'Yeah, and I love PMS'

Dean Johns

That’s what I think every time I see pictures of Umno/BN dupes waving those ridiculous ‘I love PM’ signs at gatherings attended by the current Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Abdul Razak.

And no, I’m not being sexist, even though this might be justified by the fact that Najib not long ago appointed himself women, family and community development minister.

What I’m referring to is the fact that the very sight and sound of Najib is so painful to massive and increasing numbers of Malaysians, males and females alike, as to be possibly the nation’s most powerful enlister of PMSupport for the opposition.

His PMSmugness and PMSelf-love, for starters, as symbolised by his orchestration of the pathetic ‘I love PM’ public-relations ploy, are enough to turn anything but the strongest stomach.

And of course his every appearance reminds us that another abiding reason to loathe rather than love him is that this is PMScorpene, the man who as defence minister oversaw if not masterminded the scandal-plagued purchase of French submarines.

And the same PMSwearer on the Quran that he never even met the translator in this sordid affair, Altantuya Shaariibuu, whose murder and dismemberment with C4 military explosive six years ago, but who is still widely PMSuspected of being an accessory before, during or after the fact.

Of course he’s PMSilent on the subjects of PMScorpenes and PMShaariibuu these days, having delegated to his minions the task of denying these crimes and of persecuting Suaram for pursuing them - and him - through the French legal system.

He’s also maintained total PMSilence on most more recent scandals, leaving it to former PMSnake-in-the-grass Mahathir Mohamad to confound justice for one of the chief suspects in the RM12 billion Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) scandal by simply claiming his old colleague was incapable of such an outrage.

And Najib has PMSimilarly attempted to distance himself from the rain of ordure that’s been hitting the fan ever since shocking revelations of hanky-panky in the RM250 million National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) or ‘Cowgate’ affair involving the husband and children of then-women, family and community development minister Shahrizat Abdul Jalil.

Shahrizat (left in photo) has been taking a leaf out of Najib’s PMSanctimonious book, however, albeit by making repeated visits to Mecca and wearing ‘pure’ white tudungs rather than PMSwearing on the Quran,

And she’s also been spouting a pack of PMStyle lies in the course of pursuing a RM100 million defamation suit against opposition whistleblowers Rafizi Ramli and Zuraida Kamaruddin.

‘Calls are a result of defamation’

Shahrizat had the hide to recently claim in the Kuala Lumpur High Court that the “poison” spread about her by Rafizi and Zuraida was the sole reason that Dr Mahathir, Rafidah Aziz and many other regime figures had called for her resignation following the public furore over Cowgate.

“All (these) calls are as a result of the defamation by the (respondents),” Malaysiakini quoted her as declaring. “I disagree that I am a liability to Umno, BN or the government in the face of the election.”

Then, as if that had not been enough nonsense to be going on with, she later reportedly told the court that Rafizi, a former Petronas scholar, had bitten the hand that had fed him in going against the very government that had given him a scholarship, and had betrayed the Malays and Islam into the bargain.

In this she was adopting Najib’s customary PMStrategy of pretending that government funds are the property not of the people but of Umno/BN, and promoting the equally false claim that this crooked coalition supports and defends Malay and Muslim values.

When in truth, witness countless unresolved and no doubt many as-yet-undiscovered regime financial scandals, not to mention sundry other atrocities like Anwar Ibrahim sodomy trials and dozens of still-unresolved suspicious deaths in official custody like those of Altantuya Shaariibuu and Teoh Beng Hock, Umno/BN would be a disgrace to any race or religion.

And, despite Najib’s relentless campaigning for a general election he still hasn’t had the PMSpine to call despite the alleged success of his ‘I love PM’ slogan, his rotten regime rolls on as ever, if not more so, with its routine of plunder and blunder.

As predictably every year, the Auditor-General’s Report has revealed one flagrant case of rorting and robbery after another, including the expenditure of RM3.2 billion on uninhabitably shoddy housing for armed-services personnel, RM366 million on traffic-management cameras only half of which were operative, RM20-million on a concrete ‘bridge to nowhere’, and RM382,098 to Sarawak Museum Department for work that was never done on the classification of antiquities and archaeological artefacts, including human skulls.

Even more bizarre than this latter item, however, and even more redolent of the regime’s being more like an organised-crime syndicate than a government, is the case of the S$16 million in cash seized by Hong Kong’s ICAC in August, 2008 from the luggage of Michael Chia Tien Foh , who was arrested for alleged money-smuggling and laundering.

Though Chia reportedly told the ICAC at the time that this money belonged to, or was destined for, Sabah Chief Minister Musa Aman, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department and de facto Law Minister Nazri Abdul Aziz recently told parliament that the money was a donation to Sabah Umno.

‘Nothing wrong with the political contribution’

He added that “there is nothing wrong with the political contribution. It is not an offence,” a sentiment later echoed by the unaccustomedly PMShy Najib, who refused to disclose the source of the ‘donation’.

Of course even someone as PMSelf-loving and PMSelf-deluded as Najib knows very well that he and his regime could never survive such a record of robbery and jobbery in any clean and fair election.

So he’s made good and sure there’s not a PMSign of any of the electoral reforms demanded by Bersih and two massive public rallies.

No reform whatever of the gross gerrymandering of electoral boundaries, and no slackening of the regime’s stranglehold over the mendacious so-called ‘mainstream’ media.

And far from any diminution of Najib’s “you help me, I help you” squandering of public money on buying votes for himself and his accomplices, his pork-barrel PMSpending has reached epic proportions.

But unfortunately for Najib and happily for Malaysia, the more of the people’s cash Najib uses to buy crowds of cretins to wave posters proclaiming ‘I love PM’, the more reason he gives the rest of us to say ‘I love PMS’, as in ‘PMSayonara, PMScumbag’.