Anwar may be a chameleon but Mahathir is the chief chameleon of them all!
Umar Mukhtar
They say that interests are all that matter in politics. So if Dr. Mahathir Mohamad’s goons had pulled out Lim Kit Siang’s fingernails, that wouldn’t stop LKS grovelling at the prospect of Mahathir being a more winning horse to carry LKS’s real wishes, hidden somewhere inside Deklarasi Rakyat, to fruition.
Conversely, Hishamuddin Rais, as of recently, is not as much a fan of Anwar Ibrahim as he was when Anwar arranged for him to come home from self-imposed exile without spending time in Mahathir’s Kamunting, after Anwar’s tongue-lashing of Mahathir as the prime mover of Deklarasi Rakyat who is now Hishamuddin’s newly discovered love.
Mat Sabu, too, has forgotten about all his humorous belittlings of the mamak in his stand-up comedy ceramahs now show the public that he had changed idols from the tok gurus to Mahathir. I remember his saying that he would never in a million years be associated with this Satan. It’s not even a few years and Mat Sabu was already seen in the corner of the room looking at Mahathir doe-eyed with unfettered admiration in his eyes.
PKR deputy president, Azmin Ali was not a surprise fan after his confessions of undying love for Mahathir (air dicincang takkan putus) at his daughter’s wedding reception. That’s after almost two decades of Reformasi public personae running down Mahathir as the enemy of the people. Suddenly the story of ‘anak angkat’ resurfaced to reduce the mentor-mentee story of being Anwar’s prodigy to a fairy tale.
Then there’s the NGO crowd, who had almost broken their backs organising public demonstrations conning idealists against stuff that are actually Mahathir’s political legacies, offering their public forgiveness of Mahathir without even being asked. The late Lebai Yunus (Palestine-trained socialist activist) would turn in his grave at such Special Cheap Sale.
That’s all well and good. People are free to change their minds. Do not begrudge that. All that matter are their interests that compel them to make up their minds either way. Their interests are of priority to them obviously. What these interests really are is for them to know and for you to find out. Behind LKS’s licking of Mahathir’s arse lurks something mysterious couched in ‘interests-of-the-people’ shit, the packaging that usually sells well.
What interests me is that all these manoeuvrings with the self-imposed burdens of ‘interest-of-the-people’ thingy always end up for the successful bidder to have billionaire sons who are geniuses at businesses, cheap bungalows without swimming pool and ranches in Argentina. Admittedly, there are those among that crowd who haven’t received the benefits of sacrificing for the people. The impatience is enough to abandon their boss and the ship!
Meanwhile, the reigning ‘sacrificer’ is having a field day playing rabbit to the hordes of hare. Where did he learn his craft from if not from the master rabbit himself? The going is quite rough though because when he was a student, there wasn’t this subject called Social Media 101, which the master is getting adept at. Enough for him to get 1.4 million signatures to egg him on it seems. It sells that well to a helpless public.
But as related in a dispute between a serious filmmaker with a commercial moviemaker, when the latter stressed that his movies are watched by millions, the retort was ‘Kalau sejuta langau hurung tahi pun, tahi tetap tahi juga’. Even if a million flies swarm around the shit, it still remains shit. God forbid that I am still not a ‘langau’.
