“What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bees and he told me about the butcher and my wife.”

- Rodney Dangerfield

“What do you think of this whole Zairil-Dyana Sofya scandal?” a Malaysiakini subscriber asked in a recent email. To be honest, I am sent so many mails featuring politicians exposing their junk that I have lost track of who is supposedly screwing who.

I know for sure that Umno screws the rakyat on a regular basis and it would seem that Pakatan would like to get into the action thereby making it a three-way affair for the poor rakyat but to be honest, the private affairs of politicians do not concern me.

Let me qualify that. It does not concern me so long as they do not make their private lives part of their agenda or engage in the kind of gutter politics that politicians resort to when demonising their political rivals by using the private lives of their opponents.

Therefore, if these two political operatives have not been “family values” candidates or attacked the private lives of their political opponents, I have no interest in what they allegedly do with each other as long as they are not conspiring to cheat or rob the citizens of Malaysia.

If this is the case, the DAP should just issue a statement saying the private lives of their members are their own and should not bow down to the propaganda meant to destabilise an already fractured alliance.

The big question is, are these two politicians still viable candidates? I think they are. To be fair, I think generally any opposition candidate are a viable candidate in that they offer a faint glimmer of change from the usual way how Umno does things.

For example, to the best of my knowledge, the opposition has not sought to punish voters who did not vote for them by denying them the necessary federal funds to make their lives easier. What an Umno operative like Noh Omar is doing is screwing the average taxpaying citizen and this by far is worse than anything these two DAP operatives have allegedly done.

Threatening the people of Malaysia with violence, like the message Deputy Prime Minister Zahid Hamidi delivered about breaking the “social contract” by voting, which is a democratic and constitutional right, is screwing with the public in a way that damages the very foundations of our liberty. This again is worse than anything two people choose to do in their private lives...