I see that some Malaysian sportsperson has highlighted the ‘bad’ in badminton by failing a doping test, and that Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin has been desperately trying to dupe the fans into believing that it’s all a terrible mistake.

Not that there’s anything new about this sort of state of affairs. For decades, the BN regime has been systematically doping the Malaysian people with such opiates as racism, religionism, jingoism and hand-outs, and simultaneously duping them with massive doses of official falsehood and fake news.

Thus stupefying citizens in shrinking but still sufficient numbers to either keep voting for the regime, or else to keep not bothering to register to vote against it, so it can steal the rigged elections it regularly stages to make it appear legitimate.

Though how anybody in his or her right mind could be so deceived, if not outright drugged by such clearly obvious junk as the regime pushes in its so-called ‘mainstream’ media, is beyond me.

Yet that denizen of all disseminators of dadah for deceit-addicted dopes and dupes, Umno’s own Utusan Malaysia , still defends itself by denying that its sales and reader numbers are apparently crashing as catastrophically as its credibility.

According to ‘Awang Selamat’, the alias this alleged ‘newspaper’ employs to hide the identity of whichever dimwit writes the ridiculous editorials in its Sunday edition Mingguan Malaysia , ratings agency Nielsen Malaysia’s downgrading of Utusan ’s readership from 636,000 to 563,000 between July 2013 and June 2014 is a “joke”.

The editorial went on to accuse Nielsen Malaysia of “manipulation and bias”, and also of using a research methodology that is “outdated”, as evidenced by its according some newspapers lower readerships than their circulations.

Though as Nielsen and everybody else who is interested well know, many if not all of Malaysia’s mainstream newspapers routinely try to vastly inflate both their circulations and readerships by printing far more copies than they sell, then dumping the rest in schools, government departments and probably even waste-paper recycling depots.

A minor prop

Another organisation that was busy this week helping its BN masters to keep the dopes well and truly duped was the Wanita wing of the minor regime-accomplice party Gerakan, whose chief Tan Lian Hoe warned the party conference against calls for democracy and declared support for repressive laws to ensure that Malaysia stays “politically stable”.

Getting quite carried away with her passion to pursue the BN-regime agenda, she went on to make some even more risible remarks like “there is no need for us to follow the cries of democracy that in the end destroys ourselves,” and “we can’t do something according to our own whims based on human rights.”

Then she apparently became almost hysterical, in both the hilarious and unhinged sense of the word, branding the opposition as “traitors” for “manipulating issues and sowing the seeds of hatred against the government.”

“The freedom given by the government should be respected and valued, not challenged and trampled upon,” she ranted on, before accusing Pakatan Rakyat of “committing “acts of provocation that have soured race relations in the country,” and finally lamenting that “their (Pakatan’s) vile actions are legitimised and forgotten without any criticism or demands for explanation.”

This diatribe was such a masterpiece of spins, slurs and outright lies that it was almost up, or rather down, to the levels of deceit achieved by Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Najib Abdul Razak and other world-class regime exponents of the dope-duping arts.

As breathtakingly hypocritical, too, as all the “acts of provocation” of which Tan Lian Hoe ( right ) accused the opposition have been wrought by BN itself or the pimps it pays with public money in fake NGOs like Isma and Perkasa and media like the above-mentioned junk ‘newspaper’ Utusan Malaysia .

And, though these and sundry other “vile actions” by the regime are indeed “legitimised and forgotten” but its laughable ‘law-enforcement’ agencies, when falsely attributed to the opposition they are followed by trumped-up charges of sedition or, in the particular case of Anwar Ibrahim, of sodomy.

Thus far, however, there are sufficient dopes and dupes among the Malaysian public, and ample dopers and dupers infesting the police force, judiciary, anti-corruption commission, electoral commission and other civil services, not to mention the monstrously mendacious mainstream media, to keep the innocent under threat and the guilty in power and out of jail.

Hope, not mope

But rather than moping, I believe the rest of us should keep hoping. Because, to judge by the recent reduction in the fuel subsidy, so Malaysians are now paying above the world price for RON95 petrol, the forthcoming goods and services tax (GST) to raise funds to pay for regime blunder and plunder, and the soaring national debt, BN is fast running short of the public funds it desperately depends on for buying support.

And it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the regime to hide the fact from all but the most dismally dazed that Malaysia is going backwards economically as fast as it is failing in every field you can think of, from its increasingly dopey educational system to its disgraceful international reputation.

Witness the far-from-surprising recent revelation by Malaysian International Chamber of Commerce and Industry executive director Stewart Forbes that the gross domestic product per worker in Malaysia in 2013 was only the equivalent of a Japanese worker in 1972, a Singaporean in 1978, a Hong Kong worker in 1982, a Taiwanese in 1990 and a South Korean in 1995.

Or, as Malaysiakini quoted Forbes as adding, at its current productivity growth rate of a dismal 3.1 percent per annum, it will take Malaysia 19 years to catch up to where South Korea is right now.

What an absolute disgrace this is to the criminal dopes who have been trying to dupe Malaysians that, as Mahathir is never tired of claiming, “Malaysia is the envy of the world”, and that Prime Minister Najib keeps declaring he is hell-bent on “transforming” into the “world’s best democracy.”

Despite all their bluff and bluster, these crooks are fast heading down the proverbial slippery slope. And will sooner or later find themselves, metaphorically for most and even literally for the killers among them, at the end of their rope.

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’.