Hey, Mr Pink Lips, have a nice cup of tea...

... and a great big bearhug!

Smug arrogance and supercilious pomposity bring out the nasty streak in me. Try as I might over the last 28 years, I have never been able to look upon Mahathir Mohamad with the compassion and empathy all living beings deserve.

Same goes for Najib Razak and his dad, Malaysia's second prime minister. Thirty-three years ago when I read that Tun Razak had died of leukemia in London, I felt an irrational surge of joy. At the time I wasn't at all interested in politics and had no personal reason to dislike Razak - but on the subconscious level I must have detected his inherent racism and his fascistic agenda to institutionalize repugnant, reactionary doctrines like Ketuanan Melayu.

Indeed, evidence has since emerged that reveals it was Tun Abdul Razak who masterminded the 13 May 1969 coup d'etat - camouflaged as a post-electoral outbreak of racial violence - which forced Tunku Abdul Rahman to resign, thus paving the way for Umno's young turks to implement divisive and destructive social engineering agendas like the New Economic Policy and the National Cultural Policy. But all that is blood and water under the bridge.*

I remember recoiling in disgust the first time I saw Najib's face in the newspaper. Never actually met the guy but his energy just put me off big time. Call it a visceral reaction if you like, or an instinctual response to negative stimuli. I have always trusted my cellular wisdom.

To be fair, local politicians weren't the only ones who triggered in me an irrational repulsion. International figures like "Tricky Dick" Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Augusto Pinochet, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, George H.W. Bush (and, later, his chimpanzee-faced son Dubya), and Dick Cheney had pretty much the same effect on me. I felt predisposed to loathe them. Guess I'm essentially tyrannophobic, having myself played such unsavory roles in early incarnations.

Since 8 March 2008, a large section of the population has been focused on preventing a nightmare scenario from happening: the rise to ultimate power of high-profile murder suspects Rosmah Mansor and Najib Abdul Razak.

Most people have gotten used to tolerating a certain amount of financial hanky-panky from those in public office. But cold-blooded, gruesome murder is too macabre to accept, particularly in view of the desperate lengths to which the entire Umno/BN regime has gone to protect their blue-eyed boy Najib and his ruthlessly acquisitive Lady Macbeth from investigation.

Indeed, the incumbent government of Malaysia has become vulnerable to accusations of being accessories to Altantuya's murder. After all, only the home minister can order the deletion of immigration records; and only the defence minister can authorize the unscheduled use of C4 plastic explosives - not to mention the gross abuse of power involved in recruiting his personal bodyguards to commit a capital crime.

Najib can swear a million times on the Who's Who, the Guinness Book of World Records and the Greater London Telephone Directory that he never met "that Mongolian woman" - but he can't wriggle out of accepting ultimate responsibility for the misbehavior of his uniformed staff.

If it turns out that Najib had absolutely no foreknowledge of what his aide-de-camp DSP Musa Safri had instructed Chief Inspector Azilah Hadri and Corporal Sirul Azhar Umar to do to "that Mongolian woman"... then he should immediately step down, for this failure alone reveals an utterly incompetent leader.

On 3 April 2009 the nation's worst nightmare materialized. It's not our personal nightmare and we refuse to lose any sweat over it. But the Najib nightmare serves to protect a handful of corrupt Umno bigwigs and their corporate cronies from what could be for them an even bigger nightmare - Anwar Ibrahim as PM.

As the newly installed "crime minister" of Malaysia, Najib Razak has promised drastic reforms. How drastic we don't know yet - though many feel Najib's idea of "drastic reforms" may simply mean equipping his new cabinet with government-issue jackboots and ordering the ISA arrests of all opposition leaders and loudmouthed critics of Umno/BN.

Well, I'm not opposed to genuine reforms. I hereby solemnly promise I shall make Mr Pink Lips a nice cup of tea and give him a great big bearhug the day he...

1) sacks Musa Hassan and Gani Patail (along with 500 or so corrupt senior police officers);

2) releases all political detainees and abolishes the ISA, OSA, PP&PA, UUCA, the obsolete Sedition Act and the stupid Police Act that forbids public assemblies without a permit;

3) implements the IPCMC and instructs the new Attorney General to take decisive action on the abominable Lingamgate affair;

4) replaces the idiotic chief of the MACC with someone intelligent, impartial and honest;

5) drops Zaki Azmi as Chief Justice, replacing him with a senior judge of impeccable integrity who will dismiss all politically motivated charges against Raja Petra Kamarudin and Anwar Ibrahim;

6) appoints an Opposition MP, preferably Elizabeth Wong, as Minister of Information;

7) assigns Syed Hamid Albar to political oblivion;

8) gives Khir Toyo the option of transmigration to Java or castration;

9) divorces Rosmah Mansor and turns her in for questioning on her role in the disbursement of the submarine commission and Altantuya's gruesome murder;

10) fires himself and hands over the PM's job to Anwar Ibrahim, Nizar Jamaluddin, or Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah.

But I doubt Mr Pink Lips can fulfil these entirely reasonable conditions and accept my very generous offer.

Najib Razak: Umno's savior, shortlived prime minister and political leper?

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*In recent months I have heard from at least four different sources a gruesome bit of gossip I am loath to repeat in print, lest I end up in RPK's predicament. If only one person had told me this story, I'd be reluctant to attach any credibility whatsoever to it. However, coming from so many different people, I'm inclined to give the report some credence. And the fact that I do is already a damning indictment of Najib's public image. What is this malicious bit of gossip that has reached my ears from so many different sources? Brace yourself for this: apparently, the late Umno warlord Zakaria Mat Deros was summoned to the DPM's office after the electoral debacle of 8 March 2008 and instructed to stir up some racial trouble in Klang. Mat Deros either failed - or refused - to carry out this mission - and ended up dead because he knew too much. The coroner recorded Mat Deros's death as a heart attack. Now that we have witnessed the glaring discrepancies over A. Kugan's two post-mortem reports and the obscene attempt to cover up the whole thing, it's much easier to believe that in Bolehland "semua pun boleh" or "bisa diatur" as the Indonesians would say. Now, I'm not sticking my neck out and stating this as the truth. I have absolutely no way of verifying the story, but the fact that such grotesque and vicious gossip - which make insinuations about some PKR leaders' sexual peccadilloes pale in comparison - is going around does not augur well for Najib's premiership and Umno/BN's future.

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