Sun Tzu understood war.
In the 6th century BC, the shrewd general and philosopher developed his influential military strategy against the backdrop of China's "Warring States" era. It is, unfortunately, more applicable than ever. Sun Tzu wrote,
"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles."
Let's read that again. "It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles."
Would you say UMNO leaders in the government or the foot soldiers on the ground "know the enemy?"
My guess is Sun Tzu would say, "NO."
Ahmad Sarbani Mohamed’s death is actually a Godsend for the opposition. His death was on the Sarawak state election Nomination Day and certainly this cow will be milked till its tits run dry the entire campaign period up to Polling Day on 16th April 2011.
But let us separate the chaff from the oats. We do not welcome Ahmad Sarbani Mohamed’s death, or any person’s death for the matter. What happened must certainly be thoroughly investigated and the culprits brought to book. There should be no compromise on the matter.
But let us not also lose focus on one very crucial thing. There is very serious and rampant corruption in the Customs Department, as there are in the Police Department and many other government agencies as well. In fact, the worse corruption is in the Local Councils -- with the Customs and Police Departments trailing very close behind. (For that matter there is even serious corruption in MACC itself: the foxes being in charge of the hens that end up eating all the chicken).
The MACC needs to clean up the Customs Department. The corruption there is big time. Anyone who deals with the Customs Department can tell you that. And this problem has prevailed since way back in the 1960s and has not changed one bit over 50 years or so.
Isn’t this what we in the opposition want: to clean up corruption?
Did you know that a few years ago the Chief Police Office (CPO) of Johor, Zakaria Chik, ran a car hijacking syndicate involving many government departments?
Car thieves stole expensive cars from Singapore. The Customs Department allowed them to be ‘imported’ into Malaysia through Johor. The Road Transport Department issued the valid registration papers. The cars were then sold through second hand car dealers and the police would be given the registration numbers of the cars with instructions to ‘leave them alone and do not disturb them’.
The syndicate involved the Police, Customs and Road Transport Departments. Everyone was involved and everyone received a share of the hundreds of millions they made. The current scam involving the Customs Department, which resulted in the death of Ahmad Sarbani Mohamed, runs into billions of Ringgit.
So, yes, let’s separate the chaff from the oats. The death is one issue, and a most unfortunate issue at that. But let us not lose focus of the scam that involves billions of Ringgit and involves the Customs Department. Let us not throw the baby out with the bath water. While we want the death investigated and the culprits (if any) punished, we do not want MACC to back down and allow the massive corruption to continue.
And why is all this corruption involving Muslims? Everywhere we turn, whenever we read about corruption, invariably the names of Muslims pop up.
Malaysians are so focused on the sexual misconduct of Muslims (the recent one being Anwar Ibrahim). Is sex the only issue? Is sex more important a matter to discuss compared to corruption?
It has just been revealed that what the Deputy Minister of Defence told Parliament back in 2006 was a lie. He said that the French and not the Malaysian government paid the half a billion Ringgit commission on the submarines. Now it has been proven that the commission was actually paid by the Malaysian government.
But is anyone talking about this? Are any websites and newspapers carrying this story other than just Malaysia Today? No one cares. This matter is not important. What is important is the video recording of Anwar Ibrahim allegedly having sex with a Chinese prostitute.
So what if it is Anwar? So what if it is not Anwar? Either way, will our lives improve? Will Malaysia be a better place if it is proven one way or another? Is the issue of Anwar Ibrahim’s sex life so important that the future of the entire nation depends on this?
Malaysians do not appear to know what is going to decide the future of their country. It is not sex but whether we can eliminate abuse of power, corruption, lack of tolerance, persecution, discrimination, selective prosecution, manipulation of the judiciary, and the other social ills and transgressions faced by Malaysia.
This is where the future lies. But Malaysians are so dumb that they allow themselves to be distracted by a very clever Red Herring that has been created by the government to make Malaysians focus on the lesser important things so that they forget the more important things that is going to decide if Malaysia lives or dies.
It seems like yesterday that Glenn Beck was the king of all right-wing media -- maybe because it was yesterday, practically. It was just last summer, after all, that Beck graced -- OK, maybe that's not the right word -- the cover of the New York Times Magazine and made national headlines with that big rally on the Lincoln Memorial, a molecule in the giant shadow cast there by Martin Luther King, That was supposed to be the zenith, but I could tell it was the beginning of the end, that Beck was flailing about in search of the next new thing. I saw the vacant stares when Beck proclaimed that his much hyped event had "nothing to do with politics, everything to do with God."
