Royal Commission of Pondans

By Little Bird
Malaysiatoday

I actually wanted to title this the Royal Commission of something else but with all the fart jokes stinking up the Lingam Video inquiry it is perhaps apt to link the conduct of the Royal Commissioners with unmanly behaviour. They are sissies, maybe even bordering on cowardice.

A Blogger who writes on this site explained to me in detail that during his rule, time was Dr Mahathir’s greatest friend. Through all the crises, economic downturns, general elections and recalcitrant foreign leaders time was always on his side. There is no shortage of time available if you want to postpone something. There is only a shortage of time when you want to do things in a hurry. Dr Mahathir was able to use time to do both ie to get things done in a super hurry and to postpone pesky problems to another day.

But when he postponed a party election, a General Election or sparred with the Keatings, Gores and Soros of this world he treated any extra time he got like the precious commodity that it was. Dr Mahathir was known to burn up candles working hard at his job. No PM before or since worked as hard as Dr Mahathir. And he also knew what to do if he had any extra time.

And today after his retirement even some of the Opposition has rallied around Dr Mahathir. Time has always favoured him. Even personally - a ripe old age, relatively robust health and good fitness have served him well. He also outlived them all.

But the same is not the case for Abdullah Badawi. Badawi does not have a clue about what to do to run the country. He gets nervous when he has to make a decision or read a brief. That is why he keeps leaving the country to go overseas. He does not have to work or worry about anything important or serious when he is overseas. Whether it is loafing around Perth in Australia, sleeping on someone’s boat, sleeping on board the plane or sleeping at the Davos Economic Forum it all means the same thing : he does not have to work.

He just postpones matters without using the extra time to find solutions. So problems do not go away. When they come around again, Abdullah Badawi goes away overseas.

When he tries to do something it always backfires. Without thinking Badawi dispatched the MCA Minister to China to apologise to the Chinese Government for the ‘poor treatment’ of a Chinese girl by the Police. Firstly asking women to do naked squats is procedure and physical examination to find hidden objects. The offense took place when some idiot video taped the girl and showed it to everyone. But the PM looked the idiot again when it was found out the girl was a local Malay lass and not even Chinese. The Malaysian Government was made to look totally stupid.

Obviously the PM was set up by his own Police, of which he is the Minister. They knew the Malay identity of the girl all along but they kept it from the PM. It was possibly a “teh tarik” bet among some Senior Police Officers to see just how big a fool they could make of the PM. More than anyone else, the Police know just how sleepy the PM can be. He does not know what to do.

Now in similar fashion the sleepy PM has appointed a Royal Commission of Inquiry to look into the Lingam Video recording. Again he has done this without thinking. Promising transparency and ‘lets get to the bottom of this’ the PM and whoever are his advisors thought they could gain voters confidence by dredging up dirt from the Mahathir era and exposing it in open court hearing. They even put Dr Mahathir on the witness list and called Dr Mahathir to the witness stand. But as the CNN broadcast of the event showed, Dr Mahathir gave a good accounting of himself. When he walked in, everyone stood up, including the judges. As one Mahathir critic said Dr Mahathir came across quite clearly that he exercised his authority as the Prime Minister and he was not answerable to anyone for his actions. In the appointment of judges, he said he listened to his officers, the Police, dinner guests or anyone else. But the final decision was his alone. The Royal Commission then thanked him and he went home for tea. And that was the end of that. More...