Aquino’s barren desert

Vice President Jejomar C. Binay’s decision to leave the PDP-Laban and form his own party in preparation for his presidential run in 2016 has prompted a few others to announce their own electoral plans but to declare at the same time that it is much too early for them to take the plunge. I speak of Sen. Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr., and Alan Peter Cayetano, who are not shy about their ambitions despite their very serious limitations. All this makes Binay an early bird, with all its advantages and disadvantages, but he looks like an early bird hovering over a calamity-swept desert and a large shipwreck and oil spill at sea.

Our desolate national landscape is something we owe entirely and singularly to President B. S. Aquino III. This could explain why not a few seem to be looking forward to seeing Binay succeed him. But with or without Binay in the picture, many would like to see a change in the presidency soon. They would like to see B. S. III out, not in 2016 as scheduled, but today, now, this very moment—would that they could have done it yesterday!

Not everyone will want to experiment even within the Constitution, but there are those who will not mind going above the Constitution. Some believe in some kind of “meta legal transition” similar to that which saw Cory as revolutionary president following the ouster of Marcos in 1986. This seems to favor putting in place a “system change” which Marcos and Cory had failed to put in place, the first during martial law, the second, after declaring a revolutionary government.

Now, whether or not the Constitution is strictly followed, the first question people seem to be asking these days is not so much “who will be, or who should be, our next president?” as “who shouldn’t be our next president?” or “what vested interest group shouldn’t be allowed to dictate the choice?”

The more important question is, “what kind of government, country or society should we have, or not have, after B. S. Aquino III leaves the office?” Should it be the same vindictive and venal government and society where the victors become the law and the vanquished or the unconvinced are declared the “enemy” and subjected to so much injustice and injury.

We must change our ways in choosing our leaders. Assuming elections are still valid, that it is our votes—rather than the rigged precinct count optical scan machines—- that actually elect our public officials, we must stop electing popular incompetents and calling it our “democratic right and privilege.” After putting in two incompetent mother-and-son presidents within 18 years from each other, do we need to “elect” more popular incompetents to see the cruelty we have been inflicting upon ourselves?

To choose a worthy president and other high officials in the next elections, we need first of all to make sure that the electoral process be absolutely real, and that our votes rather than the PCOS machines are the ones that will decide the winners and losers in the election. This would require thorough-going reform of the automated voting system, to make sure that all the accuracy safeguards and security features of the system, which venal and corrupt members of the Commission on Elections had criminally disabled in the last two elections, are completely restored and made 100-percent operational, and that all the offending commissioners who have been charged before the Ombudsman be now formally indicted before the Sandigang bayan, tried and punished for their crimes.

For our voters to choose our leaders well, we must begin by listing all those aspirants or candidates who do not deserve to be considered at all, before we begin to consider our actual choices. As in most sports competitions, we must first eliminate all the unqualified, and then we choose. In a situation where the political parties choose their candidates in an open convention, the voter gets some help in screening the candidates. But where the parties do not go through such a nominating process, the voters must be very slow and circumspect in supporting the unilateral choices made by the party owners or bosses.

Until now our choices for the presidency and the vice presidency have always been drawn, with rare exceptions, from the two Houses of Congress. As in the past, many of those who are making a lot of noise about wanting to run for president or vice president are coming from the Senate. But never in our history have the Senate and the senators been so thoroughly dishonored and degraded.

Except for Miriam Defensor Santiago and Ferdinand Marcos Jr. among the senior senators, and the new senators who were elected in 2013 and had no role to play in the Corona impeachment and trial, all the sitting senators have been tarnished by their alleged misuse of the Priority Development Assistance Fund and their having each received P50 million or more from the Disbursement Acceleration Program to convict Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona in his impeachment trial.

They have individually and collectively lost all moral right to seek higher office. Because of their misconduct, the Senate as an institution has lost any moral right to provide the raw material for the next president or vice president. The pork barrel and bribery scandal killed the political institution, and as Dylan Thomas says in his poem, “after the first death, there is no other.”

This is such a shame for Sen. Revilla Jr., who seems undeterred in his plan to run for the presidency despite the ordeal he is facing before the Senate blue ribbon committee, which seems determined to convict him before the bar of public opinion, even though the Office of the Ombudsman has been rather slow in investigating the complaint against him.

It is such a shame too for Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, who had set his eyes on the vice-presidency before he became the focus of the administration’s prosecutory efforts and before a tycoon close to former president, now Mayor Joseph Ejercito Estrada, and to former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and now close to Aquino decided to bankroll the operation of “potential state witness Ruby Chan Tuason” to go after the senator.

So is it such a shame for Sen. Francis Escudero, the dashing beau of Heart Evangelista, who would probably have made an interesting candidate for vice president had he not received P99 million from the DAP after he voted to convict Corona, and P102 million in PDAF from January to August 2012 during and after the Corona impeachment trial.

And finally a shame for Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano who seems to believe he had every right to run for higher office despite the fact that he too got his P50 million from Malacanang after voting to convict Corona, besides the P188 million he got in PDAF from January to August 2012 during and after Corona’s trial.

Cayetano is a young Bible-quoting demagogue, who has succeeded in getting some fortune-tellers in Manila to proclaim that he will be the next president. But even if he were untainted by any pork-related scandal, he would still be prime material in any “negative listing” of politicians who should not be considered for any high office, for being one of two siblings who saw themselves as God’s gift to the 24-member Senate and decided to sit there at the same time, in utter contempt of the Constitution and the spirit of distributive justice. Can we raise anybody to the presidency who has not learned to argue against his selfish interest? He, rather than Aquino, or anybody else, is the real poster boy for the most execrable dynastic politics.

In preparing our negative list, we must consider all those who believe they have a right to raise their sights to the highest office, without offering a single word or idea for the public discussion of national issues—-power, water, criminality, Aquino’s deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Sabah claim, the West Philippine/South China maritime disputes, the US rotational presence in the Philippines, the threat of war in Eastern Europe and the Asia Pacific, and the moral decay of government. They all must be excluded.

Certainly they will try to persuade us through the conscript media and various means of political propaganda by talking to us of their alleged “popularity” in the surveys. We must tell them we are done with crooked surveys and false propaganda and would like to hear them tell us instead what they can do to arrest and reverse the moral decay and intellectual derangement of our entire society, which threatens to extinguish the need for government. We must serve them notice that until they have something of genuine moral value to tell us, we have nothing to say to them, and they should stop bothering us. –Francisco S. Tatad, Manila Standard Today

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