On To Something

A Minggu BERSIH, huh?

I, for one, sure like this suggestion by Dr Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin following our Prime Minister’s backtracking on the whole 9th July get together.

Imagine a sea of yellow and a fluttering of the word BERSIH everywhere. Of course, there will be an intermittent of the colour… - urmm, what is exactly the colour of dirt aka KOTOR? – as this is, as far as we can tell anyway, a relatively, ahem, free country.

For the BERSIH steering committee fellas, a week (or even a weekend) should be enough to push the message through, doesn’t it?

There’s no need to even have firebrand rallies at the stadium if this BERSIH Week or Weekend plan comes afoot.

Ibrahim Ali’s Perkasa and Khairy Jamaluddin’s Umno Youth can have the same week or weekend so that their supporters can fly their Anti-BERSIH flags and what not.

Better yet, there’s also no need for Mahaguru Omardin to control his 50,000 silatists' emotions then. Huge relief there.

And please, for one, leave the “It’s all to divert attention from Anwar's case” bollocks.

Yeah, yeah, we know all about it and you know what, I dare say that he no longer matters that much.

Remember the “Who can that be?” question posted by Umno wayward blogger SakMongkol47? One his frequent reader / postee / commentator / follower Walla answered definitely: “They must obey the clean-and-fair governance demands of the enlightened rakyat.”

Pure and simple, isn’t it?

There are whole load thesis written on the electoral systems the democratic world over, and how the current First-past-the-post voting system we’re using currently is, well, unfair as votes are not proportionally counted.

Instances include a constituency of say, 28K voters returns one rep as would one of 280K (usually urban) and, as such, garnering a 60% popular vote would not equate 60% in representation.

Unfair, ain’t it? Couple that with the mainstream news papers and television networks providing negligible coverage for other than, say, Umno politicians, and you could say it was a surprise that the Opposition Coalition (we were told to use that word the last time around) won the state that they did.

I remember the dreaded apprehension at the Perak MB’s residence the night of the 2008 General Election results.

Had Edgar Allan Poe been alive and present there, he would have be able to write a sequel to his “Tell-Tale Heart” tale of torrid, terrifying terror.

The former MB stayed indoors throughout the countdown as Perak went to the Opposition (until, that is, the defection of the trio of duplicitous creeps. I never did agree with Anwar’s defection game and this one must have hurt him bad, surely).

Anyway, back to Minggu BERSIH.

Even the title alone doesn’t provoke, does it? BERSIH is a clean (pun intended fully) word made dirty by a host of provocative campaigning against it.

You can certainly say the whole thrust of BERSIH 2.0 – for a fair elections – was indeed hijacked by politicians from all three sides (Ibrahim Ali being the third cog in the Pakatan vs Barisan equation) of the Malaysian political divide.

Dr Asri is on to something there, don’t you think?

So how now?