Malaysiakini
I can't say I was surprised to hear the admission by US and Australian authorities that the electronic 'pings' they assumed were coming from the black box of missing flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean have proven to be red herrings.
The allegedly mysterious disappearance of the Boeing 777 and its 239 passengers and crew two months ago has been deeply fishy from the very start.
First and foremost, of course, because anything whatever involving Malaysia's criminal BN regime inevitably involves corruption, deception, incompetence or a complex mix of all three of these curses, and thus stinks to high heaven.
And then there's the fact that the government with more of its citizens aboard MH370 than any other, the so-called 'People's' Republic of China (PRC), is even more on the nose, if possible, than the Malaysian regime.
It was the PRC, as we all well recall, that in 1989 notoriously employed its laughably-titled 'People's Liberation' Army to slaughter countless people peacefully calling for their political liberation in Tiananmen Square.
And it is the same, utterly unrepentant 'People's' Republic of China government that alone enables the atrocious Kim dynasty to keep the people of North Korea in its death-grip; and that, in concert with Vladimir Putin's neo-Stalinist Russia, constantly vetoes and otherwise thwarts United Nations efforts to save people from the depredations of corrupt, kleptocratic and murderous despots in Syria and elsewhere.
So it seems highly suspicious to me that just as the US and Australia announce that they have been ding-a-lings to be misled by what they believed were black-box pings, and thus all the waiting, watching world is left with is the pong of the BN regime's MH370 wrongs, the Chinese and Malaysian regimes are happily playing diplomatic ping-pong.
If China's initial outrage at Malaysia's slow, confused, incompetent and comprehensively lying response to the disappearance of MH370 was genuine, it seems surpassingly strange that all has been so quickly forgiven and forgotten that Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak has been welcomed on a state visit to Beijing, and China has simultaneously sent a pair of its preciousgiant pandas to Malaysia.
A conspiracy of fiendship
It's tempting to see these moves as not so much an outbreak of unaccountably sudden China-Malaysia friendship despite the ongoing MH370 fiasco, as a conspiracy of fiendship designed to cover up something deep-dark.
Why else would the PRC deliver a pair of pandas into the care of a Malaysian regime that has not only carelessly 'lost' well over a hundred Chinese citizens, but also has an appalling record of deaths in its agencies' custody, and a disgraceful history of demonising and demeaning its own citizens of Chinese descent.
And why, for its part, would Malaysia's BN regime indulge in an exercise so rich in self-destructive symbolism as to play host to a pair of pandas?
Surely I was just one of countless government critics whose first thought the other day on seeing pictures of Najib, Hishammuddin Hussein and sundry BN accomplices on a visit to the panda enclosure was that this guilty group rather than the innocent animals should by rights have been behind bars.
Similarly, I must have been only one of many who couldn't help wondering whether, as long as Feng Yi and Fu Wa are supposed to be in quarantine, it might be a threat to their health to allow them to be visited there by a bunch of BN government and media germs.
And of course the pandas' cute black eyes were, and will continue to be, a vivid reminder of what happened to Anwar Ibrahim during his first term in BN custody. While the very word 'panda' inevitably evoked the painfully obvious punning perception that the BN regime ceaselessly contrives to cling to power by pandering to its members' and supporters' lowest lusts, greeds, ignorances and racial and religious prejudices.
Such typical pandering being everywhere evident in the campaign for the Teluk Intan by/buy-election, with Umno Wanita chief Shahrizat Abdul Jalil pandering to the sectarianism that the regime works tirelessly to foment through the agency of fake 'NGOs' like Perkasa and 'newspapers' like Utusan Malaysia by calling DAP candidate Dyana Sofya Mohd Daud a "traitor" to her race and religion, and Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi damning Chinese and Indians who fail to support the BN regime as "ingrates".
This followed Ahmad Zahid's (left) not just pandering to the already inflated sense of self-importance of Rela members by promising them new uniforms and a RM1 million 'constituency allocation' in the event of a regime victory, but also going so far as to threaten them with dire if unspecified consequences if they failed to help BN win Teluk Intan.
"Don't play with me. I know who has voted and didn't vote," he ranted, in reference to the 2,000 of 8,000 Rela members who he claimed had failed to cast ballots in last year's general election, "so this time make sure that BN wins this parliamentary seat. I'm watching over the Pekan Baru ballot boxes."
EC's customary pandering
This gross abuse of power and blatant breach of the Electoral Act predictably drew a storm of criticism from the opposition and its supporters, at which point Electoral Commission (EC) chief Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof indulged in its customary pandering to his masters in the BN regime by declaring that the home minister's threats were "mere advice", and that his promises of new uniforms did not constitute an offence "because Rela is already in the process of changing its uniform".
So it is clear that, as far as the EC is concerned, BN is as free as ever to keep pandering to Teluk Intan voters with everything from promises of a gazillion-ringgit new highway to "gifts" of hampers and presumably its traditional handouts of petty cash on election day.
Meanwhile, the home minister has claimed that he had been only"joking" when he said that he knew which Rela members had failed to vote in the last general election, before proceeding to pander to the sexism of his audience with the comment that in any event the young, smart and attractive DAP candidate for Teluk Intan, Dyana Sofya Mohd Daud, is "not very pretty, merely photogenic."
But most Malaysians can clearly see that Dyana is a symbol of Malaysia's bright future, and that the plug-uglies of BN are the past. And that all the pandas and pandering in the world won't save them much longer from getting pinged for the pongs surrounding MH370, Altantuya Shaariibuu, Teoh Beng Hock and literally countless other unforgivable wrongs.