Politics set in stone

I am beginning to think that erstwhile Singapore journalists, of current and the former kind, are a bias lot. Ms Tan Sai Siong is correct in that some will comment on her column in Today (14 March 2006). She is wrong, however, about Mr Wang.

I have no issue with what she wrote as a whole. It is a thoughtful article about the Opposition and the coming GE - a subject which is very much on the mind of the public. But I have a slight quibble regarding her statement, that given a prolonged GE, the Opposition's "propositions will unravel with over-airing". Well, wouldn't this be true of the PAP's propositions too? Is Ms Tan suggesting that the Opposition has little substance to start off with, that they are not worth listening to in any case, so why give them more time?

I sometimes wonder if former ST journalists have not all been conditioned to think and write pro-PAP articles, not that I am against the PAP. But since she is freelancing now, she can afford to break free of the ST mold, or is it so ingrained in the unconscious now that its well nigh impossible? Have we been living in Orwell's 1984 in Singapore all these years?

Lest readers of this blog begin to think that I am a closet opposition, nothing is further from the truth. I would like to think of myself as someone who, when he sees or reads something not quite right, would want to exercise his tongue, or rather the fingers on the keyboard, to right the situation, which means pushing the position somewhere towards the centre. How effective this keyboard clicking is, I leave to readers to judge.