Is it shameful to regard ourselves as the true sovereigns if and when the government, via the President, appears to be headed in the wrong direction — the consequence of which will be irreversibly inimical to our country and people?

The governed could be held as much accountable if everything in the affairs of state goes south. Governance should be driven only by the shared noble objective of fighting one common enemy — in this case, corruption — which has been observed, it’s crystal clear, to be spilling over from high places.

When the President, with uncharacteristic conviction, declared, viz.: “We shut down everything!”, that could be interpreted in various ways to be unflattering to the messenger and escapes comprehension. What could FM Jr. have really meant when he said those powerful words? Did he just raise the Sword of Damocles above those who might, in fact, be entertaining destabilization plots? Was he not known to be sensitive to the rule of law, it being a companion statement to most of his public speeches?

Do we regard the filing of a petition in the Supreme Court over the publicly perceived unconstitutional national budget as the logical proof of a destabilization move? What advice, if any, was the President getting from his presidential legal counsel or his executive secretary prior to his press conference? Were those notions straight from his own mind or from his advisers who told him what to say in public?

The punchline — “shut down” — originating from no less than the highest official of the land would be a tad difficult to delete from people’s consciousness. The words “shut up,” on the other hand, must find moral and legal anchor in the Ombudsman’s dismissal of a graft case against Vice President Sara Duterte, when he warned people to shut up and stop talking about it.

The bureaucratic denial of the existence of blanks in the General Appropriations Act just does not add up after earlier disclosures had been blown up in the public domain.

We should not play the language game where one side speaks of an epistemological proof of the existence of a signed bicameral report (inked by Senate and House of Representatives signatories) with x number of blanks versus a mere ontological proof that only a filled-in GAA does exist.

It would have been unthinkable, however, to suppose that there was a fake bicameral report that made the rounds since their messengers were persons of respectable reputation. Can we just leave it as a case of one pounding the pavement when it is hardly self-evident?

Fear not that we will be seeing the President appearing before media reporters more often than even necessary just to take the defensive and articulate indefensible theses over emerging contemporary societal issues. Call to mind what he said contrary to the challenge of his former executive secretary to take a credible hair follicle test. His very words, viz: “Nope. Why should I do that? It has nothing to do with the constitutional principle that public office is a public trust.”

What was more annoying was seeing the gesture cum facial expression of the executive secretary behind him, reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s literary folktale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, as if something respectable had been uttered.

With FM Jr. saying “shut down,” that alone sounds like having a dead man’s switch!