Four gaffes and a rocky marriage

If a Hollywood movie were to be made about Anwar and his relationship with his own Pakatan Rakyat coalition it would need a good title. Based on the events of the past months how about Four Gaffes and a Rocky Marriage – the story of an unlikely union?

In this romantic comedy a dashing and charismatic Malaysian-style Hugh Grant changes his mind, his taste, his rhetoric, and his politics over and over again. He transforms himself like a chameleon from 1970s militant student leader with leftwing sympathies to 1990s Deputy Prime Minister and faithful aide to Dr. M to turncoat and impatient dauphin to post-modern builder of coalitions of conflicting parties…and so on.

The gaffes flow from his friends Lim Kit Siang and Lim Guan Eng and extended family. There is plenty for all as the marriage falters and then steadies. You never know when the Leader’s family will take over and for that matter which Leader’s family since the Marriage (coalition) is full of ruling feudal families or family firms.

You get the idea. This is a film with a subplot that wouldn’t get a family friendly rating. But this story is not fiction. In the past few months both the DAP and PAS have done their best to embarrass Anwar – and Anwar in turn constantly embarrasses them. First up the four gaffes:

Gaffe 1

Last week DAP secretary general Lim Guan Eng let loose a big one by invoking Hitler during a spat with UMNO information chief Datuk Ahmad Maslan, who’d said Malays will lose their rights under a PR government.

“This is the same thing Hitler raised about the Jewish threat,” Guan Eng shot back. It was a quick but crass response that betrays the memory of all those who have suffered and died under fascism. Anwar waved it away. No worries.

Gaffe 2

DAP national assistant treasurer Nga Kor Ming used a speech to a packed auditorium to call Perak Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Zambry Abdul Kadir “hitam metalik” (metallic black). He then went further referring to Zambry as “haram jadah” – something we won’t translate on a family website.

If you watch this video you’ll see how Nga gets a laugh out of his audience but thankfully there were also embarrassed gasps. Most of the audience were not racist.

Gaffe 3

This gaffe involved DAP Kota Alam Shah Assemblyman M. Manoharan who in September joined the growing band of people to put their foot in it via Twitter.

Tweeting how he doesn’t fly the Jalur Gemilang he wrote: “We don’t have a world class flag. Americans are laughing. Please go to America with our flag.”

“Pakatan will come up with a new flag,” he tweeted.

What followed were furious backtracking and a slap on the wrist from his party.

Gaffe 4

And in October this howler from a bit player in the form of the assistant to Penang DAP state assemblyman A.Thanasekaran:

Leong Yook Kong used Twitter to make an unfortunate joke about Indian men and snakes.”If you see a snake & an Indian man, who do you hit first?,” he tweeted.

Four gaffes in three months…and that’s just DAP.

PAS, meanwhile, offers Anwar a constant drip-feed of embarrassment via the “hudud component”. Despite the fact that everyone is trying to wish away this topic, its very existence harms the man trying to portray his political marriage of convenience with PAS as both religiously inclusive and moderate for our nation’s more urban youth.

Meantime Anwar’s trials and tribulations don’t help. A coalition leader facing sodomy charges is enough to make a grown PAS man cry. Anwar and PAS are a bit like the married couple whose friends all say: “I just don’t know what they see in each other!”

It’s all a tale of a flawed and ultimately doomed relationship that is unlikely to ever be made into a film. If it was, the audience would never believe it.