"While we condemn Pakatan’s dirty political campaign, BN and its leadership must shoulder the lion’s share of the blame for their weak and shoddy responses. While Pakatan unleashed an urban guerrilla army of hardened and heavily-armed street-fighters, BN in contrast produced a 60s-style musical carnival replete with catchy jingles, patriotic songs, clowns and flag-waving marchers to counter it.Politics used to be the art of the possible. Now, according to The Mole's faithful letter man, it is the battle of perception. In his latest letter GE13: How BN lost the battle of perception, Mr Calcin Sankaran analyses the effective, if dubious and sometimes outright foul, strategies employed by Pakatan Rakyat to push the BN perpetually to the wall in the last five years and blames the BN government's inept response team and time.
While Pakatan wheeled out smooth-talking spin masters to hurl outrageous accusations against BN, the ruling party either never responded to the charges at all or sent bumbling bureaucrats who appeared confused, unconvincing or defensive even when speaking the truth.
The job of defending the government fell to a few brave BN-friendly bloggers and individuals. However since most of those allied to BN wrote in the national language, it left a huge void for Pakatan in the English and Chinese-language based social media and web which was ruthlessly exploited..." - GE13: How BN lost the battle of perception, The Mole, 16 May 2013
I have the pleasure of reproducing his letter in full because very few in Najib Razak's administration will readily acknowledge a debt of gratitude that they owe to the "few brave BN-friendly bloggers and individuals" who volunteered to accept "the job of defending the government".
Many of these individuals and bloggers are known personally to me and are not anything like the DAP's Red Bean mercenaries. And I am afraid their numbers are getting smaller. After yesterday's Cabinet announcement, some of them said they won't be sticking around. They are tired of the inept and the arrogance.
Read Mr Sankaran's analysis h e r e.