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| PM Lee, gagging way before 9gag became mainstream |
I am a student of history. No, I don't mean I study history in secondary school. What I learnt from life was that lessons from the past often explain the present and may very well foretell the future.
The same year when Brigadier General Lee Hsien Loong first became a full member of the Cabinet as Minister for Trade and Industry and Second Minister for Defence in 1987, it seemed that he also took on the role of the Minister of Communications. That explained foremost how a talented ophthalmologist such as Vivian Balakrishnan could be a Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports, overspent a little for the YOG, skipped to MICA, then MTI before finally switched to delivering letters to Indonesia as the world most expensive postman. Looks like multi-classing was already a trend way back in 1987. So it wasn't a surprise for me to read how the then BG Lee artfully set policies to handle foreign journals so that Singaporeans could read the right news back in the good old days.
By next year in 2014, PM Lee will celebrate his 30th year anniversary in politics. With three decades of delivering the right news to Singaporeans in his hands, it was heartening to see the great Prime Minister has kept up with times by working with his own Minister of Communications and Information, whathisname and MDA just a month or so ago to continue his legacy of delivery the right news to your doorsteps since 1987. Meanwhile our Acting Minister of Manpower, Tan Chuan Jin, kept up the multi-classing tradition by appearing on some talk show to explain stuff that whathisname should had done to eager Singaporeans in front of televisions waiting for the right news.
The basics of history, any student will know, is that history repeats itself because human stupidity is a common factor through the ages. Now you, the new student of history, tell us what will the future holds?
