Marcos’ anti-Sara mob fails to pressure Senate
IT is sickening, yet revealing of their agenda, that not a few commentators have been striving to disseminate a false picture that there is a groundswell of support for the removal of Vice President Sara Duterte from office. All except one of the columnists in the most yellow and widely circulated paper have been shrieking “Off with Sara’s head!”
One writer in that yellow paper wrote: “People from nearly all sectors — the urban poor, the rural folk, labor, the professions, the academe, the Church, the NGOs are mobilizing, preparing to do battle [with the Senate].”
Another wrote: “The thinking class has spoken. Professors, students, professionals, lawyers, doctors, clerics and ex-generals declared their expectation [to proceed with Sara’s trial].”
On the contrary, a common feature of these individuals and groups pushing for Sara’s removal has been their propensity not to analyze issues deeply but to merely “group-think” and base their views on the dominant propaganda spread by the media.
To bolster this writer’s fake news that the “nation” wants the impeachment trial to be undertaken, he wrote that “240 of 306 congressmen transmitted the case to the Senate for Sara to be tried.” He then cited two surveys, one of which showed 88 percent supporting the impeachment while the other found 78 percent in favor.
It is amazing — which, however, forces me to make an unflattering conclusion on this writer’s motivation — that this writer forgot what he himself wrote a few months ago: “In December, Congress’ bicameral conference committee defunded education and PhilHealth for public works and political ayuda; the fund juggling was for impeachment payolas. Impeachment is dirty politics — blatant lying, transactional alignments and bribery.”
Amnesia
Did he have amnesia or even Alzheimer’s disease that just a few months ago, mainstream and social media were buzzing with reports that Speaker Martin Romualdez promised P150 million in bribes to each congressman in the form of ayuda and infrastructure projects for their districts if they signed pronto the impeachment complaint against Sara? Cebu congressman and deputy speaker Duke Frasco and Marcos 2nd’s election campaign head Toby Tiangco are on video claiming just that.
Yet commentators pushing for the impeachment continue ad nauseam, citing the Social Weather Stations survey that “78 percent support the impeachment while another pollster, OCTA Research, reported a figure of 88 percent.”
I have debunked these fake polls, and publicly challenged SWS president Mahar Mangahas and the anonymous pollsters of OCTA to disprove my claim. They haven’t. The true picture is that most Filipinos are unaware of what the impeachment is all about and don’t care, with the percentage of Filipinos for or against roughly the same at 20 percent. That’s not surprising at all: “Impeachment” is something even educated people have to google to understand what it is, why there is such a process in Congress. For ordinary people, it as esoteric as “cyber libel” or “writ of habeas corpus.”
The truth is that most people are not pushing for Sara’s impeachment. The so-called thinking class and “people from all sectors” are in reality a mob, largely the same self-righteous gang which made up the propaganda forces that pushed for the impeachment of former president Joseph Estrada in 2000 and Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2012, and tried to overthrow President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in 2005. They’ve simply changed the names of their organizations to such titles as Coalition of Civil Society and Religious Leaders, Tindig Bayan and UP Act Against Corruption Network to appear to be mere citizens fighting against corruption.
In the same way that President Ramos and his political lieutenant Jose de Venecia were allegedly behind the Estrada impeachment and President Benigno Aquino III behind Corona’s, it is the Marcos-Romualdez gang that has plotted, funded and undertaken the move to take down Sara. Why? Because she is the only obstacle to the Marcos-Romualdez plot to remain in power when presidential elections are held in 2028.
Videos
Check out the videos against Sara: You’ll feel déjà vu, the same kind of demonstrations, nearly the same kind of slogans used against Estrada and Corona.
There are two organizations mainly providing the agit-prop and warm bodies for the impeach-and-remove-Sara rallies. First is the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) through its numerous front organizations, mainly the Bayan Muna electoral apparatus, and party groups such as Gabriela and Kabataan. Second is Sen. Risa Hontiveros’ party Akbayan.
The irony here is that these groups have spent nearly all of their political lives fighting to overthrow the Marcos 1st dictatorship, and tens of thousands of their comrades here had been killed and imprisoned for their activism.
Now they are struggling to remove Sara from the political landscape, paving the way for a Marcos-Romualdez dictatorship 2.0. Have they gone mad? Or have they or their leaders become so impoverished — with the loss of financing from the traditional financiers — that they have become known as “Reds for Rent?”
The other party that is at the head of the anti-Sara mob is the so-called Akbayan, set up by former cadres of the CPP in the 1990s who had left the party, disillusioned over communist leader Jose Maria Sison’s leadership.
CPP
They eschewed the CPP’s armed-struggle tack but adopted the communists’ tactics and strategy of creating fronts, organizing cause-oriented groups and collaborating with incumbent administrations as they did in the time of Estrada (in his first years) and throughout Aquino III’s presidency. Its main leader (whom broadcast media naively describe as a “political analyst,” Ronaldo Llamas, for example, was Aquino III’s political adviser throughout his administration.
Akbayan ran for party-list posts in 1998, but won one seat only in 2001, riding on its role in the ouster of Estrada. Its capture of House seats as well as its officials’ cooperation with incumbent administrations enable it to get resources from the government, especially with the election to the Senate of Risa Hontiveros in 2016. She won only because Aquino III, smitten with her, gave her huge financial and organizational resources for her campaign.
Don’t think academics, clerics and lawyers in the anti-Sara mob have really spent time studying the impeachment issue. These people have a scholastic mind-set — just like medieval scholars — of fixation on abstractions, rather than seeking truth from facts. Note how almost all of them mouth the same slogans in justifying their hatred of Sara: “It’s all about accountability,” “Senate must comply with the Constitution,” “Forthwith means immediately” and “The constitutional is not optional.”
They hate facts and history, and refuse to even spend a minute in thinking, “Did this impeachment drop down from the skies, or is it part of the Marcos plot to continue in power?” “Were the representatives really bribed to file the complaint by the Marcos-Romualdez bloc?” Their weltanschauung is shaped almost solely in their cloisters and libraries, and they move in the same circle detached from reality.
Stupidity
I have never seen such stupidity than this generation of activists and commentators are demonstrating.
Can’t they see they’re being used by the Marcos-Romualdez clan to remove from the country’s politics, the only person capable of stopping it — Vice President Duterte?
I challenge those yellow columnists to answer this single question: Will they still be campaigning against Sara if her ouster will definitely lead to a Marcos 2nd dictatorship?
This Senate, of course, saw through their lies, cleverly remanding the complaint to the House by an overwhelming vote of 18 to 5. Now tell me, can the Marcos-Romualdez tandem raise P35 billion — the amount it offered the 215 congressmen last February to file the impeachment complaint — to bribe the House representatives to tell the Senate the impeachment is valid and did not violate the one-complaint-a-year rule?
The Palace apologist disguised as a columnist may be echoing his boss’ denial of reality by writing yesterday that the Senate’s remanding of the complaint to the House “didn’t derail the trial, and even reenforced it.” Right. Do you think the next 20th Senate will be reversing their views, expressed in the 18-5 vote, when another Duterte supporters Rodante Marcoleta and Camille Villar will be joining it?
Hope springs eternal indeed if part of your income comes from the government.
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Marcos’ anti-Sara mob fails to pressure Senate
Source: Breaking News PH
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