Bribery as a means to impeach

posted January 25, 2014 at 12:01 am by  Rod Kapunan

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The trouble with this pretending-to-be-honest President is that he is trying to make himself smarter than the ancient Roman governor Pontius Pilate who instead of deciding the fate of Jesus Christ symbolically washed his hands in public to signify he was leaving it to the mob led by the Pharisees to decide on what to do with him.


That impression remains to this day.   People continue to blame Pilate because he had the power to absolve an innocent man for allegedly subverting the Roman sovereignty in Judea.   Although the Bible says that Christ was bound to be crucified to redeem us from our sins, that is as far as the believers of the Divine prophecy are concerned.  For the mundane thinkers, that aspect was the result of man’s irrational behavior for revenge. They argue that if Pilate could not stand seeing Jesus nailed on the cross, he was duty bound to absolve him.
In our present case, when this bungling President attempted to toss the issue to the public to decide on his conduct in trying to influence the senator-judges to vote for the conviction of that equally politicking Chief Justice Renato Corona, he in effect played an active role in the commission of an injustice -- the exact opposite of what Pilate did. 
Whether Corona was guilty or not is now beside the point. Whether what happened can be called a miscarriage of justice or a mistrial, one thing sure is that the conduct of PNoy is far more serious.  Bribery is a direct affront to his publicly proclaimed observance of “tuwid na daan” parodied today as “tuwad na daan.”   
Likewise, PNoy is behaving like a bigot.  He relies more on his self-serving high popularity rating prepared by his handlers for him to believe that the majority can never be wrong.  Equating the so-called “opinion of the majority” as right has been the fashion of the yellow hypocrites without the unwary public knowing they are being manipulated by the mainstream media that is exclusively controlled by the oligarchs. 
His chief trumpeters Herminio Coloma, Jr., of the Presidential Communications Operations Office, or Presidential Spokesman Edwin Lacierda are dead wrong to assume their boss is right because he continues to enjoy a high performance rating.  Unfortunately, the continued prostitution about the rule of the majority has created for us a badly dysfunctional democracy where people are made to accept bribery as right if the purpose is to get rid of one’s political enemies. Invariably, that effectively reduces our government to a mafia organization where our political leaders could freely use public funds to either buy the loyalty of their adulators or use them to pay people to do the dirty work for them.
Finally, President Aquino explained that his meeting with some of the senators during the impeachment trial was to make sure the “culprit” would not be able to escape the dragnet through legal technicalities.  But that made him appear sillier than he thought.  It is not for him to think what is right in a manner of tossing the issue to the people, but for him to observe what the law provides.  In fact, he never denied handing cash to the senators in exchange for their crucial vote.   On the contrary, his minions insist that what he did was right citing his continued high performance rating of 74 to 73 percent quoting their sanctifier, Pulse Asia.
His trumpeters also deny their man used the term “balato,” to persuade Senator Revilla to vote for the conviction of Corona, and maybe they are right.   But they should have known that talking alone to a judge handling a case constitutes a criminal offense.
The impeachment trial of Corona turned out to be another inglorious chapter in our history because the members of the Senate, except for Senators Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., Joker Arroyo and Miriam Defensor-Santiago, voted to convict the chief justice upon the instigation of a wholly vindictive President. Invariably, the President himself pointed a dirty finger at our judicial system.
Worse, PNoy’s feeling of being above the law has emboldened him to use public funds without congressional appropriations.  To make it appear the release was legal, his raving minion, Department of the Budget and Management secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad, invented a term.  It was on that juncture the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) came into being, and the purpose for which they were hastily released was to use that to bribe the members of the Senate.
To becloud the issue, Malacanang allowed their quisling Benhur Luy to rant that Senator Revilla’s signatures to secure the release of his PDAF were genuine, and  wryly asked “why only now?”  But all that were empty because the issue of meddling coupled by bribery was not refuted by their quisling.
rpkapunan@gmail.com