As an ardent environmentalist, I’m every bit as much in favour of snakes as of any other creatures in creation. Besides, my beloved elder son was born in a Snake year. So I feel no pangs, let alone fangs, in heartily joining the chorus of Gong Xi Fa Cai as we all welcome the Year of the Snake.

It can’t be denied, however, that though in fact most species are completely harmless to humans, snakes have historically had a bad rep as symbols of evil and cunning.

I blame Satan for this, as he reportedly impersonated an innocent reptile in his temptation of Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, thus causing God to throw our ancestors out of the Garden of Eden.

NONE And ever since, following Satan’s accursed example, evil-doers of every description have been slithering like so many snakes in the grass and doing their damnedest to make life a hell on earth for the rest of us.

There are countless examples of this in hissstory and currently around the world, of course, but for now let’s focus on the Malaysia’s perennial project to give snakes a bad name, the obsssscene Umno/BN regime.

For 50 years or more now, these cobras in human form have been stealthily stealing the nation’s wealth, steadily poisoning the minds of the populace, and viciously striking at people who dare cross their crooked paths.

And king of these cobras for the past 30 years has been the ferociously fork-tongued Dr Mahathir Mohamad. Having viciously attacked all who opposed him while he was prime minister, from the Lord President and other judges back in the 1980s to his erstwhile deputy Anwar Ibrahim, not to mention George Soros and all other Jews, now he’s turned his reptilian attention to Bersih co-chairperson, Ambiga Sreenevasan.

azlan All that the admirable Ambiga has done to arouse Mahathir’s malevolence is to lead Malaysians in urging for one of the many rights the reptilian regime has so long denied them - clean and fair elections.

    

But as Mahathir knows even better than the rest of the world does, he and his whole nest of vipers would be rendered politically extinct by an even remotely clean and fair general election.

So he took the opportunity during question-time following a speech on national security and the constitution in Cheras, KL last week to call for the Malaysian people to enable the regime to revoke the citizenship of Ambiga and others who “challenge the government and question the constitution”.

“To strip a person’s citizenship, you need to amend the constitution. And to amend the constitution you need two-thirds majority in Parliament,” Mahathir was quoted as saying, “so I ask that you give two-thirds majority to the BN government.”

From the hundreds of comments I’ve seen on Malaysiakini , however, it appears that most Malaysians are smart enough to write this off as just another hissy-fit by Mahathir in the face of his hysterical fear that the people will not only continue to deny Umno/BN a two-thirds majority as in 2008, but go even further and throw these snakes out of office altogether.

Insult to snakes

The only way Umno/BN can survive, let alone regain its lost two-thirds majority, is to steal the coming general election by means of the serpentine system of electoral chicanery that it has painstakingly perfected over the years. A system replete with every possible twist and turn from such gross gerrymandering that some votes are worth 30 times more others to a ‘bank’ of police and armed forces postal votes that can be manipulated and deployed in the regime’s favour.

azlan And if all that wasn’t lower than a snake’s belly, there has been so much stacking of the electoral rolls with foreigners, as most notoriously under Mahathir’s premiership in Sabah, plus so much tampering with the rolls and transgressing of the rules by the regime-friendly electoral commission, that any meaningful monitoring of an election is virtually impossible.

In any event, a great many if not a majority of Malaysians who vote have to do so in ignorance, as their overwhelmingly dominant sources of political ‘news’ are regime-controlled media whose ‘editors’ and ‘journalists’ are the kind of creeps and crawlers who serve them up nothing but Umno/BN lies and ssssspin.

Like, for example, some of the ‘stories’ from Umno/BN ‘news’ agency Bernama this week, starting with the one about Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s “doing things differently” to mark this Chinese New Year.

NONE This referred to a video in which Najib appeared in a blazing-red Chinese costume and beating a Chinese drum to, as he reportedly later explained “give a message to the Chinese community that I respect the Chinese culture,” adding that “as much as you should respect the Malay culture, you should respect the Indian culture and also the Chinese culture.”

I don’t know about you, but this and all of Najib’s other recent attempts to shed his old Chinese-blood-shedding, Scorpene submarines-scandal and Putrajaya-at-all-costs skins seems to me to smack more of snake culture than anything else.

As do similarly slimy but just as unsuccessful efforts by ex-inspector-general of police, Musa Hassan, to present himself as an upright and impartial citizen.    

According to Bernama , this former mattress-carrier for Mahathir in Anwar’s first sodomy trial recently declared that he would not join any political party, but would “fight alone in the best interest of the religion, race and nation”.

But unfortunately for the credibility of his alleged new, upstanding, independent identity, Musa’s warning of the possibility of an ‘Arab Spring’ in Malaysia by the losers in the forthcoming general election suspiciously echoed similar recent comments by Umno/BN’s internal security and public order department director Salleh Mat Rasid and Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Mohamed Nazri Abdul Aziz.

“Previously, the US Intelligence agency the CIA infiltrated governments to cause chaos, but now the Jews and Westerners use NGOs to adopt liberalism,” he claimed, thus revealing that he’s still very much still Mahathir’s pet python, if no longer police chief.

“They use NGOs demanding that the government become more transparent, (and) encourage lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender,” he ranted, claiming that “All these are done to weaken Islam.”

“If liberalism is not adopted, the government is deemed as cruel," he went on, before making the ludicrous remark that “opposition lies that federal government is corrupt and weak are aimed at influencing the people”.

In other words, despite Umno/BN’s strenuous attempts to worm their way into more Malaysians’ affections this Chinese New Year, all they’ve done is to affirm that they’re as big an insult as ever to good, honest snakes of all other species.

And that, come the general election, they deserve a good kick up the asp.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con' and ‘Malaysia Mania'.