I refer to the Malaysiakini reports Should Anwar apologise? and Can Anwar be trusted?

Political analysts Ong Kian Ming’s and Oon Yeoh’s editorial brace are examples of armchair punditry that reminds us few sights can match for hubris and imperiousness that are made by journalists when they get on their high horses and pontificate.

The temptation to go padding about Mount Olympus while editorially holding forth on the grime of those who struggle in its valley ill-befits practitioners of the Fourth Estate in their necessary task of informing with fact and enlightening with insight appraising citizens, the final arbiters in the democratic process.

Aside from the puerile notion that it is possible in the political arena to find players who are paragons of consistency and virtue, the two articles descend to a level of generalisation about the conduct of Anwar Ibrahim while he was in government (April 1982 - August 1998) that would make an effective rebuttal all but impossible.

One is reminded of the response of Samuel Johnson when he was asked who he felt was intellectually superior - man or woman. ‘Which man, which woman,’ replied the English writer, famed for his ability to plunge through the miasma of contention to grasp the essence of an issue..

However, it is not with Johnsonian wit that the bloviations of Ong Kian Ming and Oon Yeoh’s are to be met; Francis Bacon’s ‘May we not be wise above measure or sobriety, but cultivate truth in charity’ would better reflect the spirit of this reply to the contention that Anwar Ibrahim - in the Umno phase of his career - has a lot to be contrite about.

Therefore he should tender an apology (rather like Hilary Clinton – who has yet to - for her support of the attack on Iraq) if he wants to secure the votes and empathy. Post-apology, Anwar can start afresh, rather like Adam and Eve in the garden before eating the forbidden fruit. How very liberating!

Apart from the quaint notion that politicians ought to apologise for actions that they took based on their intuition and judgment – we are not talking here of peccadilloes for which apologies can and must be tendered – the idea that they constantly stand before the bar of public (and media) judgment which can magisterially hand down, based on some moral calculus, assessments in tablets of stone, displays a profound naivety before something called the law of unintended consequences, from which nobody is exempt.

A certain awareness of, some humility before, this law stays the rush to judgment on actions and policies that can weigh on those fairly bogus scales of history in ways in which right has led to wrong and vice-versa.

In short, politicians do stand constantly before the bar of public judgment, but the more immediate the latter’s edicts the more certain they are myopic. Still, the idea that they constantly stand before that bar is valuable, for its humility-inducing aura, not so much for the perspicuity of the bar’s immediate judgments.

No doubt, Anwar Ibrahim has done things to be apologetic about, notably his silence during the time of Salleh Abas’s judicial impeachment in 1988 and his quiescence during Operation Lallang in late 1987. Even then, any judgment of his conduct must be tempered by knowledge of the authoritarian character of the numero uno at that time, whom he subsequently defied and paid the price. No small price that.

It is not as if Anwar did not pay the forfeit for his quiet on those two critical counts. He has been a part of all that he has met and though much has been taken from him, much abides, to paraphrase some lines from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’.

His six years in solitary confinement on charges that now appear increasingly trumped-up, though not absolving, have muted the memory of his derelictions while in government. Let us not discount how past errors, especially when commiserated within the lonely walls of prison, can be the prelude to grand retrievals.

Should history afford him the opportunity, there is good possibility that Anwar will proceed, not by touching his forelock in apology. Anwar Ibrahim would likely proceed the way Bismarck counseled statesmen – by listening to the rustle of God’s mantle in history and catching the hem of it for a few steps, an attitude that is a mix of sobriety and humility.