A Truly Defining & Defying Moment!

A Truly Defining & Defying Moment!
Martin Jalleh
Malaysia Today - 26 March 2008

The Umno-BN hegemony has come to a sudden halt. The 50-year old political juggernaut has been severely jolted. Its formidable force fragmented. A mean machine has been reduced to a mouse.

The coalition that had used its brute majority to bully and bulldoze its way and will in Parliament, blinked when the Opposition breached its two-thirds majority. It was something that they had not bargained for.

The regime of humbug, hype, hypocrisy, hysterics and histrionics, displayed especially in Parliament, has been humbled, even humiliated. People in high places came hurtling down without knowing what really hit them.

The government of unbridled arrogance of power and brazen high-handedness has been brought low. A haunting silence hovers over the once haughty as their political future hangs heavily against hope. The high and mighty are hushed.

The powers that have dominated, dictated and decided for “the good of the people” have been dented. The BN is left in a daze as to why and how they have been ditched and damned so decidedly.

Umno’s high-profile ‘heroes’ had failed to prepare the party to cope with the winds of change. Instead, they became experts in denial, diversion, damage control and in demanding that they be not deprived of their "crutches".

They had tried to stamp their superiority by demonising others, demolishing critics, "desensitising" non-Malays by brandishing a keris annually, and dramatically displaying Umno as the staunchest defender of Islam.

Umno’s elite would even walk over each other to grab any and every opportunity to satisfy their insatiable and grotesque greed -- and they would have the gall to do it under the guise of fighting for the poor Malay.

Incapable of reforming themselves, as former PM Mahathir had inspiringly pointed out recently, it was only a matter of time when Umno would implode – self-destruct – the inevitable happened on 8th March!

The rakyat were fed up, frustrated and furious at the unconscionable Umnoputra elite and their lapdog coalition partners for having bled this country dry and gambling the country away with the racial and religious card.

The people were tired of the government’s make-believe. Behind its portrait of a "successful nation" hung an increasingly strained and soiled social fabric – which they had to contend with everyday of their lives.

Pak Lah’s advisors failed to read the groundswell of disillusionment and discontentment. Detached and disconnected from the grassroots, they discussed day-to-day realities from the 4th Floor...as the PM dozed off!

For four years they had gone on a frolick, fumbling and flip-flopping all the way, while the people struggled to stay afloat against the rising cost of living…and as the leaders of the country grew fat and flaunted their fortune.

Khairy and his boys on the 4th Floor must have flogged themselves or went into a fit as four more states fell to the Opposition. Oxbridge must have wished they never had such an ox-brained graduate.

Dr Mahathir says Pak Lah is responsible for ‘destroying’ Umno and BN. He forgets that the ruins of today have their roots in his government of yesterday -- one riddled with the most rotten of policies, practices and public personalities.

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