Most M'sians still not psycho

Even just thinking about them one day a week from a relatively safe distance of Sydney, the criminal insanity and inanity of Umno/BN almost drives me stark, staring mad.

So I’m full of admiration for the millions of Malaysians who’ve had to live with this deranged regime day in, day out for decades and have still managed to keep their wits about them.

And astonished and delighted at the fact that many who have previously been so duped by these kleptomaniacs and pathological liars as to tolerate and even vote for them are finally regaining their senses.

Despite the evidently massive meeting of Malaysian minds against them, however, or else in panic at the prospect of impending defeat, Umno/BN and their accomplices still persist in deluding themselves that the people are either dumb or deranged.

They’re still supporting psychos like Ibrahim Ali of Perkasa, for example, in his dangerously insane call for the burning of Bibles, thus losing more hearts and minds among those of the Christian and other faiths as well as among thinking Muslims.

And similarly, impressing nobody but the looniest of losers by employing the Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim) to police its ‘Mind the Valentine’s Day Trap’ campaign.

Far from convincing anybody with a grain of sense that a team of volunteer voyeurs will “combat social problems” as Jakim director-general Othman Mustapha claims it is intended to do, all it does is highlight the hypocrisy of harassing loving couples while ignoring the obscene levels of corruption and sundry other grave social evils that are so notoriously rife under the Umno/BN regime.

Similarly stupid, or as many others have pointed-out, quite literally psycho, is the regime’s scheme to try and woo the support of Malaysian youth by hiring South Korean rap sensation Psy to perform at Penang BN’s open house during Chinese New Year.

Instead of going ga-ga with joy at the thought of seeing him in person, Psy’s Malaysian fans have reportedly bombarded his Facebook site with pleas that he refuse to allow himself to be used as a political stooge.

According to Malaysiakini, one of the messages read: “Dear our idol, Psy, we love your song and we love how Gangnam Style can rock the party. However, please do not come to Malaysia this time. If you choose to come to Malaysia, you will become the political tool of Barisan Nasional. It is a political party which is seriously corrupted and always abuses power to persecute Malaysians.”

Outcry against lavish expenditure

And back home in Malaysia there has been such an outcry against such lavish expenditure of yet more public money on a political event that the regime has had to “explain” that Psy’s fee would be paid by a “private sponsor”.

Meanwhile, though with no mention of who paid for the trip, the Umno/BN regime has hosted another star attraction from abroad, a 10-member delegation from the Kyrgyz Republic.

You’d have to be crazy to believe that this was a genuine diplomatic exercise, however, as Umno/BN, usually paranoid to a psychotic degree about the possibility of support for the opposition by foreign powers, announced that this foreign power was on its side.

According to the regime’s nit-witted apology for a news agency, Bernama, Dewan Rakyat deputy speaker Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar proudly proclaimed that the Kyrgyz Republic “hopes the BN will remain the ruling government after the coming 13th general election.”

Besides hoping “that our elections will run smoothly and that BN will continue administering the country,” Wan Junaidi went on, the Kyrgyz Republic is “also keen to make Malaysia the best model as an Islamic country that practices moderation and yet (is) successful in notching success in various fields, including politics, economy and social.”

If this load of arrant claptrap from the Kyrgyz, or at least attributed to them, isn’t foreign interference in Malaysia’s affairs I don’t know what would be. Nor can I possibly imagine what madcap comments we can look forward to from other, equally no-account nations around the world.

Not that Umno/BN needs to go international for support, as it has any number of nitwits and outright nutters of its own dedicating their talents to trying to keep the minds of the rakyat reeling.

Like Tourism Minister and MCA vice-president Dr Ng Yen Yen, for instance, who recently ranted against the removal by Seberang Prai Municipal Council in Penang of banners bearing Prime Minister Najib Abduk Razak’s picture and Chinese New Year Message.

Ignoring the fact that the banners had been put up without proper council approval and thus were perfectly properly removed, Yen Yen claimed, according to Malaysiakini, that “if a banner (bearing the image of the prime minister) is torn down, it means (tearing) down Malaysia”.

And she further claimed that the image of the prime minister had been stood on after the posters were removed, and that this was tantamount to “stepping on Malaysia’s face”.

As if Malaysians are supposed to be stupid enough to enjoy having Najib and Umno/BN in their faces everywhere they look, permit or no permit, even to the extent of being inflicted with ‘Love BN’ videos in the carriages of the regime’s laughable excuse for a KL commuter rail system.

Keeping the population clueless

Speaking of permits, of course the fact of the matter is that the first and foremost genuine newspaper in modern Malaysia, Malaysiakini, remains available only online as it has yet to receive permission from the Home Ministry to publish in hard copy.

This is just one of the many symptoms of the fact that Umno/BN is as dedicated as ever to ensuring that the nation’s so-called “news” media keep the populace as clueless as possible about keeping the populace as clueless as possible about regime corruption and other crimes.

So that formerly-respectable but now pro-regime blogger Ahiruddin ‘Rocky’ Attan must imagine that Malaysians have rocks in their heads to try and convince them that the nation’s lowest-ever ranking of 145th in the World Press Freedom index is undeserved.

“I think the people at Reporteurs Sans Frontieres (RFS) did not really do their homework when it comes to a small country like ours,” he claimed, adding the blatant falsehood that “we have one of the most liberal policies with regard to news”.

But as I said up front, these days less and less Malaysians are so silly as to believe such a load of Umno/BN rubbish, let alone so psycho as to ever contemplate voting for these sociopaths ever again.

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'.