COMMENT | A bestiary of politicians

COMMENT | Last week, President Donald Trump plumbed new depths of surreal lunacy. He tweeted a video of a group of doctors standing in front of the US Supreme Court touting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for coronavirus.

That’s no surprise because Trump has been ignoring considered medical opinion and touting the drug himself.

What was freaking funny was Dr Stella Immanuel (above), the vocal spokesperson for the group.

“A great doctor," Trump said of her.

I don’t know about “great”, but she is cool for the name of her church – Firepower Ministries – next to her clinic in a mall in Texas. Sounds like members of her congregation must be members of the NRA (National Rifle Association) blasting anyone or anything that darkens the glory of the Lord.

And she is, by any rational measure, out of her gourd for some of her views. There are videos of her saying doctors are using DNA from aliens to make medicine, that they are trying to make a vaccine that will make people immune to religion. What? Talk about paranoia.

Aliens? From where? The military base, Area 51, in the Nevada desert where conspiracy theories say the remains of a flying saucer and its alien crew are kept after it crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947?

She also claims that gynaecological problems like fibroids, cysts and endometriosis are caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches. Talk about freedom of thought and talk. She is totally liberated from reason and logic. She made me wonder what she thought was the cause of haemorrhoids.

The one assertion of Immanuel that Malaysians can possibly subscribe to is the claim that parts of the US government are being run by lizards in human guise. (Hang on, that might explain Trump.)

In the past week, daily, my phone was clotted with dozens of images and vids of frogs, bulbous eyes and wattled skin, bearing a price-tag of millions, the magic of software making a frog dance a victory jig on its hind legs.

The more bloodthirsty forwarded vids showing frogs steamed, grilled, battered, the only good use for frogs. The even more bloodthirsty send vids of them having limbs chopped off and literally skinned alive, and frogs slowly inching down the gullet of a snake, the life in their eyes trying to deny the inevitable engulfing.

Fecund Sabah politics is spawning amphibians by the dozens again. Politicians may, on occasion, piously say they will not pay attention to politics because they are focused on dealing with the twin plagues of the virus and a spluttering economy, but politics is always top priority.

So, in the midst of the virus still surfacing in a daily tally, Sabahans will be going to the polls.

The last elections saw MPs switching allegiance to Warisan. After the court gave Musa Aman (below) a judgment of clean financial health, there were hops again.

Will the elections clarify who the people want to be their representative? Yes and no. The tally of the votes will determine the MP and assemblyperson, but after that, he or she is free to do whatever he or she wants, “the people” only used as a justification for the betrayal of electoral promises, the people are unhappy, it’s what the people want.

We see an illustration of this in the Azmin Ali faction’s response to PKR demanding RM10 million as compensation for switching sides, a demand sanctioned by a legal document signed by them before the elections – see you in court. Hah, their signature is worth as much as their word.

You want to wager, after the elections, the Bajau horse-trading market is not open, whatever the outcome, slim majority or large?

Politicians invited for tea and a mutual back-scratching chat about a larger lily-pad and a pond swarming with protein-rich insects for an insatiable sticky tongue, or contacting the winning coalition about having seen the light, they want to be where the action is.

The interesting thing is whether Umno and Bersatu can avoid a sour bruising of relations in dividing the spoils in Sabah.

That will be a foretaste of what will happen on a larger scale in the rest of the country if/when the prime minister decides he needs the comfort of a larger majority in Parliament. Bersatu needing to expand for credibility’s sake and to escape being a political hostage, Umno warlords reluctant to give up their fiefdoms and diminish the numbers that make them top canine.

We can only observe and endure the hops, skips and jumps. The government affects us in multiple ways, but we can do little to affect it. 

THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.

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