Outwitted

It’s really a fable about being blindsided. A few months ago, these crafty, survivalist political animals were cheering lustily, even if the “shameless” broadside was directed at them.

But once their blunder registered, it was too late. The “lame duck” whom they thought could be humored turned out to be a sly fox who had outwitted them.

So beside themselves are they now, they’re staging at the Senate and showboating at the House performative-outrage inquisitions aimed at their own corrupt selves, comically amnesiac to the fact that they are “denouncing in others what the public suspects of them,” as one news reporter wittingly described it.

But even if they’re tearing their hair out, in the emerging consensus of better-informed commentarists like former congressman Mong Palatino, they’re now driven to bend their knee before the fox.

Writing for The Diplomat web-only magazine, Palatino observed the fox can “prevent members of the ruling coalition from switching to another political camp” during his remaining “lame duck” years in office.

The fox, no other than Mr. Marcos Jr. himself, can easily do that by expanding “the list of dubious companies (involved in flood control scams) with direct or indirect links to politicians.”

A prospect which should be more potent once the “independent” truth commission — pushed by some well-meaning senators, congressmen, and civic groups — on the flood control scams is let loose.

Meantime, neither are the fox’s bellicose opponents spared from the storms on the horizon. At any time, the fox and his equally crafty cohorts can scrutinize similar flood control scams during the previous Duterte regime.

A prospect delightfully accentuated when a boisterous Duterte-partisan senator became immediately stupefied right after alleged “Flood Control Queen” Cezarrah “Sarah” Discaya firmly testified that she and her family only engaged in massive billion-peso flood control projects beginning in 2016.

And also last Tuesday, newly minted Public Works boss Vince Dizon summarily proclaimed that insidious flood control scams started not only during the last regime but “stretched even way earlier than 2019, 2017, 2016.”

In sum, the fox now has a firm grip on power in his remaining legacy-seeking years. A grip so firm he even controls the narrative on “how the anti-corruption investigation will unfold.”

The fox, however, isn’t unique. He and his advisers, Palatino points out, likely learned their political history well in their attempts to preempt the opposition and manage the public outrage over the unabated corruption.

A previous leader, scion also of another historical political family, also took it upon himself in 2013 to expose a long list of politicians wallowing in pork barrel scams.

Still, even as the fox smartly stages image-building optics to show he is dead serious and means what he promised, he nonetheless faces serious obstacles ahead — obstacles that all have to do with a weary, wounded citizenry.

A wounded citizenry, in the colorful metaphor of urban planner Felino Palafox Jr., “broken-hearted” by so many false promises and harboring grim sentiments that nothing had been done about an aberrant elitist political establishment conspiring to steal the country’s treasury.

Sentiments underscored last week when sober academics skeptically chorused that while the administration’s lifestyle check initiative on the political establishment seems necessary the checks risk becoming managed optics or “performative justice.”

Lifestyle checks are risky because without cleaning out the systemic rot that enables corruption the administration is only seeking comfort in illusions.