A couple of months ago I wrote an article for Malaysiakini entitled Pak Lah or Pak Blah? posing the question that I and many Malaysians had been asking ourselves and each other for a very long time: is Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi really committed to putting his long-promised reforms into action, or is he nothing but talk?

And around the same time, as you'll recall, his competence and capabilities were being called into question by a far more ferocious interrogator than me or any other mere peon of the press: Dr Mahathir Mohamad, no less.

I didn't watch Pak Lah's much-heralded appearance on television appearance in response to Dr M's hectoring, as tame pseudo "interviews" aren't my scene. But to judge from the similarly partisan English-language press, whose reports next morning were all as positive as possible, it was a far-from-convincing performance.