I wrote here once that Dr Mahathir Mohamad, in challenging the Umno establishment, was in for a rude awakening. Boy, was he rudely awakened. Quiet are the pundits who talk of Mahathir as a samurai warrior who never sheaths his sword until his job is done. It appears that the whole melodrama is now settled through backroom deals which the public is not privy to.

At the end of it all, we can see it now for what it really was - just a simple problem of Umno elite cohesion. Nothing more and nothing less. He who has the gold still rules. He who had prostituted democratic principles to retain his previous incumbency is now a victim of his own legacy. But all's well that ends well.

The non-Malays were wise to have kept out of it all, though only just barely. Apart from the political has-beens rushing onto Mahathir's bandwagon for the cheap but lucrative ride, the only collateral damage has been opportunistic PAS. They had chosen to ride the tiger and now find themselves just hanging on to the tiger's tail with their hands stinking of you-know-what.

The only real gainers are the Umno division chiefs who now emerge truly as warlords whose party votes will go to the highest bidder. All that investment they had made in order to control their little fiefdoms has now paid off. Its cashing-out time. With RM3 million of public funds granted by Pak Lah to each of them to manage, political patronage is now institutionalised and money-politics legitimised. So much for Mr Clean.

So in a way, Mahathir inadvertently did the rakyat a favour. He has shown Malaysians that in all his craftiness, it has made him only the second-most destructive man to Malaysian democracy. Someone else managed to be the most destructive man, by default and by just feigning a benign personality.

Will we ever see through all these?