What oxygen is Khalid breathing?

IF you are gifted with the sixth sense to spot the unspoken, bizarre or, dare we say, supranatural, hover next to besieged Selangor Menteri Besar Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim, your internal detectors will distinguish a grandiloquent spectre that seems to fly off the charts.

You might also detect variables within Khalid that exposes his self-importance and cavalierism, which, if combined, makes up for a loose cannon or a hero, battling for an uncommon higher belief.

As a guileless politician, or at least that is what Khalid wants to project, he seems more belligerent than his boss, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, who plotted Khalid’s removal in the dubious Kajang Move.

Instead, Anwar was slapped with poetic justice — he gets to swallow a searing dose of his own terrible medicine.

What he did to Umno is what Khalid is doing to Anwar, which really exposes both men as megalomaniacal, egoistic and egotistic, a narcissist exposed and parodied to the core.

To blithely ignore your party’s pleas for accountability, cooperation, even presence for crucial meetings, is the acme of political and personal contempt.

What kind of oxygen does Khalid inhale in his condescending defiance? What kind of carbon dioxide does he exhale to scorn detractors? A rollicking political science thesis beckons.

Nobody could get away with this rakishness, not even Anwar, when he was booted out ignominiously at the zenith of his super powers when he was a breath away from the premiership.

To wit, Khalid’s accomplishments in tenuously clinging on to his MB’s post after PKR sacked him:

GETS an immediate endorsement from the Sultan of Selangor that he can stay on as MB, a colossal legal and moral victory;

SUCCEEDS in temporarily blunting Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail’s nepotistic bid to take over as MB;

SCUPPERS Anwar’s desperate bid to puppeteer his wife as proxy to rule Selangor and exploit its considerable resources as a political platform for a last bust run at the coveted premiership; and,

WOOED by Pas to become a member, even from the young Turks faction head-butting with the conservative elders who are loathed to support Dr Wan Azizah’s bid as MB after it was revealed that pre-GE13, they detested the idea of Anwar as PM-designate.

In between the axis’s dysfunctional in-fighting, they can’t fathom the problems afflicting Selangoreans — a water crisis limbering for the worse and unresolved basic structural problems of potholes and garbage collection.

So, what other leverage can PKR use to squeeze out Khalid? Frustratingly for PKR, nothing, other than sermonising that Khalid has any moral cause or clause to stay on, but Khalid has a ready answer: his actions will stop what he perceives as nepotism, cronyism and a host of ills plaguing the axis that will ruin Selangor.

Running out of legal ideas, PKR’s next best manoeuvre is to file for the already moot motion of no-confidence against Khalid: how to get the sultan of Selangor to approve it when the Ruler has endorsed Khalid’s gambit.

The other option is to wait until the November assembly meeting where the “kill Khalid” move reopens or… suck it up and wait until his term ends in 2018, which is unacceptable.

Khalid’s enduring survivability is owed to his own oxygen tank, and that he is sitting pretty on a RM3 billion surplus to run Selangor – properly, transparently and diligently — with no interference from meddling and corrupt politicians.

Khalid went this far to be this ruthless to commit this unthinkable political rupture is to be both despised and admired.

Selangoreans will only care and hope that as the pioneering Lone Ranger menteri besar, Khalid solves the water crisis and structural woes.

Then will he be hailed as a real hard-nosed hero who courageously repelled Anwar’s dysfunctional and destructive runaway train.