Manila Moods : We know it's you, Gloria!
First posted 06:05am (Mla time) June 19, 2005
By Rasheed Abou-Alsamh
Inquirer News Service
THE ONGOING drama over the wiretapped conversations between President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Commission on Elections Commissioner Virgilio Garciliano is reaching absurd heights because of the president¹s deafening silence on the issue of whether or not it is her voice on the tapes.
You and I, and everyone else in the Philippines for that matter, know that it is GMA's voice on the tapes and that yes, she was improperly discussing the election returns last May 2004. There is no need for the House of Representatives to have the Federal Bureau of Investigation or Scotland Yard verify their authenticity.
The president¹s refusal to comment on the tapes, and the fact that they were first released to the press by her own spokesperson Ignacio Bunye last week, says all that needs to be said.
The
filing of incitement to sedition charge against former NBI official Samuel Ong for possessing tapes of the president¹s phone conversations, and for stirring people to rise against the president, is patently ridiculous. It is the
act of a desperate president and administration that find themselves sinking deeper and deeper into a quagmire of their own making.
Is not the behavior of President Arroyo and her cohorts just as bad if not worse than that of what they accused former President Joseph Estrada of doing? At least Estrada didn¹t cheat to win in the election, unlike GMA who now seems to have cheated badly to squeak by with her supposed 1 million vote margin and just 40 percent of the votes. That¹s hardly a healthy majority of votes cast, which just shows that her presidency has been weak and unrepresentative from the very beginning.
President Arroyo has basically sold her soul to the devil by making crooked deals with so many different power brokers. These sleazy deals have inevitably contaminated her whole administration and her close family members and that is why she is so silent now. The illegal and dirty business of jueteng has exploded under her benign watch, with a wink and a nod from her.
It is highly unfortunate that the whole exercise that propelled her into the presidency in the first place, the EDSA II protests in 2001, was
contaminated with sleazy jueteng to begin with in the form of celebrated whistleblower and self-confessed jueteng-lord Illocos Sur Gov. Chavit Singson.
I always thought it was a big mistake believing in Singson, and it was an even bigger mistake not throwing him into jail along with Estrada!
Watching Kris Aquino fawn over him on morning television whenever Singson would appear with his pet tigers struck me as not only strange but repulsive.
How could such an obviously corrupt man be so publicly celebrated and treated with respect? Only in the Philippines I guess. Now the Arroyo administration is
using Marcos-era tactics of intimidation to get people to stop talking publicly about the vast amounts of corruption that surround them. People like Ong are being slapped with sedition charges; youth leaders are being arrested in Manila for putting up anti-Arroyo posters and also being charged with sedition, and TV and radio stations are being warned not to air the controversial wiretap conversations or risk not having their licenses renewed.