Speaking immediately on the major concern regarding the after effects of Ms. Imee Marcos’ sensational broadsides on her brother’s alleged drug use: the odds of Mr. Marcos Jr. resigning are remote.

Such is the early consensus of independent political observers, who largely view resignation as “an admission that he (the incumbent) is not of sound mind and body when he had actually denied using drugs,” as one political science professor summed it up to a newspaper reporter.

So, if Mr. Marcos Jr.’s alleged ouster plot is thwarted, Ms. Marcos’ 28-minute kneecapping during the second night of the aborted three-day Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC) rally at the Luneta, as one news report put it, merely “stunned the Philippines’ political establishment and intensified a bitter feud inside of the country’s most powerful clans.”

A surprising turn of events, which probably worried the INC’s leadership enough to abort the planned three-day transparency rally, which earlier pointedly banned pro-Duterte rallyists.

Anyway, what the events generally suggested is the need to stop wasting time in outrage at the flimsy and silly preachments by leading figures of the Duterte camp and grasp their paradoxical logic instead.

As such, Ms. Marcos’ titillating, though unproven, claim that the incumbent and his wife, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, supposedly disguise their drug use as stem cell treatments and blood transfusions is no more than a token stimulant for the pro-Duterte peanut gallery.

Such titillation, however, was quickly shut down as questionable by the President’s supporters, who trotted out the undeniable fact that Mr. Marcos Jr. has only one kidney. The incumbent had donated one of his kidneys to his late dictator father. A medical issue that only meant that a person with one kidney couldn’t safely use opiates or stimulants like cocaine.

Notwithstanding that medical fact, the rabid pro-Duterte peanut gallery, aided by paid social media trolls, merely shrugged their shoulders and stood by their strident demand that the incumbent undergo a hair follicle test.

Neither were they also swayed by the cultural observation that Ms. Marcos overplayed her hand in a culture that still largely reveres family above all.

“It was a betrayal of the most depraved kind, one that will shake the core of any family-loving Filipino,” pointed out creative director Gerry Cancadin in a Facebook post. “Imee may have actually done her brother a favor.”

So, if Ms. Marcos’ somewhat perfidious claims and the attendant resignation calls are nothing more than preaching to the choir, what then are the other shadowy political intentions involved?

Or, to put it in other words, what other powerful group was all this directed at?

The answer came last Tuesday when a spokesperson of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) categorically declared that “we do not engage in political disputes or allegations.”

“These matters should be resolved through appropriate legal and institutional mechanisms and not public confrontation,” added Navy Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad.

In short, soldiers are refusing to be political game-changers, despite enticements dangled before them.

A refusal which clearly showed, as fellow journalist Marites Danguilan Vitug put it, “the AFP is no longer the coup-plotting, power-grabbing kind of the old days… They are no longer insular, (they’re) looking at an external threat, thanks to our fraught geopolitics.”

A fact openly acknowledged by Trinidad himself when he said there is the “bigger picture” behind the current political disputes, and that is China wanting “Filipinos to fight each other and the Philippines to fall apart.”