Umno’s general ass-embly

As they do without fail every year, Umno leaders, bleeders and pleaders are busy putting the ‘ass’ into ‘general assembly’ with a series of speeches so false and fatuous they would disgrace a herd of donkeys.

Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak opened proceedings with an astonishing combination of braying and praying.

“God, do not let this country, and the fate of this race (Malays) fall into the hands of traitors and the wicked,” he beseeched Allah, as if the Almighty wouldn’t be as aware as the rest of us that the true traitors and wicked are allegedly Najib himself and his Umno accomplices.

But nothing daunted, he then went even further, with “Oh, great God, we promise to fight to the death until we have spilled our last drop of blood.”

Let me interject at this point with the perhaps obvious but nonetheless pertinent remark that a great many of us would pay good money to witness Najib and his fellow members of Umno deliver on this promise.

In fact, however unwillingly and even unwittingly, Malaysians have paid countless billions of dollars over the past half-century or so through theft by Umno, and it’s high time that the people got some value for their money through witnessing demise of the alleged regime blood-suckers.

Not that such a desirable denoument is likely, of course, at least on the part of Najib himself, as at every sign of conflict or trouble he goes into hiding and gets his ministers, police force, judiciary, mainstream media and paid gangs of thugs to do his fighting for him.

And in any event, in this very speech he revealed how utterly empty his fighting words were, as he proceeded from promising the last drop of his blood to spouting some story about the Prophet and the Angel Gabriel in support of the totally conflicting conclusion that “so I think we should no longer waste our time and energy to entertain or fight traitors to the race and country.”

Similarly confused and confusing, if not so blood-thirsty, was the urging by Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin to the Malays, on whose credulity and racial and religious paranoia Umno has so successfully promoted and preyed on all these years, to “discard their defensive mindset and chase after progress.”

“Malays,” he continued, “should not be a race that is anti-knowledge, anti-competition and seeking for a ‘crutch’ to aid them,” before going on to thank Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak no less than 11 times for the complex of crutches that Najib has provided in his so-called ‘TN50’ programme for the betterment of Malaysia (but especially Malays) by not the year 2020 as previously envisaged by Mahathir Mohamad, but by 2050.

By which such time, unless he has fought to his last drop of blood for Najib before then, Khairy, as he said, will be 70 years old.

And the rest of us who happen to survive that long will be feeling more like 700 years old, after decades more deadly-dreary Umno general ass-emblies like this one, in which the deputy prime minister preposterously compared the Malaysian opposition to the Nazis by claiming that allegations of Najib’s massive embezzlement of public funds via the fake national wealth fund “1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) is a Hitlerian ‘big lie’.”

When of course, as has long been glaringly obvious, there is nothing so Nazi or fascist as Umno, in every way from its destruction of democratic institutions to its politically-complicit police and judiciary and its mendacious, regime-propagandist mainstream media.

Blaming woes on diverse scapegoats

Meanwhile, wife of the principle suspect in the notorious RM250-million National Feedlot Corporation scam and Wanita Umno chief Shahrizat Abdul Jalil joined Zahid Hamidi and Khairy Jamaluddin in blaming Umno’s (and thus Malaysia’s) woes on such diverse scapegoats as Dr Mahathir, perennial regime bogeyman Jewish-American financier and philanthropist George Soros and the Bersih movement.

Bersih being the biggest regime bugbear of all, as the Umno gang is not so asinine as to imagine it can survive the kind of clean, free and fair elections for which this admirable organisation keeps loudly and publicly calling.

And this 2016 annual Umno general ass-embly is likely the last one before the general election that Najib clearly intends to call as soon as he thinks he can get away with it.

Before, that is, investigations in the US, Switzerland and sundry other countries around the world can reach their findings in investigations of the 1MDB fiasco, and possibly then institute criminal proceedings against Najib and his partners in this scam.

So it is more urgent than ever for all of us who are sick to death of Umno’s making a Malassia out of Malaysia and Malassians out of Malaysians to do everything in our power to finally find a way - any way - to kick this gang of crooks out on their asses.

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.- Mkini