Of all the ridiculous rhetoric that Khairy Jamaluddin spouted in his speeches to the recent Umno general assembly, surely the most visible was his remark that "We should change from being defensive to being offensive".

As far as I and, apparently, growing numbers of Malaysians are concerned, the attitudes and activities of Umno and its political cronies in the Barisan Nasional coalition have been utterly offensive throughout living memory, and are growing yet more offensive by the day.

NONE For example, many found it offensive enough that the self-adoring Khairy so easily satisfied his lust for power by marrying into Abdullah Badawi's family and scoring himself a job helping pull the Prime Minister's strings. Then, when Badawi was finally dumped from office, it was doubly offensive to many of us that Khairy not only didn't get the come-uppance he richly deserved, but on the contrary managed to score himself a parliamentary seat. And now he's making an even more offensive spectacle of himself, playing the role of the young wira setting up a war room to launch assaults on and capture the votes of young Malaysians in future elections.

He's also showing disturbing signs of playing the maverick Malay messiah role that served Tun Dr Mahathir so well in his rise to power. Despite the well-known fact that Mahathir hates him along with almost everybody else, Khairy has taken to portaying himself as on a Mahathir-style mission to solve the ‘Malay Dilemma' by dragging Umno Youth and by extension Umno and Malays in general "kicking and screaming into the 21st century".

Talent for 'sowing confusion'

Besides emulating Mahathir's mix of conceit, deceit missionary zeal, he's also showing a talent for defeating good sense by sowing confusion. Asked by Malaysiakini whether one of his speeches had been less-than-rapturously received by his audience, he reportedly replied with a burst of gobbledegook that would have done The Master proud: "The fact that after I spoke, during the debate, during the speeches by the delegates, even if they didn't touch directly on what I said, the fact that they didn't say anything inflammatory (and) incendiary, is a message that they may not fully understand or appreciate yet, but the chief has NONE said something to you (and you've) got to toe the line."

And when queried as to whether he saw his calls for a new, racially inclusive Umno could be seen as self-serving or hypocritical in view of his previous Malay-supremacist antics, he responded that he was not a chameleon, as he had earlier branded Anwar Ibrahim (left) for converting from Umno, but was "still very much the same man". He then went on to explain, demonstrating as blithe a disregard for truth or rationality as Mahathir ever could, that "I don't view my position as completely divorced from before. Maybe the difference is in rhetoric". Or, as I take him to mean, he's just conveniently changed his tune and doesn't actually believe a word of what he says.

However, there was one word in his duplicitous statement that prompts me to suspect something that Khairy might genuinely, albeit unconsciously, mean: "divorced". Can he possibly be contemplating the thought that now his marriage to Badawi's daughter has served its original purpose,it's now been rendered redundant and thus dispensible?

Confounding psychoanalytic theory

Lest this fancy of mine strike you as far-fetched to the point of offensiveness, let me hasten to blame it on the fact that the counselling course I'm currently doing is not only inconveniently conflicting with my writing of this column, but also confronting and possibly confounding me with psychoanalytic theory.

Rightly (writely?) or wrongly, I've started seeing and hearing unconscious revelations everywhere. For example, as I've mentioned before, every time the words "bridge" or "model" emerge from Najib Razak's pink lips, I hear them as Freudian slips. In other words, as unintentional flashes of insight into his preoccupation with crooked bridges or the murder of the Mongolian ‘model' Altantuya Shaariibuu. Similarly, I can't help perceiving Khairy's choice of the word "divorced" rather than "different", which would have served just as well, as possibly revealing an unthinkable thought that he's struggling mightily to suppress and conceal.

But I feel no need to resort to head-shrinking or any other species of mental gymnastics to uncover the offensive truth about most Umno/BN utterances, as they're usually simple, straight-forward lies. Take the statement to parliament the other day by Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Nazri Abdul Aziz in reponse to opposition accusations that the police and Malaysian Anti Corruption Commission (MACC) engage in selective prosecution.

A ccused of 'being selective'

Admittedly Nazri got off to a shaky start, asking the resounding rhetorical question "So why are you accusing us of being selective? Is it possible to arrest 100 percent politicians from BN although they did not commit any offence to prove that we are not selective?" But, quickly realising that his question had put him on the defensive by literally begging for a resoundingly "yes" reply, he switched into attack mode with a series of blatantly and offensively false statements.

bar council debate on judicial commission 250407 nazri abd aziz he MACC, he declared, is carrying out its responsibility to investigate any person involved in corruption "regardless of their race and political differences".

"The MACC is colour-blind when it comes to their investigations," he insisted, later also stating for good measure that "I can assure you that the police do not practise selective prosecution".

Lying to parliament is a sacking offence in respectable legislatures, but so selective is the application of rules and laws in Umno/BN's Malaysia that Nazri (right) knows he can get away with procedural murder, just as the MACC and police can apparently get away with the real thing. Nazri knows, and knows that you and I and everyone else who's interested in the truth knows, that the government, judiciary, police, MACC and virtually every other public institution in Malaysia is selectively biased in favour of Umno/BN to an utterly offensive degree.

What's even more offensive is that the offences that BN and its cronies commit and condone are prosecuted not only selectively, but strategically. As in the recent arrest of four Pakatan Rakyat ‘suspects' and just one token BN member, all on ridiculously trivial charges compared with deaths in police and MACC custody, the billion-dollar PKFZ scandal and about a zillion other Umno/BN-connected crimes, and all for the obvious actual purpose of destablising the opposition-held Selangor state government. Which brings us back full circle to Khairy Jamaluddin's call for Umno to switch from the defensive to the offensive.

And the question that every honest Malaysian and friend of Malaysia must be asking: how much more offensive can Umno/BN and its cronies possibly get before karma catches up with them?