Sara’s ‘impertinences’

Tactically attempting to shore up the flagging morale of her fanatical devotees was the immediate intent of Vice President Sara Duterte’s blustering censures last week of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.

Such a tactical attempt wasn’t obvious at first glance, drowned as it was by implications of the definitive break between the feuding Marcos-Duterte dynasties and Ms. Duterte’s vulgarities in defending her misunderstood political virtues and in complaining of the slanders of her opponents.

Emerging last week from her relatively cloistered political seclusion — where previously she merely alluded to her erstwhile ally on the rare occasions that she commented on politics — Ms. Duterte subsequently managed to keep the eyes of the public fixed upon herself with her censures, to the delight of her many devotees.

For her many devotees, her furious blasts against Marcos led many of them, as Karl Marx said, to again falsely “believe in the trumpets whose blasts made the walls of Jericho collapse.” The walls of the Marcos political edifice, that is.

That surge of partisan emotions, however, was quickly hosed down by characterizing Ms. Duterte’s theatrical indignations as nothing more than the sentimental coquetry of the old Duterte brand of vulgarity.

Indeed, Ms. Duterte’s two-hour press briefing last Friday largely mimicked her father’s trademarked expletive-laced rants; a brand of vulgarity that ignited the imagination of its gullible victims, holding them spellbound in an imaginary world that a messiah had come to redeem the country, not govern it.

In fact, never has a pretender to political power speculated in a more vulgar fashion on the gullibility of her victims than Ms. Duterte’s threat to dig up the remains of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s dictator father and toss it into the sea, not only because exhuming remains is patently illegal but also because she clearly doesn’t possess enough political clout at present to do anything that she would like inside a state-guarded cemetery.

Still, the imaginative ploy of employing the threat of exhumation remains remarkably marketable, reinforcing her iron lady demeanor among her fanatical apostles, who then used her seemingly tough stance as flattering apostolic music to rally an increasingly skeptical fandom.

On this she obviously proceeded to further capitalize by accusing the incumbent of not knowing how to do his job, rating his performance as “1 out of 10.”

And, to invoke her erstwhile ally’s seeming lack of “utang na loob,” she reminded him that he wouldn’t have set foot in Malacañang if not for her helping him win votes in the Visayas and Mindanao during the 2022 presidential race.

All these impertinences, however, point to the fact that all these help Ms. Duterte and her handlers strategically position themselves in order to control events.

The impertinent exhumation threat as well as her charge that Marcos “does not know how to be president” are tactics to assume control of future political events like securing better chances for Duterte’s people ahead of the mid-term elections next year and, later, the 2028 presidential polls.

As such, as these strategic tactics all come into play, all eyes and ears are now glued on how and when the Marcoses will respond.

So far, the Palace refuses to officially comment on Ms. Duterte’s tirades, much less are there indications to even refute her accusations.

But some analysts say a Marcos response is forthcoming and it will be in the form of more intense investigations by the House on the use of the confidential funds of the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education — which some of Ms. Duterte critics claim are already damaging her.

Ms. Duterte’s tirades, therefore, are seen as a tactic to put the brakes on the House probes.

But should the House accelerate its probes, analysts say, the prying into Ms. Duterte’s affairs will be seen as nothing but preparing the groundwork for her impeachment, of which she seems well aware.

Ms. Duterte’s political distress, in short, is merely beginning to boil.