Khairy red-cards Malaysiakini

In the latest display of typically grimy gamesmanship by the Umno/BN regime team, Minister for Youth and Sports, Khairy Jamaluddin has arranged for Malaysiakini to be sent off for threatening to ask questions including whether some senior members of Sabah Umno Youth will be suspended pending their investigation for alleged foul play.

Never mind that fixing a political game so unfairly in your favour that you’re free to make up the rules as you go along and to act as the referee to boot is, to coin a phrase, hardly cricket.

A fact that Khairy, of all members of the Umno/BN squad, should be well aware, having allegedly been educated at England’s elite Oxford University.

All he’s apparently done since, however, as far as I’ve been able to discern, is to demonstrate the accuracy of the old adage that you can take the boy out of the kampong, but you can’t take the kampong out of the boy.

Not that he can be excused by his boyishness any longer, given that he’s now 41-years-old. In other words, he’s now as youthless as he’s proven to be useless in achieving the personal goal he publicly proclaimed back when he became the latest star recruit to the Umno/BN squad by marrying a daughter of then Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, to himself achieve the premiership by the time he was 40.

But at least he can take heart from the fact that the former and veteran if not outright antique Umno/BN captain-coach Mahathir Mohamad is attempting to make a comeback at the age of 90-odd.

Odd being the operative word here, as in the decade since Mahathir (photo) hung-up his boots he’s put a stop to the career of his first hand-picked successor, Badawi, and has been striving to repeat this feat against Badawi’s substitute, Najib Abdul Razak.

All for the sole purpose, apparently, of scoring the top job for the only one of his sons to employ the Mahathir name for the purpose of making it big in politics rather than business, Mukhriz.

However, Mahathir’s Machiavellian moves have seemingly put him so hopelessly offside with the rest of the regime team’s self-perceived major players as to have totally cruelled Mukhriz’s pitch.

And in any case, of course, Mahathir, along with fellow Umno/BN-team has-been Muhyiddin Yassin, has transferred to the opposition side, and in the process, as far as I can see, thrown the entire contest for the 14th General Election into chaos.

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the big match, the Umno/BN team under skipper Najib Abdul Razak has been frantically practicing its repertoire of professional fouls, deliberate dives, and cheap shots.

Like, to bring us back to where this column started, Khairy Jamaluddin’s summary dismissal of Malaysiakini from his press conference following his participation in an ‘ignition ceremony’ celebrating the return of Malaysian volunteers from humanitarian missions to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh under the MyCorps@South Asia Programme.

And, as I’ve been reminded by a subsequent Malaysiakini report on the sending-off, while this was a first by the Ministry of Youth and Sports, it has long been the standard state of play at the Prime Minister’s Office, the Treasury, the Defence Ministry and MCA headquarters.

At first sight, this banning of Malaysiakini from interviewing Umno/BN regime stars about their team’s shocking record of own-goals on behalf of Malaysia seems to make some kind of sense as both putting a stop to awkward questions and providing a sop to their one-eyed supporters.

But on second thoughts it makes almost no sense at all, considering that ‘official’ regime team propagandists like Bernama get a totally free run in reporting lots of absolutely shocking performances.

Like, for example, the one-sided contest between Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi (photo) and coherent reality at the recent official launch of the Terengganu-level Expresi Negaraku programme and National Sports day at Dataran Merdeka.

According to Bernama, Zahid got the ball rolling by bizarrely calling on Malaysians to ‘balance physical and spiritual development to help realise Malaysia’s aspiration to become a developed nation by 2020.’

Apparently happy to leave mental development to languish somewhere out in left-field, he then driveled, or, as long as I’m trying to sustain the football-match metaphor here, dribbled onto the effect that ‘the spiritual shield should be built as a defence in combatting social ills which would eventually demolish the morals of society.’

What? I found myself wondering as I read this for the first time. Is he about to send a hospital pass to Najib?

But he must have seen the risk he was running, so he quickly crossed into less dangerous territory with the comment that ‘we must return to religion..regardless of what religion we profess..we must strengthen our morals and minds in line with the latest developments.’

Then he capped-off this astonishing solo performance with a flurry of shots that went as wide of the mark as ‘there are states, districts and areas where we have poured plenty of investments in terms of development and provision of numerous facilities but we lose our foothold as a consequence of merely giving progress which is only outward in nature, this is what we want to transform.’

See what I mean? There’s not a way in the world that Malaysiakini could have made Zahid’s performance look more ridiculous than Bernama did by slavishly reporting it word-for-word. Or that other elements of Umno/BN’s miserably mendacious ‘mainstream’ media could have done by putting their customary positive spin on them.

So I have to conclude that Khairy Jamaluddin’s and other Umno/BN team members’ exclusion of Malaysiakini from their press cons as in conferences is not solely for reasons of secrecy, but also a symptom of typically poor sportsmanship if not outright spite, born of fear of finally being red-carded themselves by their long-suffering former fans.- Mkini