You just can't polish a turd... but you can roll it in glitter! Which is what we think (Superman) Hew Kuan Yau was thinking when he offered this rebuttal to his highly controversial comments in a SKYPE session with voters at the Batu Kitang constituency. In the video he exhorts the people of Batu Kitang to vote for DAP's candidate, Abdul Aziz Isa.

Everything was cool, he tells them Aziz would be the first Malay YB (not that his race should matter, his policies and his integrity should). He goes on to say that maybe, after 36 years, Sarawak would have a Malay ADUN (again, race, doesn't matter). Really inspiring stuff. Bravo.

"Good show!"

All of a sudden he busts out this line, "So that Aziz can SCREW the Malay people."

"Did he just say, what I think he said?"

Woah, where did that come from? In a Facebook posting, Hew claims that “Umno cybertroopers had purposely twisted my speech in Mandarin in the video on YouTube, with incorrect subtitles. They switched ‘PBB’ with ‘Malays.’”He continues, “I’m not anti-Malay. I was just attacking the corrupt PBB.” Conspiracy theories like that would usually be right on the money, but we heard you actually say the words, "Malay." Multiple times. No amount of tai chi is going to get you out of this one, you done messed up.

"Oh no you didn't."

The speech goes from bad to worse here and no amount of polishing this turd will help. Even DAP leader Kit Siang called the remarks "crude" and "vulgar".

Is it racist though?

That depends on who you're asking. After consulting multiple native Mandarin speakers in the office we found that his words were in some ways taken out of context, and his broader meaning was to take the fight to PBB and shouldn't be taken at face value. We concluded that taken as a whole, he was not directly asking for Malays to be screwed per se.

That said, he played the race card from the beginning. Emphasising a 'Malay' empowerment agenda instead of a people empowerment agenda. While Malaysians are trying to move towards a race-less political atmosphere, Superman over here leaned on trite race persuasion tactics to garner votes. If he was 100% impartial to race, he would have extolled Abdul Aziz Isa, the human, not the Malay. We're calling it as we see it, he receives both the race card and the rude card.

"Off to the bench with you!"

Watch the video in question below if you're interested: