Putrajaya even to the extent of broken bodies and lost lives; dark hints of a repeat of the May 13 riots and deployment of the police and the People's Volunteer Corps (Rela) in its defence.

But meanwhile, the regime is sustaining, if not increasing, its customary shows of farce. So many of them, in fact, that it's almost impossible to recall and list them all.

The alleged ‘fight' against corruption, for example, is so farcical that not only relatively recent cases like the Scorpene submarines, Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) and National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) scandals remain unresolved, but so do countless other thefts and frauds dating back decades.

And such suspiciously super-rich regime members and cronies as Mahmud Taib continue to go uninvestigated while the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) has the unbelievable arrogance to declare that all BN candidates for the forthcoming federal and state elections are completely clean and corruption-free.

Then there's the even more farcical fact that suspects in the same MACC, not to mention the far more fatal police force, have still never been brought to book for the suspicious deaths of all the people who have mysteriously died in their custody.

And from this lowest of low points, we progress to the dizzy realms of high farce or outright fantasy as unseen forces, presumably the desperate Dr Mahathir Mohamad in a last-ditch attempt to ensure the future fortunes of the Mahathir sons by installing Muhyiddin Yassin as the next PM, foment fantasies per medium of ‘carpet trader' Deepak Jaikishan.

‘Let them eat croissants!'

The latter's long-heralded revelations of alleged wrong-doing by self-styled ‘First Lady of Malaysia', Rosmah Mansor, has so far been a total fizzer in the form of a fatuous fairytale entitled, Black Rose.

While Rosmah herself has once more made headlines, and arguably, further hastened the BN regime's deadline by declaring that Permata, the early-childhood education scheme of which she is patron, and which is already publicly-funded to the tune of over RM1 billion, should be permitted to participate in the Roti 1Malaysia Charity Programme.

She would like to "make sure that the bread and the croissants reach the children, because I don't think our children from the Permata centres have tasted croissants," she was reported as saying.

For a great many Malaysians, Rosmah's call for poor children to have the opportunity to taste exotic baked-goods inevitably recalled the notorious if possibly apocryphal retort by the consort of Louis XVI of France, Marie Antoinette, to "let them eat cake".

But of course, Rosmah and her critics are reckoning without the fact that Malaysia's disadvantaged children and their parents could well eventually afford all the cake and croissants they could possibly wish for if the rakyat voted the BN ‘ratyat' back into power for another term.

Or so it would seem from the farcical announcement by Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, in the course of a meet-the-people session at Tanjung Malim, that the RM500 cash payments being doled-out under the 1Malaysia People's Aid (BR1M) scheme "could be increased to RM1,000 and become a permanent policy" if BN retains power in the approaching general election.

Criminal career

According to the Oriental Daily News, Muhyiddin added that the BR1M cash would be given out "not only for the second time, but for the third, fourth, fifth time, or even forever" if BN wins the government."

This would be bribery on a truly stupendous scale even by BN standards. But in case there were any in his audience so foolish or free of need or greed as to refuse his offer to buy their votes, he added that they should not be misled by opposition lies that the BN government had failed the people.

"Everything is nice, well-planned, the economy is good, there are no quarrels, so why support the opposition?" he asked.

The answer to Muhyiddin's rhetorical question, of course, is for billions and billions of reasons, given that this rat-cunning regime steals countless billions of ringgit in public money for every billion or so it ‘generously' gives back in BR1M and other bribes to the voters.

And it sustains itself in its criminal career with the help of countless police, jurists and ‘journalists' who are happy to rat out their families, friends and fellow citizens in return for being kept by the regime like so many pets at public expense.

If their behaviour before, during, and after previous rallies are any indication, the regime's police will get up to all their usual tricks of hampering and attacking the rakyat at every turn, and the tame press will either mis-report the event or fail to report it at all.

But whatever the forces of farce do or don't do this Saturday, the very fact that the Himpunan Kebangkitan Rakyat is happening is one more victory over the BN ‘ratyat', and another big step towards ridding Malaysia of these rodents once and for all.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con' and ‘Malaysia Mania'.