Wednesday, May 18, 2011

This Will Not Wash

PM Lee Hsien Loong was the one who invented the rule. All candidates who are contesting in the General Election are not allowed to campaign on Cooling-off Day, a day before Polling Day 7 May 2011.

PAP candidate Tin Pei Lin said on Thursday May 5, her Facebook page carried a "clarification" on reports that a MacPherson resident had been refused help for her child's tuition fees. A snide comment about her political adversary Nicole Seah on 6 May at around 1.33 pm on her Facebook read:
“OooOoooOooh so that’s what REALLY happened? Wow. I think tears in Parliament is worse than ANYTHING ELSE!”

Quicker than the reaction to Goh Chok Tong's own Facebook post about her "trauma", the comment was taken down after 20 minutes. But not before a netizen beat her to the draw.
When contacted, Tin told Channel NewsAsia one of her administrators, a Denise He, had mistakenly made the post.
"She wanted to post the comment in her personal capacity, and she was using her mobile phone. But she didn't realise that she had inadvertently posted as my profile rather than her own ... It was an honest mistake," Tin said. Instead of doing her job as official moderator, she had asked her "administrator" to remove the comment immediately. She added that she had earlier given strict instructions to her team of administrators not to make any postings on Cooling-off Day.

When Nicole Seah made an official complaint to the Elections Department, she was told to make a police report before they will take further action. It's good advice. In a court of law, Tin risks persecution for perjury if she sticks to her Kate Spade bag of lies. Any posting from a mobile phone has a unique signature. Unlike a dynamic IP address, the IMEI number is easier to trace. Denise He has to be produced in court. The act of deleting the post is tantamount to tampering with evidence. Finally, her computer or Denise's mobile will yield the tell tale electronic footprints - modern computer forensics is that good.

In the bad old days of parliament, prior to all the reforms alluded to in the GE 2011 election promises, Tin  would simply make a Mas Selamat type apology pioneered by Wong Kan Seng. And the people will be asked to please move on.

On 16 May a member of the public lodged an official police report against Ms Tin Pei Lin, elected Member of Parliament, Marine Parade GRC. Police confirmed they are investigating the offence, which carries a fine or imprisonment or both.

PM Lee made the rules. PM Lee also said at Boat Quay, "if we have to discipline somebody we will do that, and we must learn from the lessons, and never make the same mistake again." The ball is in PM's court.

17 comments:

  1. You are correct that electronic trails don't lie. If what Tin said about the incident was made up, she would be in deep s***. Nixon got into serious trouble not because of the break-in but because of the lie and cover-up.

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  2. TPL is already dishonest in the first place when she declared that she's the sole operator of her Facebook page...

    So how did an administrator come into the play?

    Anyway, I think your headline may need to change into Party in White will not wash dirty laundry in public...

    They will probably say TPL is young and inexperienced and has been "counseled" - another honest mistake - case closed

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  3. They are wearing white. After GE2011, they have to make sure that what they are wearing are truly white. People are watching now. More difficult for the laundry to guarantee 100% white, even if the laundry is paid the highest salary.

    It might be wise to change white cloths to transparent cloths so that it shows nothing flaws hided behind the white cloths. It will also avoid returning the cloths to the laundry for accountability.

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  4. Does anybody have a copy of the deleted YouTube video
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U72fA8gcxr8
    maybe it's like the missing 8 minutes of the Watergate tape, maybe Denise He is on it

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  5. men in white is supposed to be whiter than white. so are the women in white. integrity honesty, accountability, responsibility....are these too much to demand from high offices of society?

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  6. The uppermost question in everyone's mind now is how can her administrator make that kind political remarks on behalf of her unless her administrator is the whole mastermind behind it.

    So even before she enters Parliament, it seems there is already no accountability on her part and one can't help suspecting that there is a dishonesty trait in this young PAP MP ? So that is the kind of values that our PAP leaders are so proud to promote ?

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  7. Sadly, I don't think anything will come of it. It's business as usual for the MIW - one set of rules for them and another set for the rest of us. Perhaps they should change their uniform to a shade of grey!

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  8. If PAP needs to jettison a liability to fix an image problem, this would seem opportune.

    Tin-Tin, you are about to find out who are your real friends.

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  9. For an administrator, Denise He's FB account look pretty slim
    http://www.facebook.com/MParader/posts/199323340110340#!/profile.php?id=830035223&sk=info

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  10. Even if the post on Cooling Off Day was done by an administrator, Tin Pei Ling will have to bear the responsibility (as she would have authorised the administrator to post on her Facebook page). Further, people who had been interacting with Tin Pei Ling on her Facebook account would have done so thinking they were interacting with Tin Pei Ling and not an unknown administrator. They cannot now be sure if any particular posting was made by her or her administrator. And they would never have known that there was another person posting on her behalf if not for this sequence of events.

    Even more important, even if Denise He comes forward to say it was an "honest mistake", the fact remains that, in her Electoral Advertising Declaration filed with the Elections Department, Tin Pei Ling had declared that she was the sole administrator of her Facebook account. The Declaration states that all information provided by Tin Pei Ling in it is true. As Tin Pei Ling has been elected to public office as MP, the public and especially constituents of Marine Parade GRC are entitled to know the truth.

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  11. I believe that as her FB page administrator, Denise He was acting as an agent for Tin Pei Ling. Under the law of agency, all representations made by the agent should be binding on the principle (Tin).

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  12. Let's be real. There is unlikely to be Dennis Ho, it is just figment of her imagination to come out some phantom to blame and hope the issue will go away and be forgotten. She has herself to blame because she didn't follow the footstep of her masters for choosing the right phantom to blame. Didn't her master teach her to use "NOBODY" to blame ? When PAP lost billions and millions of investment, Nobody is to blame, and in Mini-bond fiasco, Nobody is also responsible. So why didn't Tin use Nobody as the administrator ? LKY will love her for that !

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  13. Looks like the wife of LHL's principal private secretary is becoming a liability and the fact she is allowed to slip through the PAP selection only goes to show what a dumbass PM we have and with very poor judgement. Sadly for the next 5 yrs, Sporeans have to put up with him...courtesy of 69% AMK voters.

    ps: I don't see how the dumbass PM is able to make things right, not with the bunch of duds in his PAP...courtesy of the 60%

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  14. @ Anonymous May 18, 2011 4:10pm
    Well, not really that it matters for those in power anyway. They are already elected into power as the main party by 60% of the population of voters in Singapore, and like it or not, the 40% have to "repent" that the others did not learn to see through these lies and false promises they did not deliver over the last decade. I watched the news about how this and that minister is retiring from cabinet, but even with their departure, and a considerable reshuffling here and there of people, I suspect that the changes are all just cosmetic and that in the long run, we have another 5 years to be screwed as citizens.

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  15. ok ... i seem to have a common friend with Denise He ... should i flee the country?

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  16. Hmmmm.... It's 6 Oct now... So what's the outcome??

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