The Marcos regime's desperate attempt to block Vice President Sara Duterte from succeeding Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has backfired spectacularly. The administration's impeachment plot against Sara, fueled by bribery, fabricated evidence, and a propaganda campaign, faced a crushing defeat with the Iglesia Ni Cristo's massive show of support for the Dutertes.
In the past several days, the writing on the wall for the Marcos-Romualdez regime has clearly appeared: It is a moribund government that is merely waiting for the family's history of being forcibly ousted to be repeated. In the best scenario, it will drag itself bloodied toward 2028, with Filipinos either hating the regime or just ignoring it, as happened to another US-puppet regime, Benigno Aquino III's. It deserves its likely fate. Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
's greed in wanting his clan to continue to rule to the next generation is unprecedented. Marcos should have been extremely content that by a quirk of fate — the popularity of the Dutertes who supported him and were willing to wait for six years for Sara to be president — Filipinos took a chance that the son would not be like his authoritarian father who eventually ruined the country. Marcos Jr. should have devoted heart and soul, given up everything else and use all his energies to change the current and global assessments of his father as the country's most corrupt president ever.No. He certainly didn't do that. Rather than getting the best and brightest to join his administration, he took on spoiled boyhood friends, tycoons' technocrats, and worse, those who think a big corrupt deal in government, even just one, would allow them to live their lives on banks' interest.Worse, never in our history has a sitting president moved to block his vice president from succeeding him, except — to stretch it — in the case of Marcos Sr. who blocked and aborted scheduled elections (in 1973) to instead impose authoritarian rule that lasted 14 years. Not even the Machiavellian President Ramos blocked his vice president, Joseph Estrada, whom he abhorred from becoming his successor.In sharp contrast, Marcos spent huge resources and time in the first half of his term to undertake plots to block Sara from becoming president in 2028, or before that in case he becomes incapacitated. Early last year, the Marcos gang tried, foolishly I think, to have the Constitution amended to turn our government into a parliamentary system in which House Speaker Martin Romualdez would be prime minister with Marcos in transition as president. That was blocked, as no one in the Senate was stupid enough to give up his or her political and outrightly financial investments undertaken over many years to be one of the 24 senators of the land to just sit with the 300 mostly mediocre members of parliament.Or was it his cousin Martin Romualdez who pushed him to take down Sara as soon as he could?UnprecedentedWhoever between the two was the mastermind, the resources and efforts they undertook to politically assassinate Sara has been unprecedented in ferocity and scale. Four committees of the House of Representatives, even the communist congressmen, were mobilized by the regime to come up with some evidence, even the flimsiest, to impeach her. How much would it have cost — through outright bribes or pork barrel to do? At least P2 billion, a source in Congress estimated. Government investigative agencies were made to turn out dirt against Sara.Staff in the Commission on Audit and Education Department, as well as the Office of the Vice President, were bribed to come out with what on the surface were juicy information to use against Sara such as one 'Mary Grace Piatos' as a purported recipient of Sara's confidential funds. A source in the military claimed that Communist Party of the Philippines was directly given the funds in order to get it to order its party-list representatives' groups to become strident critics of Duterte.And what crimes did they find for which she has to be impeached? Extrajudicial killings when she was Davao mayor, her failure to condemn China's aggressive actions in the 'WPS,' her display of lack of control?The quad comm hearings were gradually exposed as a propaganda operation, its 'resource persons,' for instance, who provided testimony against the Dutertes, were unscrupulous criminals who were not even cross-examined, and were obviously lying to get favors from the government.IglesiaWhat has totally routed Marcos' plot was the homegrown religious organization, the Iglesia Ni Cristo's (INC) show of support for the Dutertes — its nationwide demonstration last Jan. 13 attended by 1.8 million massing in the country's major cities. While officially for 'peace and unity,' the rally was, as even former senator Leila de Lima pointed out, an unequivocal defense of Sara, a demand for the Marcos government to drop its impeachment nonsense.Marcos himself backtracked in a panicky way, emphasizing in a talk with the media on the day of the rally itself, that impeachment would be a waste of time and that he had never supported it
Philippines Marcos Regime Sara Duterte Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Impeachment Iglesia Ni Cristo Politics Corruption Propaganda
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