To get off the hook, Puteri Umno chief Azalina Othman Said will now have to impugn the authenticity and correctness of the audiocassette recording and show that it has been tampered with. This is easier if there are intermittent gaps of inaudible portions or omissions so substantial as to render the recording as a whole untrustworthy (Tape, the key in police report against Azalina's alleged immorality).

But even if the audiocassette recording cannot be technically faulted, it does not mean that what the speaker identified in the tape (allegedly, a wife of a prominent businessman) said (that she was allegedly Azalina's lover) is true.

The content of what was taped may well be contradicted by subsequent testimony by this prominent businessman's wife or others before a dream team of lawyers (as in Anwar's case).

Perhaps this person has concocted a lie. Maybe not. But even if she were indeed a lesbian, she might have been induced to implicate Azalina by her political enemies who were prepared to conceal a tape recorder for entrapment.

If this wife of prominent businessman were to give evidence, wouldn't she implicate herself and expose her cover too in public as a lesbian as well? What happens if at the eleventh hour, she balks and denies the truth of what was taped and then gets her husband to corroborate about their normal heterosexual relationship?

Azalina's confession? She can just deny that  that the political leaders' public and private lives cannot be separated and that their moral authority demands that they be held to higher standards than ordinary citizens.

This is quite unrealistic. Politicians are subject to the same foibles, and when their sexual peccadilloes are exposed, they are only caught in the act of being human.

The ordinary people around, however, behave as if they are in a public circus. They seize the opportunity to cheer, moralise, judge, condemn and heckle at the spectacle as the Romans did in the Coliseum in which men and beasts fought and tore at each other to the end. How entertaining and exhilarating!

But because of public expectation that they be held to higher standards than ordinary citizens, and a certain mercilessness when they are caught, politicians naturally have to continually practise the art of hypocrisy and deception, and pretend to be demi-gods, just so to pre-empt attacks of which there are, as can be seen, no boundaries between private and public lives.

People shouldn't now complain, and forget that if we are not mature enough as a people to respect the separation between private and public lives (including on matters of sexual orientation or preference which harms nobody else and is no reflection of one's capability to perform public duties with rectitude and public interest), we likewise will forfeit the right to expect our elected officials not to equally blur the lines between their private and public lives and private and public interest and use public facilities or public trust funds as if they were their own private properties.

If there were indeed proof that the Puteri Umno chief had used party funds to purchase a luxury car for her 'lover', this would have been a more legitimate ground of attack than one on her personal life regardless of whether the 'lover' was male or female.