Shhh… we shouldn’t criticise Vice President Jejomar Binay because he’s got the goods on us.
Perhaps this is what’s in the minds of the Philippines’ leaders, even as Netizens and ordinary folk alike, many of whom are rabid fans of President Benigno Simeon ‘BS’ Aquino III, mount a “full-court press” to slam Binay on social media.
All that noise on social media ironically highlights the deafening silence coming from President BS Aquino himself. To be fair, Aquino had seemingly given the green light to his mouthpieces to release the hounds, so to speak. But as far as the famously blamey horse’s mouth we ask of Aquino: Why the notable silence yet again?
To be sure, nothing in the damning statements let loose by Binay against President BS Aquino is news to most Filipinos. Aquino suffers from a string of political scandals erupting under his watch. The emergence of vast pork barrel thievery at an unprecedented scale had a money train on tracks that lead squarely back to Malacanang. The jewel of Manila’s public transport system, the MRT, was reduced to a junk heap under the current administration’s management. And a criminally-insane law that seeks carve out a chunk of Mindanao and serve it to a terrorist group was drafted under a Philippine President in cahoots with Kuala Lumpur.
Oh yeah, and then there is that small matter of the Hacienda Luisita and its seeming immunity to subjection to agrarian reform.
There are no good guys or bad guys here — only dynastic interests. Whether one is pro-BSA or pro-Binay, Binay-aran or Noytard-ic by motivation, all these politicians have red underwear to hide under their skirts. A frenzy of skirt-lifting will do the entire oligarchy no good because everyone’s got skeletons in their closets. It’s the reason why, despite the Philippines’ stone-age bank secrecy laws being highlighted as a hindrance to fact-finding during the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2012, politicians still manage to grossly misdeclare their personal wealth to the public.
For that matter, it is quite funny the way people get so worked up about how an allegedly crooked family like the Binays managed to grab so many offices and stay in power for so long, considering that at the centre of the whole demonisation campaign against the Vice President is “senator” Antonio Trillanes who became a member of Congress despite being a convicted rebel leader who endangered thousands of Filipino lives and destroyed millions of pesos worth of property on account of his little military adventure back in the mid-2000s.
Pinoy nga naman talaga.
As always, the wrong arguments win in this intellectually-bankrupt society. And I’m not talking about arguments for or against any of these bozos. I’m talking about arguments that properly frame, the issue of why Philippine politics is the way it is — an ostentatious national ornament worn to buttress the pretense that is Philippine “democracy” at immense cost to the ordinary Filipino schmoe.
In the hit HBO series Game of Thrones, one will note that the story is spun mainly around the tribulations of the nobility. There is not much about the plight of ordinary peasants that punctuates the GoT world. Too boring. Who gives a flying frig about peasants’ petty lives anyway when bloody feuds between rich folk make better entertainment?
That’s kind of what the Philippines is like today. It’s really a circus of the elites with the concerns of ordinary Filipinos fitting in as nothing more than the inconsequential dust on the grounds upon which gallop the mounts of jousting knights.
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