General Admission
Duterte is of the people, by the people, for the people
By Al S. Mendoza
THE people have spoken.
They voted Rodrigo Duterte the 16th president of the republic because they want change.
That change is anchored on Duterte’s Twin Torpedoes: Curb criminality and stop illegal drug trades.
How he would do it, the people never gave a hoot.
They see in Duterte someone willing to do it—that’s all that mattered to them.
Change does not have pre-conditions.
Duterte is of the people, by the people, for the people.
Duterte offered the people his own cure, questionable it may even seem; they took it hook, line and sinker.
A saviour is never an applicant.
When one is on the brink, on cliff’s edge, he clings to the last thread of hope, of survival.
He would gamble, even sell his soul.
Gambling is the mother of desperation.
Among Duterte’s four foes, not one came close to presenting a platform as palatable as Duterte’s dish.
Mar Roxas did not represent change, taking a fatal plunge by promising to continue PNoy’s daang matuwid.
Daang matuwid became Mar’s albatross since Day One of his campaign.
Under daang matuwid, 70 percent of our 100 million people have remained poor—despite a handsome average of 6.2 percent growth.
How can it be daang matuwid when even the United Nations regularly see some two million Filipinos eating only one meal a day?
The fruits of growth have never cascaded down to the poor.
Nothing’s changed from Tita Cory up to her son, PNoy: The rich became richer and the poor became poorer.
Grace Poe was the 2016 campaign’s most unfortunate battered victim.
Her ambitions brought her down—a riling result of miscalculations mainly authored by her political mentor, the opportunist Chiz Escudero.
Jojo Binay had self-destructed way too early through his stubborn refusal to face the corruption charges repeatedly heaped on him in Senate hearings aired on TV primetime.
Binay, finishing a poor fourth, was a sad, gruesome tale of how to lose a virtually-won presidential derby.
And Miriam Defensor-Santiago?
Struck by cancer, Miriam’s Palace bid was but an illusion from the start.
How pathetic that the one-time runner-up—she almost prevailed in the 1992 presidential election won by Fidel V. Ramos—became delusional in the end.
She had no business running in the first place, her campaign sorties as few as PNoy’s thinning hair.
Her only consolation was she had been accorded preferential treatment by Duterte during the presidential debates.
Who said Duterte was not of the gentlemanly kind?
If there was one who exhibited chivalry of the highest degree during the debates, Duterte it was.
As proof, even Grace almost repeatedly gave Duterte beso–beso before and after every debate was held—Poe ignoring Roxas and Binay each time.
If that was not a resplendent recognition of Duterte’s inexorable march to Malacanang, what is?
Duterte is it and he might as well be what the people had been waiting for all this time.
(For your comments and reactions, please email to: punch.sunday@gmail.com)
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