Having been off the air for the past three weeks to undergo and recover from a hip-replacement operation, it’s nice to be back here talking the talk, if not yet too easily walking the walk.

You might imagine, as I did, that a procedure involving bone saws, hammers, chisels and other instruments of the orthopaedic arts would be agonising in the extreme as soon as the anaesthetic wore off.

But thanks to a cocktail of cutting-edge narcotics, the recuperation process has so far been a lot less painful than I feared. Physically, that is.

But totally to my surprise, it’s had a freaky and totally excruciating effect on my appreciation of food. Whether it’s a side-effect of the pharmaceuticals or of my shiny new titanium-alloy implant, the smell, taste and texture of almost everything I force myself to eat are almost enough to turn my stomach.

At least I can console myself with the fact that I’ve never been much of a gourmet. Unlike most of my Malaysian friends and colleagues, whose palates are so sensitive they can distinguish the subtlest distinctions between countless varieties of laksa or other culinary specialties, I’m pretty much a clod when it comes to the finer points of food.

So my bizarre - and I trust temporary - distaste for even such former favourites as Vegemite toast or bacon and eggs isn’t freaking me out too badly.

In any case, it’s nothing compared with the psychic pain I’ve been suffering along with you, my fellow fans of truth and justice, ever since I left the haven of hospital and started hitting the Net to try and catch up with the latest on Malaysian politics.

At first I fancied I must be hallucinating; drifting in and out of drug-induced dreams. But no, as surreal as it seemed, it soon became clear that the nightmare was real.

The first shock to my system was Raja Petra Kamarudin’s statutory declaration that the Rosmah Mansor, wife of Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak, had been at the scene of the murder of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shaariibuu.

Not that I question Raja Petra’s credibility. But the few days of deathly silence that followed his allegations, then Rosmah’s dotty declaration that she was innocent - but would not press charges against her accuser as she had “many other bigger things to attend to for the people and the nation" - struck me as just too weird for words.

As was the next brain-buster to hit the headlines: fresh allegations of sodomy against Anwar Ibrahim by former aide Saiful Bukhari Azlan.

Blame it on my blur post-operative condition or simply my chronic incredulity induced by the Mahathir-sponsored sodomy farce of 10 years ago, but there’s no way I can get my head around this one.

Every time I think about it, all I can come up with is the same questions everyone else seems to be asking. Like how come Saiful was able to get not just one but two audiences with Najib before he reported the alleged crime?

What motivated Anwar to take refuge in a foreign embassy? And, of course, most crucially, as long as Anwar’s accusers always claim that he commits his sodomies in condominiums, why is there never any evidence of condoms?

Reality-starved rakyat

Speaking of evidence or lack thereof, it’s fascinating to see that Anwar has made reports against attorney general Abdul Gani Patail and inspector-general of police Musa Hassan for allegedly fabricating evidence against him back when he was beaten-up in jail, or as Mahathir suggested at the time, when ‘he beat himself up’.

Meanwhile, there are questions just as challenging over the whereabouts and the well-being of P Balasubramaniam, the private investigator who submitted a statutory declaration implicating Najib in the Altantuya affair; and then, the very next day recanted by means of a second statutory declaration omitting all reference to Najib.

In any halfway respectable country, any of these mysterious scandals, let alone all of them, would be enough to bring the government down. But in Malaysia, whose system Australia’s prime minister had the ruddy insensitivity (or was it sarcasm?) to characterise as a “vibrant democracy”, almost anything goes.

The best that Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has been able to manage amidst all the uproar has been a statement that he will hand over the premiership to the fatally-suspect Najib in the two years that he claims it’s going to take him to completed his long-despaired-of reforms.

Abdullah also launched a barely-coherent attack on unspecified “treacherous” and even “treasonous” parties who deliberately attempt “to create perceptions of uneasiness and distrust among the people via the Internet and SMS”.

“Conduct attributed to the truth is not appreciated,” he ranted. “Perception negates the truth. The truth is no longer talked about. The important thing is the perception.”

All this confusion was too much for some bloggers, notably Marina Mahathir, Ahiruddin ‘Rocky’ Attan and Wong Chun Wai, who called for their fellows to strike in protest.

Wong waxed especially eloquent on the subject, writing that “We have had enough. We are simply fed up. For the next 24 hours, bloggers are on strike.

“There will be no sodomy, no anal sex, no power grab, no clinging on to power, no lies, no statutory declaration, no P Balasubramaniam, no Anwar Ibrahim, no Najib Tun Razak, no Saiful and nothing to do with the issue. Let's do something useful with our family and loved ones. At least, for another 24 hours, let's get away from this madness of Malaysian politics.”

As I’ve said before, Wong seems to forget that Star , the newspaper of which he is chief group editor, has - along with all the other pimps and perjurers of the mainstream media - for decades been peddling perception in preference to the truth in favour of its political sponsors. So, the last thing the reality-starved rakyat needs is a strike by truth-telling bloggers.

Call me medically-fixated, but what the nation needs in this current surreal situation isn’t a strike so much as surgery - radical removal of the rot and corruption from the judiciary, the police force and every level of government.

The kind of surgery that an apparently revitalised and prosecution-enabled ACA appears to be performing as we speak, on the director-general of the immigration department and some of his high-level cronies.