“All this is in character for the embattled Vice President.”
I finished writing my piece for Monday as early as Friday, and was just waiting for Sunday to send it. But when the Vice President made her ‘cri de coeur’ that afternoon with her litany of revelations about her “non-friendship” with the President, I thought it best to archive my previously written article.
I admired how she has been more open to the press, and her first long presser showed her in her natural self, no pretensions, very authentic. In Friday’s two hour gabfest which was cut short by the moderator, she was more than that. She was candid to a fault.
She repeated an earlier statement that the president was not her friend, only his older sister was. And in trying to convince Inday Sara to run as vice-president to her “ading,” the senator-sister was quite candid. It was all about political arithmetic: Solid North plus solid South was key to victory, period.
Principles, platforms, goals and all those ideal points of agreement were never on the table. Such is realpolitik.
Inday Sara was also quite candid in describing her frosty relations with the people around the president, which she promised to detail in a yet forthcoming press conference, when frosty would further “drag me (and them?) to hell.”
These and other incendiary remarks, the usual pundits described as “rants.” It would be difficult to describe her words as an expression of angst, or even anger, as clearly that has passed. She simply has had enough and for her, there is no turning back.
Her critics described her message to her friend Imee about digging the grave of FM Sr. and throwing his remains into the West Philippine Sea as a desecration of the dead, so very un-Filipino whose culture of reverence for the dead is strong. How did her friend feel?
It may have been said in a moment of anger and exasperation, which if only the press encounter was scripted, her handlers should have excised.
I have a different take: she did not realize that what are jokes or light banter to her are taken seriously by her critics and the media.
Remember when she said three Dutertes would run for senator? I do not know her that well, but immediately, I knew she meant it as a joke, and I wrote so in this space. Others took her seriously, even the pollsters.
Now her critics have something to bash her with aside from the COA reports that they are peeling bit by bit. “Desecrating the dead,” they chorus.
Sadly for the Vice President too, Undas, the Dia de los Muertos, is just around the corner. Talk of bad timing. Her “joke” would be grist for the reunions around graveyards.
I did not quite understand her big fuss about the graduating student being refused by PBbM the gift of his watch. The question in my mind was the brand of watch on the president’s wrist — was it a Patek, a gold Audemars, a vintage Vacheron? I did not know, because I was in Taiwan during much of FPRRD’s term, that former president Rodrigo Duterte, when so approached likewise in the PMA graduation, gladly parted with his wrist watch and gave it to the graduate.
PBbM must have been unaware that Duterte started some kind of tradition in the academy and was unamused by the audacity of a mere student asking for his watch.
That she wanted to wring the neck of her political partner for what she thought was his being mata-pobre, was a reaction that many would clearly interpret as grossly improper. She simply assumed her audience would know why she was so mad.
While her candor and strong reactions could be likened to her father whose uncontrolled and un-scripted statements made him more endearing, one wonders how people, especially the masa, would accept the manner by which she burned all bridges towards her scorned UniTeam partner and the baggage around him.
The Palace must have been stunned by her frankness and thus could not make a proper reaction and opted to keep quiet. That of course is only “for now”, in much the same way that their sachems took out their long knives only recently against the January “rants” of FPRRD about “bangag.”
But trust the Palace and its congressional surrogates to dig their knives deeper till the hurt becomes unbearable, or its thousand thrusts obliterate her chances for 2028 if it should yet come to that.
Then again, it was in character for the embattled Vice President. She would say it as it is, to hell with how people interpret or mis-interpret her words.
