Terengganu: Losing Face, Or Falling On It?

“It’s not a question of losing face because what is more important was that the matter has been resolved.”
- Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

Well, I hope you don’t mind, my dear premier, but I beg to differ. After all, there is quite a large difference between losing face, and falling flat on it. The resounding splat! made by you as your not-so-elegant mug made contact with the unyielding ground did not just reverberate between the small space between your large ears.

No indeed. The resonance from your ungainly fall echoed throughout the country, exposing (yet again!) the nation to your true nature, that of a characterless and impotent premier who coarsely attempts to maintain his waning authority through patronage and political manoeuvring and manipulation.

This time around, our inept premier made a thorough mess of things when he tried to wrest control of the state of Terengganu from its people – to his own benefit, no doubt – by attempting to dominate the nomination and election of the state’s Menteri Besar.

Fortunately, as he is always wont to do, our premier made a total mess of things. As coined most aptly by Forest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does”.

Perhaps for some reason he did not factor in the possibility that his choices have always been poor, bad or atrocious, depending on his (or his son-in-law’s) involvement in the decision. Or perhaps for some reason he did not factor in the possibility that his party’s fall from grace in the 12th General Election may have been somewhat attributed to the complete fiasco that is his premiership, the utter debacle that is his leadership, or the tragedy that is his party.

For whatever reason, the bungling premier tried and failed to control the nomination and election of the Terengganu Menteri Besar, after which he did what he always did best…he quietly tucked his tail between his legs and slunk away to hide under someone’s skirt, and got someone else to do the dirty work for him.

That dirty work was done firstly by a gaggle of spotty faced twits issuing none too subtle threats of tendered resignations, and secondly by a horde of paper pushing queers mangling the constitutional.

In comes the constitutional monarch, and bang! that gaggle of spotty faced twits meekly swear their assorted testicles into service to the new Menteri Besar, and that horde of paper pushing queers discovered that there isn’t much of the constitution left to mangle.

How did all that happen? No one really knows, as its all been hushed up, but apparently there is talk that the accounts books of Terengganu are missing an obscenely large sum of money while the ruling coalition was playing at the administration of the state.

So while the issue has been ‘resolved’, there is still a great deal of loose rope hanging around to figuratively and literally hang a large number of people who used to – and still do - walk through the state’s corridors of power.

The least of it is, "Which unlucky moron is going to take the fall for it all?"