COMMENT It is always a useful enterprise to turn obsession into irony. In life it is the great antidote to insomnia; in politics, it is the alternative to hysteria and frenzy.

The crowds in seemingly high dudgeon that demonstrated on two occasions in Seberang Jaya last weekend in defence of Prime Minister Najib Razak's supposedly injured dignity over an example of public derision of the PM's remarks on the price of a humble vegetable were decidedly short on humour, to say the least.

But humourless or not, they seemed to have succeeded in stirring a little debate among the opposition on the appropriateness of an apology over the PM's assumed hurt at an elected PKR representative's supposed audacity at having constructed a figure in the likeness of Najib and stuffing its mouth with the vegetable of newfangled fame...