It's over now, I mean the election, just in case you're still holding your breath for EC's announcement on the date. Now is one dandy time to pause, ponder and reflect.
I know you're already overwhelmed by the relentless torrents of thoughts, theories and verdicts from part-time political pundits and psephologists, mostly struggling professors madya from local universities ranked 1456th, 1396th and 1354th in the latest world university rankings. All are mediocre except for a few who look clever and even Scottish (eg Karim, Farish, Noh Omar). Their narratives are decidedly lazy and agricultural. They pontificated that BN needed both urban and rural support to secure a two-thirds majority. I mean, it's like saying Indonesian maids are from Indonesia.
With plenty of time to burn, I've decided to weigh in. I pored over and rummaged through the numbers to make some sense of the election outcome and dynamics. No surprise that all the political analysts are biased, innumerate and, in the process, missed the more relevant points. So what can we really draw from the just-concluded election? Plenty to learn and take away if we're not lazy. For a change, let's use the much-maligned Question and Answer (Q and A) format:
Q.Who won the election?
A. PR. Anything else is just gossip.
Q. But why does BN, not PR, get to form the government? So unfair.
A. Let's not mistake our election for a beauty contest, where the winner gets to rule for a year, visit places, or marry Hugh Hefner for two weeks. According to an expert in criminal law, we're adopting an archaic Anglo-Saxon democratic model called First In, First Out, quite similar to the trick used by the Welsh accrual accounting. It's devilishly simple: in any election, the party that comes first is out. This system differs slightly from the original democratic notion conceived by Plato or Pluto or some one-name Greek geek about 2500 before Greek bankruptcy. Most modern democracies like Zimbabwe, North Korea etc have long rejected this idea, more so now that Greece is part of Germany. Whichever way you look at it, BN, quite rightly, should form the government.
A. PR. Anything else is just gossip.
Q. But why does BN, not PR, get to form the government? So unfair.
A. Let's not mistake our election for a beauty contest, where the winner gets to rule for a year, visit places, or marry Hugh Hefner for two weeks. According to an expert in criminal law, we're adopting an archaic Anglo-Saxon democratic model called First In, First Out, quite similar to the trick used by the Welsh accrual accounting. It's devilishly simple: in any election, the party that comes first is out. This system differs slightly from the original democratic notion conceived by Plato or Pluto or some one-name Greek geek about 2500 before Greek bankruptcy. Most modern democracies like Zimbabwe, North Korea etc have long rejected this idea, more so now that Greece is part of Germany. Whichever way you look at it, BN, quite rightly, should form the government.
Q. Who's the best performer?
A. Consensus is a tie between Nurul Izzah and Taib Mahmud (and Taib's wife, don't forget). Nurul Izzah for jailbreaking the BN juggernaut. Taib for beating back PR and the other PR (guess). The less romantic plump for Teresa Kok, who racked up the biggest majority. She polled 61,500 votes, about 50% more than what PR had expected. This is all daft. Because the biggest winner is actually Zulkifli Noordin. PKR had expected him to get only one vote but he managed a massive 38,080. It's 3,807,900% more than expected. Take that, Teresa.
Q. Based on the election, is it safe to say that Khalid Ibrahim is the best living politician today?
A. I'm not sure about safe, but Khalid Ibrahim, Selangor MB, is definitely the best politician today. How? By not being a politician, that's how. For the past five years he's been banging his head on his transformation agenda: free water, free sand, and plastics-free Saturdays. In between, he mumbles and exudes the very charisma of a three-pin plug. People just fell for this refreshing, working-class, crony-is-cissy style. And how he blew away and left BN for dead on the night.
Q. So there's a fraud?
A. What fraud? Our competent EC has just spent RM400 million of your good money to make sure that the election isn't another gold-bar multi-level scam. The guy at the polling station tallied my IC against his register and then screamed my name so loudly that the whole Kg Pandan knew I wasn't an Indon phantom. No fraud. Not a chance.
Q. Chinese Tsunami?
A. Both "Chinese" and "Tsunami" are overrated and overused terms, up there with verbal bores like transformation, gerrymandering, lol, samsung, Victoria Beckham. They've been given more credit than what they remotely deserve. And they're not even English to start with. Tsunami is, you know it, Japanese, Chinese is, well, Chinese. Japanese and Chinese are technically still at war (the siege of Manchuria hasn't formally ended). When did the last time you saw a Chinese speak to a Japanese? Exactly. So any expression containing both Japanese and Chinese words is immediately hilarious and can't be taken too seriously.
