As if Malaysia wasn’t enough of a madhouse before the recent general election, now it’s looking more than ever like a haven for the criminally insane.

Having had his ‘1Malaysia’ reduced to ‘less than half-Malaysia’, Najib Abdul Razak is still apparently suffering from the psychotic delusion that he really is the legitimate reigning prime minister. Or maybe I should make that ‘raining prime minister’, as he recently bizarrely declared himself and his fellow BN inmates to be an “umbrella for all Malaysians”.

Maybe his minders should change his medication. Or better still, get Dr Mahathir Mohamad back on his case. Because if madness is truly, as they say, going on and on and on, doing the same thing and expecting a different result, then Najib is certifiably nuts.

NONE Or else, he still imagines that he majority of Malaysians are. There he was at the Agong’s birthday bash raving on with all his usual lunacies, like “the BN government is aware of cracks in national unity and that some people feel marginalised, and is committed to addressing the challenges”.

Never mind that he and his paid crackpots in Perkasa, Utusan Malaysia and other members of his ‘Umnobrella’ are the ones who have been attacking national unity. Or that the “some” people who he concedes feel marginalised comprise at least 53 percent of the nation’s voters.

And as for he and his government being “committed” to addressing the challenges, they should  instead be committed to barred and padded cells in the nearest high-security Hospital Bahagia.

Where they can happily entertain each other with such gags as Najib’s declaration that “certain parties are trying to dispute the results of GE13 which favoured BN by raising issues such as the popular vote, use of indelible ink, claims of the presence of phantom voters and so-called power blackouts during vote counting”, followed by his ludicrous response that “it is very easy to blame others, but it will not solve any problems or unravel all the challenges facing Malaysia”.

'As if the audience took him seriously'

“The government urges all Malaysians to consider the togetherness factors that can unify us rather than seeing points that will trap us in nostalgia and past reality,” he continued, for all the world as if he imagined his audience was taking him seriously, before finally ending with the punch-line that he and his colleagues in government “will continue to defend, protect and preserve the constitutional principles, the rule of law” and blah, blah, blah.

All of which, as usual, got me wondering who are the clowns that write Najib’s speeches for him, and how does he manage to deliver them with a straight face?

NONE Or without laughing along with the rest of us at the antics of his allies under the ‘Umnobrella’ like Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi ( left ), whose laughable suggestion to those protesting election fraud was to tell them to migrate elsewhere, and whose utterly deranged response to demands for justice in the cases of more murderous deaths in the custody of his police has been to diminish such deaths as “unfortunate” and to call critics to respect police morale.

Then, in what was such a top week for BN maniacs that it seemed the psychiatrists must be on strike, Immigration Department director-general Alias Ahmad announced that 6,564 Malaysians will have their passports cancelled the next time they venture back into the country because they have “tarnished the nation’s image abroad”.

Among those facing this penalty, according to one of BN’s loony ‘newspapers’ Berita Harian , are Malaysian overseas students who have made allegedly seditious statements online or been photographed holding the Malaysian flag upside-down.

But none, we note, like BN politicians, supporters or cronies strongly suspected of electoral fraud, billion-ringgit thefts and embezzlements, homicides of ‘suspects’ in their custody, or involvement in political murders like that of Mongolian translator Altantuya Shaariibuu - whose immigration records, we all recall, were mysteriously erased by somebody in Alias Ahmad’s own Immigration Department.

And speaking of hypocrisy on a hilarious scale, action against one of the few sources of true and independent political news in BN’s Malaysia, Malaysiakini has been urged by several BN jokers, including some zany named Dzulkarnian Taib who claims to be president of Kelab Wartawan Muda Malaysia (KWMM) or Malaysian Young Journalists’ Club.

BN's jokes are wearing thin

In the face of the fact that he and other so-called journalists with Malaysia’s mainstream media are in reality more warts than wartawan (journalists), Dzulkarnian declared that Malaysiakini must be required to register officially and have strict conditions imposed on its operations “to prevent it from disrupting unity in the country”.

azlan According to Bernama , the ‘news’ agency that dutifully reports the rantings of those sheltering under Najib’s BN ‘Umnobrella’, Dzulkarnian called for the authorities to “take immediate action” against Malaysiakini , claiming that its reporting was “lopsided” and thus “could adversely affect the political situation in the country.”

And as if to prove that lawyers can be regime-compliant as any journalist on the BN payroll - as if we all didn’t already know - Bernama reported that “advocate and solicitor” Salehuddin Saidin and “law practitioner” Wan Azmir Wan Majid had joined in the anti- Malaysiakini chorus too.

All of this would be a bit of a giggle if we were all hearing it for the first time, but after several decades of it, such psychotic slop starts to wear thin.

Which is why most Malaysians long ago stopped laughing with the criminally insane BN regime, and have even grown sick of laughing at it.

So if these nincompoops think they can get away with their inanity and insanity much longer, safely under the shelter of Najib’s imaginary umbrella as he struts around playing the faux-transformative ‘emperor’ in his non-existent ‘new’ clothes, they’ve got another think coming.

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'.