Mine! Mine! Umno Vice President and Minister for Rural and Regional Development Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Shafie Apdal seems to make himself a bigger fool and is now digging a bigger hole for himself.

I feel enormous sadness that we have Cabinet Ministers who cannot be humble and admit that they have made mistakes.

Let me tell the UMNO Ministers that there is nothing wrong with them admitting that they have made mistakes, and that in this case, Apdal had wrongly accused DAP National Vice Chairman and MP for Seputeh Teresa Kok’s video “Onderful Malaysia CNY 2014” of lampooning the Malaysian security forces and the Lahad Datu intrusion tragedy.

After all, UMNO Ministers are mere mortals. Even Homer nods!

Apdal’s mistake is all the more understandable and excusable as he did not understand Mandarin or Cantonese, the languages used in the video dialogue, and he could only have heard a garbled, inaccurate, biased and tendentious version of the video from his colleagues in the Barisan Nasional, whether MCA, Gerakan or Liberal Democratic Party, who have political axes to grind.

Apdal’s accusation that the video lampooned security forces and the Lahad Datu incursion tragedy made me, and I am sure very many Malaysians, to visit YouTube and check the video, and I find no reference whatsoever in it which could substantiate Apdal’s allegation of lampooning the Malaysian security forces and the Lahad Datu incident.

This is why I had invited Shafie to a public get-together with Teresa and he could come with his experts and advisers so that his team could publicly point out where the security forces or the Lahad Datu incursion tragedy had been the subject of ridicule by the video satire.

Today, Shafie was very dismissive when he publicly turned down my proposal to host a get-together for Shafie to watch the video clip together with Teresa Kok.

He said: “I have better things to do…I have a country to manage.”

Is Apdal aware that he had made a public confession that he had not even seen the video clip but he had the audacity to pass public judgment on it?

Is this the reason why former Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad had said that the present Cabinet is full of “half-past six” Ministers?

There have been allegations that Teresa’s video is anti-Malay and anti-Islam. I invite those who made these allegations to step into the open to show where in the video there are anti-Malay and anti-Islam references.

Actually Teresa must thank Apdal, the Minister for Communications and Multimedia Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek, and other misinformed and/or malicious Umno/MCA/Gerakan leaders who have brought the video to the attention of a larger audience than it would otherwise get.

In ten days, Teresa’s video on “YouTube” have exceeded 300,000 hits, with 3,825 likes and 2,159 dislikes – far exceeding the most popular That Effing Show on YouTube, “Let Them Eat Kangkung” which has scored 183,861 hits after three weeks though Teresa’s video still well behind the top “kangkung video”, the kangkung remix video by Yuri Wong which is just short of one million hits at 980,957 hits.

May be those who create videos in future should enlist Umno Ministers to help them publicise their works so as to get more hits on the Internet.