The Ogre does what ogres can,

Deeds quite impossible for man,

But one prize is beyond his reach:

The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,

Among it's desperate and slain,

The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

While drivel gushes from his lips.

- W H Auden

Something about the relative youth and the numbers of participants in the anti-ISA demonstration a week ago must have driven the ruling elite and its cohort over a threshold. For after that, drivel started gushing from its vents.

No less than that the Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin began by branding Anwar Ibrahim, putative leader of opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat, a traitor to the Malays.

NONE Muhyiddin ( right ) stuck to his guns when on pain of being sued for defamation by Anwar, not only declined to withdraw his invective but reasserted it and announced willingness to face the consequences.

Then an Utusan Malaysia columnist, Noor Azam, lambasted the Malays for being cowards in the face of what he claimed was growing non-Malay encroachment on supposedly impregnable Malay domains in politics and the civil service.

Not that these two instances of hysteria-stirring and intemperance were aberrant episodes; they have been part of a pattern that however marked a nadir of sorts in Umno's verbal and legal hostilities towards Pakatan Rakyat and the man, Anwar Ibrahim, mainly responsible in making it a threat to the Umno-dominated Barisan Nasional's now 52-year stay in power.

Muhyiddin's verbal wars against Anwar

Before this, Anwar has been called a traitor to Umno and the Malays by the party's lesser lights.

But it's something else when somebody of Muhyiddin's stature says it - especially someone who had explained in September 1998, that he had visited the just-sacked and about-to-be-disgraced Deputy Prime Minister and Umno deputy president because he did not believe in being only a fair-weather friend of Anwar.

It was a nuanced defense of a humane action by somebody who was signaling that he was not of the herd mentality.

NONE Surely, that action had its negative payback for Muhyiddin: A few years down the road, a chance for him to become Deputy Prime Minister under Abdullah Badawi was snuffed out by the just-retired Dr Mahathir Mohamed who pushed for Najib in preference to Muhyiddin, suspected in Mahathir's eyes of latent ties to Anwar.

That was then. Now, swept by the vortex of Umno politics to its deputy presidency and within a heartbeat of the prime ministership, Muhyiddin's descent in the verbal wars against Anwar ( above ) suggests that he cannot sustain the ‘I'm the same in fair or foul weather' behaviour of a decade ago.

Muyhiddin's stoop marks an ominous turn in the verbal wars against Anwar Ibrahim, just as columnist Noor Azam's tirade against Malay apathy in the face of non-Malay infiltration of their allegedly sacrosanct Malay precincts suggests the Umno cohort, these days, are leading lives of unquiet desperation.

Anti-ISA rally has Umno under pressure

Prime Minister Najib Razak ( below) must have expected that the slew of socio-economic measures he announced in recent months - all aimed at recovering waning support among non-Malay voters - would see Umno-BN navigate out of the shoals that his ineffectual predecessor Abdullah Badawi had stumbled to.

najib tun razak Heightened dissonance within the Pakatan ranks and a near-win by Umno in the Manek Urai by-election last July 14 must have encouraged the Umno cohort that the Najib's socio-economic nostrums were working to appease the Malaysian body politic against too-radical a swing against Umno-BN.

But an unexplained death in the afternoon at the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Agency and a better-than-expected turnout of relatively young Malaysians at the Anti-ISA rally - the latter despite a hostile and forbiddingly heavy Police cordon - have ratcheted up the pressure on the Umno cohort and driven it over a threshold.

The upshot: Invective - foulmouthed and facile - and red herrings are trained on Anwar Ibrahim for his success at conjuring a coalition not many, a year and a half ago, would have given a ghost of a chance at succeeding in ousting Umno-BN from power.

Today, the Umno cohort's descent to drivel in the wars against their looming ouster reflects their desperation that the leader they allowed themselves to reject has become the cornerstone of a jelling replacement.