Barisan on the bandwagon

Holy cow. Barisan politicians are really jumping on the blogging bandwagon now. Hm, I wonder if it's got anything to do with BN's stunning loss of four states (plus failure to recapture Kelantan) and its two-thirds Parliamentary majority to the Opposition in a strongly Internet-driven upset, after years of insulting Malaysian bloggers as stupid and seditious? (Lim Kit Siang's had his own blog for quite a long time. Teresa Kok, the DAP MP for Seputeh who's been blogging since 2006, is quite funny because the title of her blog is "Sassy MP".)

For instance, the ex-Health Minister Dr Chua Soi Lek has turned to blogging. He has more free time these days after resigning from his Cabinet and MCA posts, since he was caught on video demonstrating safe sex. Alas, he uncreatively picked "drchua" as his sub-domain name on Blogger, and then found that there were already 8 "drchuas" on there. So he's drchua9.

Mohammad Ali Rustam, the Chief Minister of Melaka, wanted to get into the Malaysia Book of Record as the first CM to have a blog. Then he found out that his skin was too thin to take criticism, especially over a post implying that state governments allowing Chinese to farm their dirty pigs was a special concession that we should be endlessly grateful for, and deleted all comments and disabled future ones. However, not only did Malaysiakini archive the comments on the controversial post, TWO mirror blogs with comments enabled popped up rapidly. (Melaka sucks, by the way. If you believe all the stuff they tell you in school about how it's the nexus of history, you will be heartbroken as I was by how horribly run-down all the beautiful old buildings are.)

Muhammad Muhammad Taib (no, that's not a typo) the ex-CM of Selangor who was given a senator post as a consolation, is also jumping in. Ironic, considering he once lodged a police report against Raja Petra Kamarudin for insulting the King in a post on Malaysia Today. At least he was smart enough to buy his own domain name and hasn't started deleting comments - yet.

What I think is really interesting about all this, is that blogs and alternative news sites like Malaysiakini and Malaysia Today (I prefer "Today" over "'Kini" since it's free, although they don't quite cover the same ground) have had a really active part in turning the tide in this past election. Unlike in the USA where bloggers are merely observers and commentators, Malaysia is a small country and communication through the Internet only reinforces the "everybody knows everybody" atmosphere. By allowing people to see how many others were frustrated with Barisan Nasional, blogs, alternative news sites, and yes, Facebook allowed individuals to overcome the apathy of "Barisan is going to win anyway" and gave them the impetus to go out and vote. Barisan just didn't see this coming.

I'm no political pundit and I can't stand people who go on about it all the time, but I'm a citizen of a democratic nation with eyes and ears and emotions, and I unabashedly find recent developments incredibly cool.