Not “Anak ng Pangasinan”

AS the political campaign heats up, candidates and their spinmasters are becoming very creative each day, and even have the gall to twist and stretch falsehoods. They conveniently leave it to the public to discern what’s true or false.

A most glaring, blatant falsity that insults the intelligence of Pangasinenses is the claim that Senator Grace Poe, a presidential candidate is “Anak ng Pangasinan.” Nothing can be farther from the truth. Ms. Poe does not have roots in Pangasinan, it’s her adopted father, Fernando Poe Jr. who had roots in San Carlos City.

In fact, what is being debated at the Supreme Court today is whether Ms. Poe, as a foundling has the right to seek the highest office in the land since the Constitution requires that only natural born citizens can. Ms. Poe was found in Iloilo and perhaps her still unidentified parents are from Iloilo but not in Pangasinan. She never even campaigned for FPJ in 2004 in Pangasinan because she was busy as a US citizen at the time. How could she even claim herself that is “Anak ng Pangasinan”?

Ms. Poe (Mrs. Grace Llamanzares in reality) is a decent lady and highly intelligent lady but apparently politics has already numbed her mind about need to be truthful.

 

Not a debate

IT was not a debate in the strictest sense of the word but still, there was a bit of a word war there.

A firework it was when Mar Roxas said Jojo Binay’s Makati is the country’s No. 1 haven of drugs to refute Binay’s claim that Makati was drug-free.  Miriam Santiago seared Binay with this: “Yes, I had a Party List congressman for a son for one term and that was it.” That was in answer to Binay’s charge that Santiago’s own child is an “elected” public official when Santiago indirectly accused Binay of political dynasty.

Grace Poe hit Roxas’s ineptness as a Cabinet member, especially on Roxas’s failure to improve train services in Metro Manila.  To which Roxas answered, “We do not need OJTs running this country,” in an oblique reference to Poe, whose only experience in political governance is her being senator for only three years since her election in 2013.

Quite astonishingly but not that surprising, no one dared to take a dig at Rodrigo Duterte, the tough-talking mayor of Davao City.  Perhaps Duterte’s rivals were simply afraid they might be torpedoed by the mayor’s acid-laced tongue doing a repartee, so that it would be wiser for the four foes not to stir the proverbial hornet’s nest?

Indeed, it wasn’t a debate but for starters, good enough.

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