The big floods inundating Australia, Sri Lanka, Europe and many parts of the world are the big news worldwide.
The altercations in the Selangor State Secretary's appointment and the Rais Yatim's sorry tale are news Malaysiawide.
I feel empathic sorrow for the world news, and plain sorry for the local shenanigans.
The scientist would simply explain away the vagaries of nature in the climatic disturbances. The more religious would, doubtless, find reasons far more esoteric. The more mundane should at least realise that nothing beats nature, and the best human efforts cannot match the wrath of nature. Only the human spirit can lift us from despair and allow us to move on.
Notwithstanding that bit of self-serving sermonising, we should perhaps accept the proposition that we, creatures of God, must submit to His Plans.
Which is more than I can say for Khalid Ibrahim.
He's just being forced by man-made rules that he accepts someone he has reasons to dislike to be his head of administration in the State Government that his political group now controls.
To begin with, Khalid should be intelligent enough to know that he's where he is by default.
PKR as a political party that alone has no majority in the Selangor State Assembly. UMNO is still the biggest single party voted in in 2008. If the BN component parties delivered just half of their votes, things would have been different. But that is conjecture. What is factual is, the BN vessel got stranded in 2008 because of its own internal malfunction, and the mouse jumped on the pile.
But the crow standing on top of the cow-dung shouldn't, well, crow. Knowing this, Khalid should wisely pick his fights where they count, and not be like the silly lad in olden times, when, given a "kris" for the first time, he started to poke this and poke that with it. It was ok when he poked a banana tree. What happened when he poked at a rock ?
Now to make things worse for Khalid, he says he's set to convene the Dewan Negri to change the State Constitution to empower the Sultan to the pre-1993 status. Yet even as he mouths his lines, he's very publicly going against the Sultan. Can you believe it?
Poor Rais has had his share of bad luck in his long political career. But he's a survivor, and he'll survive this one, too. With excellent credentials, he went into Negri politics full of the promise that soon steadily materialised. He became the MB in spite of the ill-placed jokes made by his less-than-subtle predecessor. He became a Cabinet Minister soon after, but chose the "wrong side" in the UMNO scheme of things. He "burned his bridge" and fought hard for his old constituency wearing new colours, but this was UMNO of old, and he paid the price.
And yet his well-spoken delivery and the hands of fate saw him survive politically until to-day, perhaps as one of the longest-serving Federal Ministers.
His bad luck this time is that he took on the blogger-community in a confrontational manner, which is ok if you have what that takes, but not if you lump them together, "the good, the bad, and the ugly." Rais is nothing if he cannot learn from his experience, and that should teach him that you may have a silver tongue, but you should not always use it too quickly before you use your good ol' brain.
It's always easy to comment, I suppose. But commentry is public menu.
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