Q. Why couldn't BN do better? Where's the tipping point? Who's at fault? Will this repeat?
A. Man, I'm out of breath. There's just too many to pinpoint. Cows, videos, ambiga. But the feather that broke the camel's back was the submarines. Not one, but two. Maybe more, I don't know. This is unfortunate because Malaysia is historically a maritime nation (remember Parameswara, Hang Li Po, Sir Francis Drake?), but Malaysians are, genetically, scared of submarines. I watched submarine flicks U571, K19 and KL Gangster half-way and almost blacked out with claustrophobia. Naturally people won't vote anybody who's out to scare them.
Q. PR's popular vote was about 51%. Why wasn't it possible for PR to get more, like 60%?
A. So obvious. It's due to DAP's poor performance. The party's support among the Chinese was low. Surprise? Let's look at some Chinese-heavy seats (i.e 90% of voters are Chinese) where DAP won big-time. Let's assume same voter turnout across all races and let's assume (conservatively) that DAP got its votes only from Chinese voters and let's also assume that I'm right. In Seputeh, 97% of the Chinese voted DAP. What? Only 97%? This is terribly low compared to, say, 100%. In Mengelembu, it's mere 92%. It's disastrous 82% in Kuching. I can go on but the point is made: the Chinese don't support DAP. Now you see how I'm sharper than all those professors madya and those Scottish lookers combined (hahahaha).
A. Consensus is a tie between Nurul Izzah and Taib Mahmud (and Taib's wife, don't forget). Nurul Izzah for jailbreaking the BN juggernaut. Taib for beating back PR and the other PR (guess). The less romantic plump for Teresa Kok, who racked up the biggest majority. She polled 61,500 votes, about 50% more than what PR had expected. This is all daft. Because the biggest winner is actually Zulkifli Noordin. PKR had expected him to get only one vote but he managed a massive 38,080. It's 3,807,900% more than expected. Take that, Teresa.
Q. Based on the election, is it safe to say that Khalid Ibrahim is the best living politician today?
A. I'm not sure about safe, but Khalid Ibrahim, Selangor MB, is definitely the best politician today. How? By not being a politician, that's how. For the past five years he's been banging his head on his transformation agenda: free water, free sand, and plastics-free Saturdays. In between, he mumbles and exudes the very charisma of a three-pin plug. People just fell for this refreshing, working-class, crony-is-cissy style. And how he blew away and left BN for dead on the night.
Q. So there's a fraud?
A. What fraud? Our competent EC has just spent RM400 million of your good money to make sure that the election isn't another gold-bar multi-level scam. The guy at the polling station tallied my IC against his register and then screamed my name so loudly that the whole Kg Pandan knew I wasn't an Indon phantom. No fraud. Not a chance.
Q. Chinese Tsunami?
A. Both "Chinese" and "Tsunami" are overrated and overused terms, up there with verbal bores like transformation, gerrymandering, lol, samsung, Victoria Beckham. They've been given more credit than what they remotely deserve. And they're not even English to start with. Tsunami is, you know it, Japanese, Chinese is, well, Chinese. Japanese and Chinese are technically still at war (the siege of Manchuria hasn't formally ended). When did the last time you saw a Chinese speak to a Japanese? Exactly. So any expression containing both Japanese and Chinese words is immediately hilarious and can't be taken too seriously.
Q. Why couldn't BN do better? Where's the tipping point? Who's at fault? Will this repeat?
A. Man, I'm out of breath. There's just too many to pinpoint. Cows, videos, ambiga. But the feather that broke the camel's back was the submarines. Not one, but two. Maybe more, I don't know. This is unfortunate because Malaysia is historically a maritime nation (remember Parameswara, Hang Li Po, Sir Francis Drake?), but Malaysians are, genetically, scared of submarines. I watched submarine flicks U571, K19 and KL Gangster half-way and almost blacked out with claustrophobia. Naturally people won't vote anybody who's out to scare them.
Q. PR's popular vote was about 51%. Why wasn't it possible for PR to get more, like 60%?
A. So obvious. It's due to DAP's poor performance. The party's support among the Chinese was low. Surprise? Let's look at some Chinese-heavy seats (i.e 90% of voters are Chinese) where DAP won big-time. Let's assume same voter turnout across all races and let's assume (conservatively) that DAP got its votes only from Chinese voters and let's also assume that I'm right. In Seputeh, 97% of the Chinese voted DAP. What? Only 97%? This is terribly low compared to, say, 100%. In Mengelembu, it's mere 92%. It's disastrous 82% in Kuching. I can go on but the point is made: the Chinese don't support DAP. Now you see how I'm sharper than all those professors madya and those Scottish lookers combined (hahahaha).
