I am horrified that people are asking for Tin Pei Ling to stand in a single seat ward. And for sure, if the People's Action Party (PAP) does that, it will never have my vote again.
The netizens bay for a sacrifice. Putting Tin into a single seat ward is to do so knowing that Tin will lose. It would reflect poorly upon the PAP indeed if it allowed the masses of unthinking and undiscerning people to taste blood. Undiscerning people who have rushed to make a snap judgment based on decontextualized videos and pictures. Better to withdraw her from the slate than knowingly place her on the sacrificial altar of a single seat ward.
In a single seat ward, Tin will lose because she is too clean, too good, too innocent and too well-meaning for the type of dirty politics it takes to get into power. LKY can do the dirty politics with knuckledusters and all, but Tin only wants to help, and I think she can. Why would the PAP choose to baptise Tin with dirt? What would that say of the Men in White?
Herein lies the irony. It takes dirty politics to get into power. Yet, can a dirty person be trusted with power? The thing is, politics in Singapore has been relatively clean. LKY dirtied his own hands, but he picked people who were clean and put them into positions of power. Generally, PAP Members of Parliament are ill-equipped to be dirty, simply because those who are apt to play dirty, wouldn't have made it through the PAP screening.
Tin doesn't know how to play dirty, and to force her into the mud pool would destroy the very qualities she possesses that can contribute to Singapore. What is odd about the whole thing is that PAP has had its pick of the PhDs and the Masters in
GREAT jobs, earning
FABULOUS pay. I personally know 3 who were tea-sessioned so to speak. These, from the intelligentsia, used to be the kind of political candidates the PAP
ALWAYS picked. And the PAP has drawn flak for that. People go on and on about how far removed these intelligentsia are from the commonfolk. And so PAP picked Tin - your typical girl next door. Not slow but not extremely academic either, and not yet professionally successful. And of a sudden, people now laud the opposition parties for fielding candidates from the intelligentsia.
Huh?
Far better a Tin than a Jack Neo, who until he got his penis in the wrong places, was widely tipped to be a PAP Member of Parliament (to garner the vote of the Chinese speaking masses).
**Short digression: May Jack Neo's penis rot and drop right off... and his balls follow after in excruciatingly slow succession.** Jack Neo implicated a Minister George Yeo who, in true PAP fashion, couldn't see/stay-away-from/deal with dirty either. For more on Jack Neo, click
here. Now, I do believe that Ministers, before they become Ministers, should know how to do a Lee Kuan Yew (i.e., SEE dirt, TOUCH dirt, GET dirty if necessary, clean up and go home clean), else they are too naive to be effective.
This applies to Vivian Balakrishnan too, who didn't see the dirt of poverty. He could have done so much to clean up the lives of the elderly poor and the disadvantaged children (and thus preempted crime) but he saw no need here and instead, blew more than his budget on the Youth Olympic Games. The guy didn't see the dirt under his nose.
But I daresay that the PAP Ministers under Lee Hsien Loong will stay away from dirty politics. Firstly, because when dirt gains a foothold, it's hard to stay clean. Secondly, Lee Hsien Loong was brought up to stay clean too. Not many people are like LKY you know, able to get dirty and still stay clean. Every machine needs a filter. LKY was that filter for dirt. He took dirt upon himself and he got rid of it. The machine stays clean, the filter got dirty.
Who will be the PAP filter when LKY goes away? Can LKY be replaced with filter mechanisms? For sure, I would like to see the PAP stay clean, and not engage in mudpool politics.
The PAP tends to be oblivious to dirt... doesn't know how to deal with dirt and won't get dirty. But clean is better than dirty any day, I say.