Kadir Jasin sued by Zaid Ibrahim

When bloggers made a lot of progress in news breaking and scoops, especially the ‘cover ups’ and gross abuse of power of the ‘establishment’ during PM ‘Flip-Flop’ Dato’ Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s time, bloggosphere especially socio-political gained the luxury of exponential growth in readership and popularity. 

Bloggers colour Malaysian mainstream political scene when the urbanites and educated Malaysians made drastic voting pattern changes based on the writings in the blogs and multiplied the influencing effect. As such, urban seats such as Klang Valley, Penang and Selangor saw heavy losses to BN during the 12th General Elections. BN unprecendentedly lost 5 + 1 states on the 8 March 2008 ‘Doomsday’.

There were also attempts and structural effort to silence these new media. The most high profile case was NTSP dragging Supremo Blogger Ahirudin “Rocky” Attan and Jeff Ooi to court (the case is till on going).

May 2008 saw Fourth Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad jumped into the new media foray and suddenly bloggers gained new wind and a huge breadth of fresh air. More and more expose’s and commentaries are made to reflect the professionals, educated and urbanites’ feelings of the socio-political surroundings. The days of taking bloggers to court has thought to be ended.  More affluent Malaysians, which include top politicians now began to take bloggosphere very seriously. Gone were the days of taking bloggers to court, so many have thought.

Then this. Supremo-Journo-turned-blogger Dato’ Kadir Jasin now is being sued by Former Justice Minister Senator Zaid Ibrahim. What Zaid is trying to achieve is unclear. Obviously, since joining PKR, Zaid how has been infected with the  acute ‘Suit Syndrome’ that only Former-Abuse-of-Power Anwar “Mat King Leather” Ibrahim suffer. Anwar uses the court for media circus to gain attention as his stories are getting stale and he needed the ‘legal drama and sensation’ to keep his sordid politics alive.

Now Zaid has been infected with the Acute Lackofattentionitis dissease. His recent suggestion of making PAS Murshidul Am Nik Aziz as the Pakatan Rakyat Supremo drew a lot of flak within the tri-party ‘marriage of inconvenience between strange bedfellows’.

How far can Zaid go with this is also unclear. Obviously, he needed the media and legal circus to make himself ‘relevant’ to stay on visible PKR after being sacked by UMNO, now that his patron within PKR partyless-Opposition-Leader Anwar “Mat King Leather” Ibrahim has a high risk of being jailed for his second sodomy trial. For the record, recently High Court awarded Anwar with a RM 100,000 suit over NSTP, despite asking RM 100 million for it. This is probably Zaid’s inspiration.

For the record also, Zaid was the BN MP who as invited and appeared as a panelist in  the All-Blogs endorsed ‘Bangsa Malaysia’ forum, the first held to then Bloghouse in Damansara Heights. His openess for ‘new media’ and ‘alternative positive engagement’ was well accepted, especially for pro-Pakatan Rakyat bloggosphere avid readers.

This turn of event is really interesting. We are almost sure veteran-journo-blogger can defend hismelf at this game. The ‘circus’ that Zaid will create for himself will not improve the public perception on a failed-spent-bullet, which gone to ‘cry baby’ in Anwar’s camp.