“……//…Before his confession is admissible into evidence in the court of popular opinion, we need to know if the confession is voluntary….Had the PM been tortured?…..” – Undergrad2

So now the focus is on the PM’s legal rights? I can see that you are really bored with all these inane discussions on corruption!

Well I’m sure the PM too was just bored or irritated by the reporters’ repeated, insensitive and ignorant questions of who the minister alleged to be corrupt by Ezam Mohd Nor of Gerak was (when some of us also know who he might be by 2 + 2 deduction).

The answer “I don’t know” (cos’ he needed to study the memorandum) then does not really mean he didn’t know. Only the naïve would construe his word in the literal sense. It is a polite expression of telling the press corps, “don’t ask embarrassing and stupid questions”.

The “senior cabinet minister” alleged by Gerak to have used a public company’s funds amounting to RM30 million to settle his personal debts was likely inherited from Tun Dr Mahathir’s administration.

Pak Lah was anointed successor on the expectation – and condition – from his predecessor that he didn’t upset the apple cart, which means not only not aborting projects like the crooked bridge and withdrawing support for Proton and Tengku Mahaleel’s stewardship thereof by also retaining some of TDM’s cabinet ministers responsible for formulating and implementing TDM’s projects so that there was continuity and no break that would impair his legacy…Hence the XXL jumbo size cabinet of over 30 ministers, some present PM’s men and others the ex’s!

When Pak Lah took over he declared war against corruption and launched the national integrity plan. It was like a “new law” and for the implementation of a new law purporting to catch the corrupt thieves to be “fair” and “just”, it should extend to cover those who had prior notice of it and shouldn’t retrospectively apply to hold to account past thievery and corruption by perpetrators who at that time of perpetrating the alleged offence had no notice that there was such a thing as a war against corruption or the national integrity plan!

The reporters’ questions were stupid because they didn’t address the unspoken and ‘no need to speak about’ underlying premises and knowledge privy to all that:

We have always had a corrupt society with corruption reeking at the seams of the fabric of feudal political structure; and that:

· Corruption had always been acted upon against only in respect of petty and lower government officials (small fries) and except for the occasional a big guy who didn’t toe the line and fell out of favour, almost never the big fish;

· for corruption is though outwardly condemned as evil and wrong was tacitly and hypocritically indulged upon is actually a kind of political reward by access to power and by it the opportunities to make money as a prize for political loyalty and success for contributing to the BN’s agenda of maintaining power and hegemony.

All are in the “game”, indeed the component parties’ ability to use money for electoral success depends on this ability to use political power and official connections to raise money for both party and self and no person aggrandizing himself with riches from such position could be held to account without implicating the party, the Godfather for all the rest to obtain largesse and patronage.

Now where have these reporters been all their life? So get real, understand the milieu, and don’t ask stupid questions which are stupid enough as they relate to present ministers and doubly stupid if they relate to past ministers of whom he inherited!

People who aspire to change the nation for the better and rid it off the yoke of corruption are at liberty to devise whatever way legal to campaign against and vote the ruling coalition out of power if they could though the prospects are slim since it had always been able to maintain power drawing on the resources of the entire nation to replenish its coffers and individual pockets.

The whole system and individual players within engaged hypocritically in this game and to change one has to rid the whole system and not zero in and penalize in particular this and that particular minister for present corruption much more for past ones as Ezam/Gerak tried to do!

Before we all get sanctimonious re-examine and ask in which country there is no corruption amongst its top politicians? Do you really think there is no corruption in first world country? It takes different guises and forms depending on definition! What is the raison de etre of joining politics? If you believe it is to serve public with integrity, then you can believe everything else that the world dishes to you.

In an abstract case, sure, there is no dispute that it is not honourable to be a thief but when all thieves are banded together for maintaining power for a common cause of perpetrating “thievery” (from the resources of the State) then there must at least subsist a code of honour amongst even thieves that they do not snitch on one another, punish and victimize any particular member unless he is disloyal and acts against the interest of the group of which is part and even if there were a new plan to reform and turn to a new leaf of being less a thief, one just don’t single out a member for past sins of why he stole in the past just because now there is launched a new hypocrisy plan to change over to a new leaf.

All these we Malaysians know. For the reporters to keep asking such questions of who the minister was (in the context of what we all know of our political and cultural milieu) is apparently stupid and unrealistic : why do you expect him to say?

I thought “I don’t know” was polite, magnanimous and gentlemanly rebuttal by a humble man who is prepared to draw criticisms unto himself for being ‘sleeping and not knowing’ rather than implicate another, who by a merest draw of the lottery of life, happened to be unlucky to be the one investigated and caught with evidence by Gerak whilst all around who are equally though not proportionately guilty of the same have not been asked to account as yet.