There were maybe 100,000 of them, lining the woody banks of the Reflecting Pool, arms folded, watching the planes descend into Reagan National as their leader struggled to hold their attention. Beck was already bleeding TV viewers -- losing more than a third of his audience -- and soon came the stunning news that he was getting yanked from the radio airwaves in Philadelphia and New York.
And now it's (sort of) over, just like that. Beck's descent was so steep and so fast that yesterday's news that his main platform, his nightly show on Fox News Channel, will end this year, probably this summer, wasn't even that shocking. Beck, whose shtick always remained rooted in his past as a "Morning Zoo" shock jock of the '80s and '90s, could never recreate the "shock" of taking on Barack Obama in early 2009 when that backlash was looking for a spiritual guru. Night after night, his rants grew more frenetic -- insulting all of Reform Judaism one night, outlining a conspiracy to create a Muslim "caliphate" the next, or calling trains yet another government plot to control your life.
The crazier that Beck got, the more viewers and advertisers he drove away, until eventually it was too much for his beleaguered bosses at FNC, who may have lost as much as $40 million on the whole fiasco. Liberals, especially those who organized a high successful advertiser boycott of Beck's program, celebrated the news as a victory against political hate speech.
But I think that progressives might want to hold off on that victory lap -- unless it's to get in better shape for the long battle ahead.
Because the truth is that Beck's ouster isn't really the end of the nightmare, but just the beginning of the end. Over the last 27 months, Beck -- and let's be clear that he had a lot of help from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity and Rand Paul and all the folks in the Tea Party Movement -- managed to do incalculable harm to the American body politic, that Beck was exactly like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.."
You'll probably hear a lot about how Beck coarsened the political debate and how his words may or may not have incited violence, but I think the wreckage is a lot more substantive, to actual policies that affect Americans every day. You see, there was a reason that Beck was so fond of a political theory called the Overton Window -- so enamored, in fact, that he made it the title of his (officially) fictional "thriller" novel last summer. The Overton Window is a notion that you can radically move the parameters of political debate by pushing talk to the outer limits, so that ideas that were once deemed as extreme suddenly appeared to be normal.
Ironically, no one mastered the use of the Overton Window better than Beck. With all the focus on the leading edge of Beck's craziness -- the "caliphate" stuff, the flirtation with "the FEMA camps," or President Obama's "deep-seated hatred" of white people -- it's easy to forget how he rationalized once out-there ideas to millions of American conservatives, and how those ideas became ingrained in the Republican agenda that has thwarted progressivism from virtually the day Obama took office.
Let's take the example of climate change. There was a time when mainstream Republicans like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Tim Pawlenty thought that man-made climate change was a real problem and that government had a role in fixing it. Then Beck and friends on Fox News Channel and talk radio in went to work. Beck's role in all this remarkably cynical, as he told USA Today Weekend that he personally believed in climate change -- "you'd have to be an idiot not to notice the temperature change," he said -- but said the complete opposite on the air. "Americans know this global warming thing is a scam," he proclaimed on the radio.
In 2007, 62 percent of Republicans believed in man-made climate change, but by late last year 53 percent of GOP voters said there is no evidence for it. In Delaware, a band of Beck aficionados called the Delaware 9-12 Patriots played a key role in ending the Senate ambitions and political career of moderate Republican Mike Castle, largely because Castle had voted for the anti-global warming plan known as "cap and trade."
Do you think other Republicans took notice of Castle's fate? Last month, the House Energy and Commerce Committee was asked to accept an amendment to a bill confirming that man made climate change is real. The vote among the GOP majority was unanimous -- 31 votes against global warming.
But then, Beck has the GOP going off the rails on a crazy train, literally. In other industrialized capitals from Paris and Beijing, high-speed rail is seen as a futuristic way to grow the economy with the kind of a zeal that a very different America once held for its space program. But now the political tide has turned against high-speed rail, with talk radio leading the charge characterized scheduled train service as a form of totalitarianized mind control. Earlier this year, Beck summed up the far-right mantra on trains earlier this year when he said: "The trains run on time and there's a schedule -- and you'll obey us and go where we want." It would be laughable -- except it came just as newly elected Tea-Party-darling governors Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio and Rick Scott in Florida killed high-speed rail projects that would have brought federal dollars, and more importantly jobs, to residents of their recession-battered states.
You could go on and on -- the talk-radio jihad against big government that has put gutless Democrats so on the defensive that they no longer fight to protect vital programs but only over whether to agree to "steep" spending cuts or "draconian" ones, or the fear-mongering on terrorism and Gitmo that made quivering congressmen afraid to house terror suspects in our maximum security prisons. Don't think that Beck's nightly burst of insanity didn't have a lot to do with these things, because they did.
