That, to me, pretty concisely sums up the Umno/BN regime and the compelling reasons why Malaysians in all their diversity need to unite to remove this curse from the country they claim to love.

But unfortunately, as demonstrated by Umno/BN’s fake ‘win’ of a majority of seats in the 13th general election despite its loss of the overall majority of votes, the very fakery and on-the-takery that render the regime such a curse are also what keep it alive.

Fake Umno/BN election ‘success’, for example, depends not only on the drawing of fake electoral boundaries by the regime’s fake electoral commission, but also on enough citizens being either willing to take bribes to vote for the highest bidder, or else so patently and pathetically fake as to not bother to register or turn up to vote at all.

Similarly, the survival of Umno/BN’s fake ‘news’ media depend not only on such constitution-faking laws as the unconstitutionally-oppressive Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984 and the transparency-killing Official Secrets Act 1972, but on the cooperation of countless fake ‘journalists’ corruptly taking salaries in return for their support of the regime in the form of lies, spin, self-censorship or outright silence.

And so on and so forth, through every conceivable institution of government and department of the civil service.

So it came as no surprise last week when fake Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, already under strong suspicion of being massively on the take via such scams as the long-ago Scorpene submarines purchase and the very much ongoing multi-billion-ringgit 1Malaysia Development Berhad swindle, once again stole US President Donald Trump’s trademark “fake news” concept for the purpose of belabouring his own detractors and critics.

Umno/BN’s very own fake ‘news agency’, Bernama, reported a lavish selection of Najib’s typical exercises in fakery, such as his claim that “a well-known foreign newspaper” had printed “complete lies about the government”, and that this had been done “without a shred of evidence, and based solely on nameless, anonymous sources who may not even exist”.

When in fact, as everybody knows, the so-called “well-known foreign newspaper” was the authoritative Wall Street Journal, and that, far from being alone, it had been joined in this reporting by countless other such trusted newspapers as The Washington Post and The Guardian; the story was not about the Malaysian government, but Najib himself; and the sources on which the running story was based, far from being ‘nameless’ or ‘anonymous’ or even non-existent, included such authorities as the US Department of Justice.

Entirely undaunted by the universally-known facts of the matter, however, which included numerous mentions of ‘Malaysian Official 1’ (MO1) or, in other words, apparently Najib himself, in the findings of the Department of Justice investigation and similar probes in Swiss, Singaporean and other jurisdictions, this faker went on to claim that such highly-credible reports “represent a cancer at the heart of journalism... a disease that can have very serious effects”.

And as if that wasn’t a fake enough take on the topic, Najib also claimed in the same fake diatribe that the Umno/BN regime permits considerable freedom of speech in Malaysia, in contravention of the clearly evident fact that a great many critics of him and his government’s blatant fakery and takery have been summarily hit with charges of sedition...