Nathaniel Tan’s cherry-picking and missing the elephant in the room
KTemoc Konsiders
My dear old matey Nathaniel Tan, once a fervent devotee of Anwar Ibrahim, wrote this Malaysiakini article Will Guan Eng be Dear Leader for life?
I assess his article as very very naughty and typical of those in PKR or like Nat, a former but still committed-at-heart PKR-ista.
I replied in a letter to Malaysiakini as follows:
I want to say I am glad to read Nathaniel Tan’s article in Malaysiakini titled ‘Will Guan Eng be Dear Leader for life?’ but alas I am unable to.
Being old mateys on the blogging circuit (when we used to spar for and against Anwar Ibrahim, with me of course being against – loud laughter) I call him Nat. Now, in case you have missed Nat’s wry sarcasm against Lim Guan Eng, the ‘Dear Leader’ implies that Lim Guan Eng is becoming another Kim Jong-il, the former and late president of North Korea.
Just a wee trivia, Kim Jong-il was titled ‘Dear Leader’ to distinguish him from his father Kim Il-sung the Great Leader. I wonder whether Nat will be tempted to refer to Lim Kit Siang as ‘Great Leader’? [grin]
In our ‘old’ sparring days Nat had this rather charming cute way of disarming me by asking why I hated Anwar Ibrahim so much.
Well, I didn’t hate Anwar (still don’t) but I did not like his Umno past, his PKR politics and politicking (still don’t), but in March 2010 I frightened myself and astounded a number of my friends when in a letter to Malaysiakini I defended the PKR ‘de facto’ leader from Khairy Jamaluddin’s jeering of him for dancing with the daughter of Lim Goh Tong.
Needless to say, it was an embarrassing blemish to an otherwise perfect record of being anti-Anwar. But it did underline my personal values in defending anyone, even Anwar Ibrahim, from unfair criticism, and in the same token, criticising local demi-gods for their wayward conduct.
And while digressing and reminiscing about our old times (Nat’s and mine), I have to say Nat like most PKR people has a prejudice against the DAP, and in this letter I want to express some of my concerns for Nat’s biased letter questioning Lim Guan Eng’s tenure as chief minister (CM) of Penang and the issue of setting a term (not time) limit, brought up recently by a DAP assemblyperson, Teh Yee Cheu.
Nat’s thrust is that long tenure in high office lends substance to the old political adage that power corrupts, especially long term power.
But sadly because I have come to expect better from Nat, I lament his examples of long serving world leaders were naughtily only those from draconian dictatorships and fascist states, people like Kim Il-sung, Muammar Gaddafi, Francisco Franco, Robert Mugabe, Mao Zedong, Hun Sen, and Josef Stalin.
Has Nat been implying that Penang is such a political state? Of course his labeling of Lim Guan Eng as a ‘Dear Leader’ has made it clear what he thinks of the CM if not the state.
Though he has recently stopped being an acolytus serving at the PKR altar to their demi-god, I urge him to reflect on his erstwhile term as one and to compare the state of the DAP to his old party PKR where the latter even condoned an undemocratically elected leader with the shameless label of ‘de facto’, which many would be forgiven is they mistake that word to mean ‘defect to’.
Then there was that over-burnt and overdone Kajang Satay which was to bring Pakatan a few steps nearer to Putrajaya and also to stop Mahathirism from overwhelming Pakatan-ruled Selangor.
And since Nat brought up the name of Mao Zedong, I have to ask what Great Leap Forward (supposedly towards Putrajaya) has been achieved by PKR’s Kajang Manoeuvre? As for Mahathirism overwhelming Pakatan’s Selangor it must already have when we see Azmin Ali and Uncle Mahathir Mohamad side by side in recent forums. Yes, Lim Kit Siang has been alongside as well, much to my immense embarrassment.
Anyway, when Nat asked us what countries impose time limits, he mentioned ‘France, Germany, the UK and the US’ as countries that do. In that (I suspect deliberately) vague sentence I have to say this again, Nat has been very naughty to the extent of misleading us. And I’ll explain how and why.
At this point we must distinguish prime ministers (and chief ministers) from the republican head of states or presidents. By the by, France has both.
