When ex-President Rodrigo Duterte, dubbed “The Punisher,” more than graciously if “excitedly” accepted the Senate invitation to be a resource person at the hearing, the viewing universe got a clear and fresh look at DU30’s “war on drugs” at a threshold never before experienced.

Later in the hearing, the rabid Akbayan activist-senator of the chamber took “dangerous parliamentary maneuvers” she thought would make it beyond difficult for DU30 to navigate without sinking.

When DU30 endlessly echoed the phrase, “alam nila yan” (they know that), pointing to the police generals present, repeatedly challenging the Senate subcommittee to verify from them his “actual orders” regarding the drug problem, all those watching the inquiry graphically understood more factually the circumstances behind DU30’s unassailable rage against criminals — contrary to the oppositionists’ misplaced construal that the terms “to neutralize” and “to negate” equivocally and categorically mean “to kill.”

It has now come to light that the vicious and demonizing reference to a “Davao Death Squad” is a mere construct peddled by mainstream media. Otherwise mistakenly adopted by former Sen. Leila de Lima together with Sen. Risa Hontiveros, it was Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa who made this interesting disclosure based on actual, if evidentiary experience.

DU30 effectively communicated his misgivings about another Senate invitation since he subsists only on his retirement pay. This justifiably explains why DU30 compelled the committee to raise all their questions to put a disconcerting politico-ideological rumpus to a close.

This laid the predicate for DU30’s manifestly no-nonsense resolve to have the Senate probe disposed of that very same day, even registering his willingness to get the business done till the wee hours so his case can be put to rest. There being no expressed opposition from the senators, it should have implied affirmative action to his plea.

When applause from the gallery was heard after DU30 raised a crucial point, the presiding Sen. Koko Pimentel echoed by Hontiveros were quick to register a warning. Yet, the latter did not at all find it disturbing that two of her own staff right behind her exhibited if not displayed gestures even louder than the applause she expressed a displeasure for.

Don’t we practice what we preach? Hontiveros interjected at every opportunity, mindless about bringing embarrassment to another colleague or if her voice and DU30’s canceled each other out — a demeanor that by itself diametrically violated their own aforestated “ground rules.”

The Senate should devise a way or impose discipline on senatorial staff who can’t help themselves from “making faces” or “gesticulating with nods of approval” at every time their senator-boss raised a point. This scene left a bad taste in the mouth.

Pimentel laudably moderated the public hearing with respectable comportment and compliant with the laid-down “ground rules,” central of which is “respect for the invited resource persons,” except that at the end of the whole proceeding, a renegade demeanor of partiality, disrespect, level-headedness, arrogance had gone out the window. And the moderator seemed to have lost control.

Why did an oppositionist senator overzealously rebut everything that ex-president DU30 registered as an opinion, in outlining the details of his policy worldview? What makes Hontiveros so unlike the rest of her colleagues who proceeded with deference, prudence, caution and foresight for what they had to ask DU30 who ascribed to himself the “killer” or the “death squad” but with a two-fold caveat (i.e., legalese as a lawyer and sophistry as a shrewd president).

A trained legal mind like DU30 realized how Hontiveros must have missed the point that crime or “guilt is personal,” any admission or confirmation notwithstanding; thereby rendering her string of cases cited as operating in a vacuum. Is this an apparent lack of instruction for the senator to understand that lawyer’s point akin to an African proverb that says: “We cannot convince a monkey that honey is sweeter than a banana?”