Don't believe me? Then ask a fellow in South Carolina named Bob Inglis who was a Republican congressman until he told his constituents to "turn off Glenn Beck," and lost a primary to an upstart who got 71 percent of the vote. Why do you think the Republicans in Washington remain in lock step, even as 90 percent of what they stay in lock step for is bat-guano crazy.
When people look back on this peculiar time in American history and talk about Glenn Beck, and they will, I'm sure there'll be a lot about all the wacky stuff -- the apocalyptic hyping of "God, gold and guns" and the way out conspiracy theories, the leading edge of the buzzsaw and he moved the Overton Window to the far right corner of our national house divided. I'm more worried about the rising temperatures and sea levels, the falling behind other developing nations like China on everything from infrastructure to alternative energy to education, the repeated blows to America's civil liberties and the destruction of a social safety net it took 75 years to build.
The solutions to these problems are out there, but they are stymied by a two-year explosion of madness, the right-wing backlash, which I reported on my book that is called "The Backlash," and it was Glenn Beck that lit the fuse. Yes, his reign on the Fox News Channel may last little more than 27 months. But it may take the rest of us 27 years -- or more -- to undo all of the damage.
LOOKS LIKE THE PM IS UNWELL.
Najib, who was met in Santubong today, added that his visit to Chinese-majority area Padungan today has led him to believe that “there is still work to be done (by BN)”.
AFTER 30 YEARS……WE CALL IT WORK IN SLOW PROGRESS. SHIT CAN TAIB IF YOU ARE ABLE.
“A government must represent all races, so the Chinese must vote for (a party) which can represent them in government.
LIKE UMNO, MCA, MIC IN PENINSULAR? SARAWAKIANS ARE NOT STUPID….EVEN IF YOU THINK THEY ARE.
“As I understand (Ahmad Sarbani) went to the MACC office voluntarily to change his statement and died in the blink of an eye just as an MACC officer was calling the investigating officer.
“He was not being questioned. It is different to the Teoh Beng Hock case,” he said.
“He was not being questioned. It is different to the Teoh Beng Hock case,” he said.
MR PRIME MINISTER, SIR….STATEMENTS AS WE UNDERSTAND IN MACC LINGO COMES ABOUT AFTER A BOUT OF QUESTIONING. IF HE WAS NOT QUESTIONED, THEN THERE ARE NO STATEMENTS TO CHANGE.
“We must remember that MACC is doing this to safeguard national funds. Corruption is serious and if we can stop this racket, which has been ongoing for years, then it is the rakyat who will benefit.
LIKE HELL THEY ARE SAFEGUARDING NATIONAL FUNDS. IF CORRUPTION IS SERIOUS YOU SHOULD ORDER MACC TO STOP THIS RACKET – FINGER TAIB MAHMUD. THEN AS YOU SAY RAKYAK WILL BENEFIT. YOU AND MACC DARE?
YES. Your PM is not well.
In this instance, ignoring the antics of the main characters goes beyond somebody else’s problem. It seems that with your average person, their attention span is wholly taken up with the gray mundanity of their everyday lives. They simply refuse to see anythingtoo strange.
Sometimes invoked for seriousness, such as an explanation in which exploits go on ignored by SOMEpeople...but often, this is just one part of the Rule of Funny. Magic battles, alien invasions, and all other sorts of natural or supernatural happenings often happen right in front of some peoples' faces...and yet they merely glance out the window, and go back to their morning coffee, sometimes either not noticing it or just saying some excuse like the self-annointed Ruler of Malay Rights Ibrahim ‘Pendek’ Ali who publicly proclaimed in Parliament that marital problems arise because wives are irresponsible. All wives, he expectecs, should spread their legs even before the master can kick off his shoes after a hard{?) days work….or excuses like Teoh Beng Hock’s death is different from Ahmad Sarbani’s…..or Nazri asking why should MACC chief step down….he should step aside, sacked!
Aside: In a 3/10 session here in Rajang Park, Sibu, the Whistler proclaimed a new name for Ib Ali: turd polisher! I chocked on my Henieken.
Can these EXCUSES be synonymous with LIES?
Lies happens when a character shouts out to another the words "You lie!" This can also be in different forms, such as "That's a lie," "You're lying", "You are telling a lie," "you are a liar that lies," and “you are a liar that lies a lot and thus you lie” etc etc.
This can happen either while the receiver is speaking or when he is not speaking. Occurs when SOME character speaks blatant lies and another character knows that he is lying. When used against a person just because of their culture, sex, or race, my friend the WHISTLER says it’s a Pet Peeve Lie.
There is a medical term for this trend…..it just escapes me now! Can some doctors who deal in mentals give us your expertise?
Meanwhile somebody should advise the UMNO appointed Prime Minister to go for a full physical….and maybe bring along Ibrahim Ali, if Mak Bulat allows.
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