Even among alleged experts in Chinese astrology, opinion appears to be a bit woolly as to whether 2015 is the Year of the Sheep, the Goat, or the Ram.
But whatever, here’s wishing a hearty Gong Xi Fa Cai to all my fellow creatures of goodwill, and as beastly a year as possible to all those of ill-will.
It has certainly started on a baaad note for many of the latter, with heightening determination to hunting-down of such predators as ISIS and Boka Haram, and increasing global attacks on Malaysia’s BN regime for its countless animal acts.
A great many genuinely democratic governments and respectable news media have woken up to the fact that BN sees the Malaysian people as nothing but a bunch of flocking Sheep to be fleeced, and government as a licence to act the Goat while engaging in Rampant corruption.
And far from dying down, this anti-BN outcry is getting louder. Today as I write this, for example, on the second day of Chinese New Year, the Sydney Morning Herald is running an editorial that is stridently critical of the Malaysian regime.
Entitled “Anwar case a stain on Malaysia’s reputation”, it includes such statements as “ordinary Malaysians are increasingly fed up with the vast wealth displayed by the nation’s elites, by the abrogation of the rule of law, and the rulers’ almost casual disregard of people’s needs.”
The “rampant greed” of the ruling regime, the editorial continues, has empowered the opposition in its promise of “a long-overdue change from Malaysia’s usual system of entrenched patronage and corruption”, and in the 13th general election Pakatan “was only prevented from taking power by the distribution of votes in Malaysia’s gerrymandered seats.”
And it concludes with the observation that besides such “regressive” court decisions as in the Anwar case, using “archaic sedition laws” to try and silence such critics as the cartoonist Zunar “is hardly the mark of a modern, moderate nation in charge of its destiny.”
Of course Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and his gang of BN hoons, goons and buffoons are apt to write such criticisms off as just so much impotent bleating by insolent foreigners.
But following revelations of apparent international laundering of regime members’ and cronies’ ill-gotten billions, and the Swiss government’s avowed intention to take the Anwar case to the United Nations, BN would be wise not to push its luck too much further lest it provoke global sanctions of its activities and seizures of its loot.
Such possibilities don’t appear to have given BN much pause thus far, however, as the legal bigwig the regime hired to head its most recent prosecution or rather persecution of Anwar Ibrahim, Muhammad Shafee Abdullah, seems to imagine that this is the Year of the gloat.
Not satisfied, apparently, with having assigned Anwar to jail, Shafee has now embarked on a highly injudicious, indeed arguably illegal if not outright criminal campaign of character assassination against his victim, variously branding him a “closet homosexual” and “blackmail risk.”
The latter charge being one that applies to Shafee himself and everybody else implicated in the rotten BN regime, as they all have the guilty goods on each other and thus, in paraphrase of the immortal words of American revolutionary Benjamin Franklin, they have to hang together lest they be hanged separately.
The spectre of hanging inevitably takes us from the Anwar atrocity to another potentially even more serious threat to Najib and his accomplices in the BN regime, the apparently never-ending case of the murder of Altantuya Shaariibuu.
Having been somehow allowed to take flight to Australia, one of the two former members of Najib’s bodyguard who have been sentenced to death for the murder, Sirul Azhar Umar, appears to be planning to make this his Year of the scapegoat.
Claiming that he was only following orders from above, and in any case that he had not confessed to complicity in the killing, he has been threatening from the relative safety of Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre to tell all to the highest bidder among the Australian media.
Long suspected by many if not most of complicity in the Altantuya killing, or at the very least of being an accessory after the fact, Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak was asked by a Malaysiakini reporter for his reaction to Sirul’s possible revelations as he emerged from a Chinese New Year event hosted by the MCA, a party in cahoots with Umno in BN.
Clearly rattled at being questioned, not only by a mere peon of the press, an institution he considers nothing but a cog in his propaganda machine, but on such a personally confronting matter, the only response that Najib could muster was several repetitions of “total rubbish” and “utter rubbish.”
Thus leaving us all in considerable doubt as to what he meant. That he considers the reporter, or Malaysiakini in general, or Sirul’s allegation of “orders from above” utter rubbish? Or all of the aforementioned?
Or could it possibly have been a self-assessment on Najib’s part? Certainly he’s infamous for uttering total rubbish. From making rubbish promises he had no intention whatever of delivering on, like “the world’s best democracy” and “zero tolerance of corruption” and his perjured pre-GE13 election pledge to talking total trash about trivia.
As in his unforgettable statement likening economic cycles to the fluctuating price of kangkung, his claim to be able to buy RM1 chickens with which he attempted to divert public attention from the disappearance of MAS flight MH370, and his more recent proposal that all Malaysians should play golf, just like he was in Hawaii with the US President at the height of Malaysia’s recent floods.
This totally reality-handicapped golfer and his gofers in government, PR, the mainstream media and the comments sections of the online news portals seem to have no idea whatever that all they’re achieving with such ridiculous rubbish is the widening of their credibility gap into a yawning gulf.
So, however inauspiciously if not outright disastrously the Chinese New Year of the Sheep/Goat/Ram has started for members and supporters of the rubbish BN regime, it’s bound to only get worse for them. And consequently all the happier, healthier and wealthier for the rest of us.
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