If anyone brands Zaid Ibrahim a wine drinker, and refuses to state that half of Parliament is filled with the same, they should just shut up and drive. Preferably off a cliff. Balik Pulau has some lovely cliffs if you need a recommendation.
Do we really need to get into the details of who does what with their personal time? Seriously? If so, perhaps we should start of a Malaysian version of TMZ just to trail each Parliament member during their free time, just to see what we can find.
Umno has drunks. PAS has smokers, regardless of Nik Aziz saying they’re worse than defecating cows. MCA has womanisers. These are not issues to be made into a smear campaign for a by-election. In fact, if such issues were raised, we wouldn’t have a nation to build on to begin with.
Tunku Abdul Rahman never made it a secret that he was a drinker. In fact, he’s even recorded a tale that he went to shoot a tiger, but fell asleep before taking a shot because he was too drunk.
So let’s look at the campaign of Hulu Selangor as of right now. On one hand, Umno is campaigning that the PR candidate, Datuk Zaid Ibrahim is a wine drinker, even going so far to label PAS as supporting those who are truly un-Islamic. Meanwhile, we have an MIC candidate that actually supports Perkasa for some reason.
On one hand we have a former Federal minister who quit and was then further sacked from his political party. On the other hand, we have an MIC candidate who was willing to be demoted and take a pay cut in his job to allow himself to continue sustaining his family.
Both have their histories, and their positive and negative traits. However, character assassination is truly an act of true desperation. On that note, I believe that the PR can actually just focus on discussing national issues in comparison to Umno (and amazingly Umno alone) who are trying their hardest in an online campaign to smear the PR candidate, which just so happens had been their own ilk.
I guess we should hope that Datuk Zaid himself is magnanimous enough not to mention just who of his former colleagues were womanisers, alcoholics or gamblers, or even a combination of the two.
Meanwhile, while all this mud slinging is going on, we have an electoral commission that somehow ‘forgot’ to mention to 13,000 voters that they have been re-located in terms of voting. While I will be sending the head of the EC a bottle of gingko biloba and I hope most readers of this post do the same since Sibu’s by-election is also coming up, I guess we’ll just have to bite the bullet.
And personally, since Malays forget so easily, perhaps we need a non-Malay EC chief to take over if the gingko biloba doesn’t work.
Dirty tactics and mud slinging aside, what one should not do, as I’ve pointed out to both sides, is to discredit the memory of Datuk Dr Zainal Abidin Ahmad.
"He was a man who reserved plots in Selangor for vegetable planting, talked to the Orang Asli about their grouses, tried to introduce eco-tourism to Malaysia and even went as far as to ask in Parliament as to what aid was being given to single mothers, going so far as to suggesting that the government foot the bill while such cases were being brought or delayed in court.
That last one I mentioned was the final media mention of his actions as a member of parliament. If you were to read the Hansard, the last thing that an elected government representative said to him was “When are you going to jump ship?”
Aged and frail from cancer as he was, he did not jump ship, and none of the campaigns have given their piece in his contributions, other than one Umno supporter on Twitter who said, and I quote: “What did he did(sic) as MP other than die?”
copy from MalaysianInsider
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