double faced

Presidential duplicity

By Manila Standard Today | Aug. 14, 2014 at 12:01am

 Once upon a time, President Benigno Aquino III gave us the sense that he despised his job so much that he could not wait his term to be over.
But he had the legacy of his parents to live up to, and as he said in his most recent State of the Nation Address just less than a month ago, he felt he had no choice but to take this path that seems to have been carved out for him.
In the past four years, the yellow ribbon-sporting President has made his mark by saying one thing and then doing another.
For instance, he said he would tread the straight path by going after the corrupt in government. In fact, he has only gone after his perceived political opponents —a Supreme Court Chief Justice who had the audacity to lead an adverse ruling on the Cojuangco family’s estate in Tarlac, and the President who had appointed him just before she stepped down.

 Everybody else is presumed guilty until proven otherwise— except his men and women who continue to enjoy his trust and who must be deemed innocent until proven guilty. There is, however, no means for proof to be established because they are never charged and prosecuted in the first place.
He also was adamant about attempts to amend the 1987 Constitution, crafted and ratified when his mother was President, even though proposals meant only to change the economic provisions and make the country more open and competitive.
But in an interview with News5’s legal analyst Mel Sta Maria, Mr. Aquino revealed on Wednesday that his position was not cast in stone after all. And no, he made no mention of greater foreign investments and competitiveness as factors that has changed his mind. Instead, he felt the powers of the Supreme Court were limitless and had to be clipped—the result, no doubt, of the Court’s surprise adverse and unanimous vote against his brainchild, the Disbursement Acceleration Program.
Mr. Aquino suggested that the Judiciary—one of the three supposedly Independent branches of government—has been using its power much too often.
Of course, a happy coincidence would be the possibility of running for a second term, as Interior and Local Government Secretary Mar Roxas suggested a week ago. At that time, many thought Roxas was plain silly, or plain desperate, but now it appears he has been in the loop in the Grand Plan, after all.
We now have it straight from the President’s mouth that his decision to go for a second term would all depend on what the people, his supposed bosses, want. The yarn is that the people have been enjoying the benefits of good governance and reforms he has instituted. They want him to carry on.
It’s a clamor he must heed, he hinted. But it is a clamor that we find difficult to imagine—what with his declining approval ratings and the increasing frustration with his arrogance, self-righteousness and duplicity.
With these pronouncements, President Aquino has marked the beginning of his downfall. Anybody who still believes he operates in good faith must now consider that the President’s feel-good talk is mostly hot air.