P-Noy, The Principal Culprit

Ronald Roy — 22 February 2012

As of this writing, the embattled Chief Justice Renato C. Corona’s quest for the hearts and minds of citizens appears to be suffering a setback for indulging in a personal word war with President Noynoy Aquino.

The CJ may have forgotten that he is the head of a non-political Judiciary, who is expected to rise above the crudities of politics, and stay within the ambit of the highest norms of decorum and rectitude.

The CJ may have forgotten that the Presidency is an inherently political institution, and that it matters little in the people’s view if its current occupant’s deportment is ethically or morally unacceptable, provided they are convinced he is sincere and dogged in pursuing his purpose to clamp in jail the malevolent Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and her cohorts.

In this internationally humiliating tit for tat between the country’s President and its Chief Justice, the latter is therefore seen as the loser, and it is to the credit of P-Noy’s handlers, if any there be, that his constant broadsides against the impeachment respondent have so incensed the latter as to cause him to retaliate in a manner that degrades his robes.

The Honorable Chief Justice has thus fallen into their trap.

Hardly disputable, incidentally, is the open secret that these “handlers” come from the camp of DOTC Secretary Mar Roxas, whose electoral protest before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET) —where three SC Associate Justices sit as members—remains pending in a bid to prove that it was he, not Jejomar Binay, who won the vice presidential race in 2010.

It is in light of these handlers’ strategy, therefore, that P-Noy’s escalating demonization of the Chief Justice is seen as his imperative to oust the latter in order: to insure PET’s nullification of Binay’s proclamation as the winner of the VP race, to declare Roxas as the winner, to strengthen and promote the Liberal Party as the party to beat in the 2013 and 2016 elections, and ultimately to preserve P-Noy’s place in history, alongside his “sainted” mother and “martyred” father, as a champion of Philippine democracy.

It matters not, really, if P-Noy’s sustained diatribes are of his own making or the planning efforts of Roxas’ tacticians, for what is clear is that in such embarrassing verbal skirmishes in public, a ranting and raving political President will still be cheered as a crusader against corruption, vis-à-vis an unbecoming Chief Justice against whom the tide of ostensibly damning evidence continues to swell.

In the end, only CJ Corona can save himself, and apologizing to the nation for his unseemly demeanor should be a good start in that direction. Until his time comes to speak on the witness stand, he must hold his peace and allow his Palace nemesis to fulminate all he wants, in the hope that a behavioral contrast would help him regain lost ground.

It is interesting to observe P-Noy’s chutzpah (of the pathological sort, most likely) in promising an escalation of his tirade, premised on his self-professed “duty to expose the unholy character” of the respondent even before he takes the witness stand to present his evidence.

Verily, it blows the mind that one who stands in open defiance of the Rule of Law and the respondent’s constitutional right to Due Process can call himself our President.

The think-tank (please refer to last week’s article “The only country we own”) has not yet convened to asses the word war. Be that as it may, it is this writer’s view that this development will not alter the think-tank’s judgment that CJ Corona will be acquitted for the reasons stated in its earlier analyses.

The unexpected turn of events on Day 21 of the impeachment trial—which saw Impeachment Presiding Officer Enrile fuming at the prosecution panel and the devastated prosecutors being granted an early adjournment to give them ample time to re-evaluate their position after the court stopped further ventilation on Article 3 —was in the view of observers the worst day ever for the prosecution, a development that boosts the think-tank’s thesis of an acquittal.

By the time of this article’s publication in the 4th week of February, we will have witnessed a dramatic drop of public interest in the annual commemoration of the EDSA People Power Revolution, and there are three reasons for this.

P-Noy is losing his credibility given the fact that one: the farmers of Hacienda Luisita are incessantly whining and reaching the end of their patience, two: the entire pro-life segment of the Church has all but abandoned him, and three: the Dalmatians (short for the Black and White Movement), who are known for their canine loyalty to P-Noy and his parents, are now pathetically decimated by their credit-grabbing exploits and hubris, and scorned for their self-seeking pursuit of government jobs as rewards for street-rally services rendered to their master in the Palace.

In ending this piece, allow me to cite a comment of a senior law student: “It’s bad enough that I’m not learning much from the impeachment trial of the Chief Justice, thanks to the prosecutors’ incompetence. Worse, we have a President who thinks he is above the Rule of Law and the Bill of Rights. Could he be the principal culprit behind the prosecutorial blunders?”