SENATOR Aquilino Pimentel is one funny guy. His charming expletives against GMA do not fail to make me laugh.
One of his latest, when asked what he thought of the CBCP statement: “Appeals to conscience are good under normal circumstances, not when the person concerned doesn’t appear to have one. How does one ask Idi Amin or a Saddam or a Mugabe to examine his conscience?”
Although at this point he is by his words far from being the quintessence of statesmanship, I almost liked him, myself an avid disciple of the wonderful art of sarcasm. To adopt an FPJ line from an FPJ movie (which my favorite carinderia’s television set mercilessly imposed on my senses one lunchtime), para siyang nakakain ng maraming sili—masyadong maanghang ang bunganga.
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At least, as we go along in our comedy, we are putting a decisive end to several national issues.
A rallying group of students, around 40 or so, claiming to be the voice of the school’s entire studentry, has helped debunk once and for all the so-called overpopulation of the country. If they are the voice of the majority of the students, and if every group claiming to carry the statement of their sectors is to be believed, there couldn’t be that many people in this country after all.
Fr. Robert Reyes, together with a group, also recently sounded the death knell of hunger in the country. His group, if memory serves, vowed to keep several members at a time fasting 24 hours at the EDSA Shrine until GMA resigns. If more gallant and generous souls join their cause, our poorer countrymen would have food (granting also that GMA defies the call). Reyes, that Forrest Gump-like health buff of a priest, is even putting his well-being at stake.
On a more serious note, the resolution of the controversies hounding the Expanded VAT Law is being given a not-so-expanded time frame as well. As the immediate resolution is seen as one of the main acts in the national big top, the Supreme Court anteponed the hearing of oral arguments on the law to July 14, two weeks earlier than its original schedule. Good show, no doubt. Open to the public, too.
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I said earlier in this column that I won’t take to the streets until there is a clear and real reason to do so. I have no problem with shouting for GMA to resign. I would even do it in the fashion of an Apache war cry, complete with face paint. If we go by tradition (it is, isn’t it?), by all means she should be flushed out of Malacañang for the stain of impropriety that messing up the presidency.
But looking at the circumstances of this country, we cannot afford to change the president every so often, and without regard to the Constitution.
To be fair, GMA has not been true to her word before. But that was in a different setting, one that did not require presentation of proof. In the situation now, the bishops are indubitably and inevitably correct in saying that, beyond apology is accountability (Naturally, the CBCP statement got sniped and griped at by the resign bloc, whose idea of making a stand perhaps is always oppositive).
But GMA should not be content with saying she’s sorry. She should overcome the accusations with contrary proof and be quick about it, in an impeachment proceeding, the only constitutionally warranted move available now that she has put her foot down on not resigning.
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I do not join those who call for GMA’s resignation because as they are not clear as to how we go on after GMA is out, they are merely noisy cymbals.
GMA’s several “crucial hours” have turned into crucial days and weeks, and the resign factions are still at it, commenting every time a rally disperses that a “bigger, more massive” one is in the works.
The debate is so protracted now that it has become childish. Whatever the opposition and its allied forces have thrown at GMA, she is still in Malacañang. These rallies that promise to grow bigger and bigger are a stubborn display of childish ego, the type that cannot accept being made wrong by circumstances.
Can they please just stop?
Sue me. Or just impeach GMA instead.
