The gloves are off in dirtiest ever polls

COMMENT The gloves have come off in the final prelude to the 13th general election. We already knew it was going to be the dirtiest election ever. This was chiefly because of long festering suspicions over irregularities in the electoral rolls.

While those misgivings have recently intensified and some violent affrays have already occurred here and there, attention was diverted from the more salacious levels to which an all-out campaign could descend, giving smutty credence to the appellation ‘dirtiest ever' that has come to be bracketed with the GE13.

In part, this was due to the High Court decision on Jan 9 that resulted in the acquittal of Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim on a charge of sodomy.

Many deduced that the acquittal would issue in a stay against the purveyors of political smut on the campaign trail.

One felt that the court decision was the signal a moratorium on sexual innuendo against targeted politicians would come into effect.

People were fed up with the orgy of salacious claims and revelations in the long saga of Anwar's alleged sexual predilections.

The verdict at the end of nearly two years of wrangling over Sodomy II had the effect of an entreaty that it was time political contestation in Malaysia ascends to the higher registers of policy differences and argument rather than risk being mired in a swamp of sexual innuendo and insinuation.

Anwar, in remarks made after the rendering of the verdict, issued a plea for the return of national politics to levels loftier than below the navel.

It was felt that a relieved public, too, was ready to lift its sights from those levels to higher regions, provided the agents of political smut would comply with the judicially implied moratorium.

Fat hope that.

Act III in porno-politics

Last week's re-emergence of the three musketeers of political smut, S Nallakaruppan, Ummi Hafilda and Ezam Mohd Noor (photo below), with nauseating warnings to Anwar that he would be exposed as a sexual libertine, put paid to those hopes that the national political scene has had enough of porno-politics after Sodomy II had concluded in an exoneration of Anwar.
Anwar's lawyers immediately threatened Nallakaruppan with legal consequences if he did not recant.

Lamentably, the threat had the effect of issuing in an even more raucous warning by its target of exposes to come, presumably with Utusan Malaysia as media conduit for the drivel.

Welcome to the Act III in porno-politics in Malaysia.

This interlude began in earnest nearly 14 years ago when Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the prime minister then, decided that the decapitation of an opponent must first begin with the target's sexual humiliation.

Despite two sensational cases, strung out over 14 years, issuing in exonerations of the target, the matter simply refuses to die down.

Some people just don't know when they are beaten.

It appears that if the public thought that with Sodomy II they had hit rock bottom in this intermittent 14-year saga, they have just now, courtesy of the three musketeers of political smut, heard the sound of knocking coming from below.

This is not to mention the episode of the sex video peddled by the three ‘Datuks' which rose like a bang only to gutter out in a whimper.

But Anwar appears determined not take the third edition of this despicable saga lightly.

His lawyers are seeking legal redress and he himself has resorted to attacks on what he thinks is the source of this new round of aspersions on his rectitude.

Bare-knuckled combat

His dredging up stories of Prime Minister Najib Razak's alleged infractions of this code suggests that at this edition of the sordid saga, the target is going to give as good as he takes.

From now it seems it would be bare-knuckled combat, with one combatant reciprocating with direct hits on what he feels is the source of the attacks by the adversary's surrogates.

This would likely raise to a new pitch of intensity the attacks by the three musketeers, with countering thrusts by Anwar and his cabal.

Already, some MPs have complained about receiving lewd videos and pictures purportedly showing Anwar in the all together on their phones and in their emails.

The upshot: the prediction that the GE13 would be the "dirtiest ever" would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just when one thought that Sodomy II was the nadir.