Are we seriously considering a mentally challenged person to be our President?

By Renato Beato

To My Fellow Filipinos,

Like many of you, I was initially enchanted by the Cory Magic and entertained the notion that a Noynoy Aquino presidency would be a great step towards restoring order, honesty, and decency to Philippine governance. Change for the better was finally at hand, I thought with unqualified optimism!

During the past few months of the presidential election campaign, however, it began to painfully dawn on me that perhaps the Liberal Party had bet on the wrong horse by drafting Noynoy Aquino to be its presidential candidate. This was because telltale signs of his unfitness for the country’s highest public office started to come in trickles—at first only in polite whispers or in little TV images or sound bites, so to speak. But now, I think you will agree with me, his evident daftness is now an open secret.

My suspicions actually dated back to September 2009 when I came across Noynoy Aquino’s self-serving, revisionist claims of heroism in his Senate website. Listen to his unabashed lie long before he was drafted as presidential candidate by his party: “The defense of democracy nearly cost Noynoy his life. He was almost killed during the military coup against President Aquino in 1990 when he met retreating rouge soldiers at the front gates of Malacañang. Three of his bodyguards died while he suffered five bullet wounds. A bullet is still embedded in his neck.” It seemed to me strange that despite the fact that it was public knowledge that he and his bodyguards were plain ambushed with no opportunity at all to fight back, Noynoy would contrive to give the false impression that he actually engaged those soldiers by meeting them headlong—and “in defense of democracy” at that! (Sensibly, his handlers have since removed this lie from his Senate website, but I can send you a copy if you wish.)

Anyway, I thought that this was just an isolated, harmless fib by someone who was still in the process of establishing his own self-worth. But last March 14, in a sidebar story in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, I found proof positive—and a very painful, demoralizing one at that!—that the man whom you and I want to be Philippine president is not only a habitual prevaricator but someone with the mind of a small child or an adolescent with a very low IQ.

Lest you think that this is just another poisoned concoction from the other political camps, I will be quoting extensively from the Inquirer report about his interview during a break in Noynoy’s campaign sortie in Surigao City. I must assure you that I wanted to be as dispassionate and objective as possible in reading the Inquirer’s account of the interview; I even entertained the notion that the reporter probably just wanted to be nastily cute by contriving absurd questions for Noynoy to answer, or perhaps had just made up a lampoon story for the Inquirer’s funny section.

After reading the interview story, however, there was no mistaking the fact that Noynoy’s sense of understanding things is very poor indeed! To even very simple questions, he reacts like a petulant spoiled brat who will concoct just about any nonsense in his mind just to reassure himself of his superiority to anybody. I really find it weird, but he has begun to believe that he is Superman! I now therefore find it unthinkable that the Aquino family and Noynoy’s political handlers—and you and I as well—could have ever entertained the notion of propelling this person to be president and chief executive of the Philippines? What were we thinking?

Below, except for my comments in Italic text, I now quote verbatim from the Inquirer’s Reporters’ Notebook:

PHILIPPINE INQUIRER REPORTERS’ NOTEBOOK

Tit for tat

The NP’s Villar asks in his ads: Naranasan nyo na bang matulog sa maikling bangko sa palengke (Have you ever slept on a short bench in the market)?”

“Yes,” says his closest rival, the LP’s Aquino.

And Aquino says he did it for two days in the basement of Malacañang at the height of the coup attempt against his mother’s administration in December 1989.

“I was supposed to sleep on [the dictator Ferdinand] Marcos’ dental chair, but two of our household helpers beat me to it. So I had to settle for the bangko,” Aquino said during after-dinner cocktails with reporters at the Gateway Hotel in Surigao City.

MY COMMENT: Take note that it was lost to Noynoy that the question was: “Have you ever slept on a short bench in the market?” A short bench in the market, got that? Instead, he crows about his experience in the basement of Malacañang! Palengke ba ang basement ng Malacañang? What kind of perverted logic is that?

* * * * * * * * *

Aquino has countered Villar’s sob stories with his own.

To Villar’s claim that he lost a sibling because his family could not afford to buy the necessary medication, Aquino said he lost his father from gunfire heard all over the world.

MY COMMENT: “Aquino said he lost his father from gunfire heard all over the world.” This question might be asked: By what stretch of logic is his loss of his father connected to the decibels of the gunfire that killed him? Or to the fact that that gunfire was “heard round the world”? Frankly, all this sounds like a infantile Jack-en-Poy logic to me! Noynoy’s thought process is beginning to get very scary indeed!

To Villar’s story of being forced to sleep in the middle of the street during Christmas, Aquino claimed that he suffered a similar indignity when his mother and sisters were forced to strip down every time they visited his detained father.

MY COMMENT: If you were in Noynoy’s shoes (and don’t even factor in the fact that you are gunning for the Philippine presidency), would you invoke this non sequitur just to prove that you have a superior experience in anything—even the most humiliating ones? If you did, it would be most difficult for me not to conclude that you have gone out of your mind.

What Aquino cannot match is Villar’s claim of having swum through a sea of garbage.

But he said: “I really doubt that. At Villar’s age, I don’t think the seas in his youth were dirty. So I don’t know what sea of garbage he swam in.”

MY COMMENT: This is really the gut-wrenching, terribly alarming clincher! We all knew that Noynoy Aquino wasn’t at all brilliant to begin with, but we pinned our hopes on him on the assumption that at least he could go through the motions of putting back the body politic to the path of normalcy, with the best and brightest of the people around him providing all-out support. But what do we do now that there’s incontrovertible evidence that Noynoy Aquino doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to be the country’s president, to put it every so mildly?

Indeed, what do we do now that in our desperate, irrepressible desire to get rid of President Gloria Arroyo and usher in an era of reform in the Philippines, we have conned ourselves and other people to the point of possibly electing someone so mentally unfit to be our country’s chief executive and head of state? Heaven help us!

Yours truly,
Renato Beato

Back to Homepage

Share your Comments or Reactions

comments

Powered by Facebook Comments