When the oil runs out - Neil on Kerismuddin at Jeff Ooi's blog.

They are playing a knife's edge game. This brinkmanship can only be explained on their desperation.

They know Umno is no longer relevant because it has no viable solution to the problems of the race it is supposed to represent using a party whose total membership remains only 15% of that community. Therefore, the denials and deflections are to cast attention away from the yawning gaps between the majority being the poor Malays, and the minority being the rich Malays who share the same ontology as UMNO elites who have hijacked the very policies that were meant to help those poor Malays, and to add injury to insult, framed the communities who had sacrificed their future to support those policies in the spirit of Barisan Nasional, now relegated to the graveyard of dead utopias. In fact, you can rename it Batang Nasional.

If Najib and Petronas are to be believed, this country will be an oil net importer latest by 2011, some say 2009. Importing oil will mean full removal of subsidies, higher costs of production, closure of inefficient factories, and increased capital risk. The attendant economic tailspin will contract service firms which will affect the livelihood of the urban middleclass Malays who won't and can't go back to farming. Many will be too old by then to retool their own skills, let alone change their mindsets, a process which cannot translate 'feel-good' to 'feel-the-goods'. Tax revenues will decline which means government tenders will taper. To the ranks of the thousands of graduates who have graduated to join the dole will be the additional thousands who will be graduating to join the queue to the dole. Demand for continuous support will exceed supply from the other communities, many of whom will similarly suffer.

The bottomline will perhaps be a new recession. Signs are already showing that, despite proclaimed performances, things at the grassroot, retail, and infrastructure-maintenance levels aren't equivalently rosy.

So far, people are spending on credit. When the truth comes out on the precise standings of Petronas and other GLCs, inasumuch as we know of the red-line levels of the financial standing of the state governments, shit will hit the roof and people will take to the streets to riot. Expect that on the day this country achieves 'developed' status.

They know all this. That is why they played on tribal fear. Despite the calling by Badawi at the beginning for them to display sensitivity to the other communities on what they would be saying, they went ahead. KJ said it was no-holds bar. Is that to be interpreted as implicit acceptance of what Hashim Suboh was trying to egg Hishammuddin to do - use the keris? And this symbolic ritual of drawing the keris - how does it jive with the aspiration to be a global towering Malay with mindsets changed to be more progressive, if in the first place it wouldn't take even a goon to realize that memories of scars about its use still rankle the minds of thousands who are still living today, those thousands who incidentally pay 80% of the tax revenue that supports the very government this bunch depends on?

When Hishammuddin held the keris, was he remotely sensitive to what his party President had exhorted, what his fellow component party peers had exhorted, what he would have concluded from the uproars a year ago, carried forward while holding the post of Minister of Education, a post that was supposed to integrate national, not racial, unity, open minds, lift spirits and achieve excellence? Let alone carry the tradition of his lineage?

No-holds bar in a multiracial society doesn't and shouldn't mean free-for-all in a monoracial political assembly. Certainly the right to address all issues in a publicly-broadcasted event of such import should be carried with a greater sense of responsibility. Especially since the leader has had to say Umno was for ALL.

If Umno was for ALL, they have certainly shown they're not up to it!

Now this part about rehearsed speeches. If the general assembly speeches were indeed pre-vetted, then how did those tirades get past the scrutiny of the Chief Mediator, the Party President, who incidentally, is also the PM? Since they got through in all the pristine glory of their gory KKK dogmas, does that mean that the final summing speech is..fake? And if it is not fake, does that mean the whole exercise was rehearsed so that fire is set in order for a fireman to be seen, and applauded, coming in to the rescue at the end?

There must be a more efficient way to win approval without insulting the intelligence of the rakyat.

Too much time, energy, money and resources have been nationally wasted on shenanigans, manipulations, attention-deflections and skulldruggeries. In the end, it would seem that those who complain about these race-based bashers are the ones who care more for the heartland, Malays, Chinese, Indians and Rakyat Aslis. That would be a fitting indictment that Umno's strategy is no strategy, Umno's tactics are monkey tricks, and Umno's elites have forgotten their roots, and how they have come up over the future of millions.