Call it the massacre of the Senate’s drama queens. A drive-by shooting done by the Secretary of the Interior and the nation’s police chief that left almost everyone in the Senate’s disgraceful majority a casualty.

“For the record, all evidence points (to the conclusion, for now) that there was no attack on the Senate,” Remulla, alongside a nodding PNP chief, Gen. Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr., calmly said in a Palace briefing last Tuesday.

This was about as bad as it could get. No wriggle room. Zilch.  

It was a direct verdict on a drama fueled by harried Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano’s emphatic “we’re being attacked” alarm in a Facebook livestream, which many suspected was a lame attempt to stoke the ire of supporters rallying outside the Senate on that fateful night of 13 May. 

Cayetano or any of the majority senators who quickly cried to the high heavens haven’t yet, as I write this, issued any sharp retort to the initial evidence gathered by police probers, with only a “distraught” three resorting to cringey crocodile tears.  

But if there was a hint on how Cayetano hoped to wriggle out of the mess, it was his earlier criticism of acting Justice Secretary Fredderick Vida.

“That’s why my message to him (Vida) is: you can’t be the hero if you’re the villain,” said self-styled “Ambassador of Jesus Christ” Cayetano after Vida said Justice and the NBI were launching a probe of the shooting incident.

(Aside from his self-styled ambassadorship, Cayetano was also panned for his ludicrous sartorial choices, the only redeeming grace of which was the fact that his clothes were stitched from indigenous materials.)

By Wednesday, however, Cayetano’s exit ramp had all but closed.

Remulla, aside from informing President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., said the police’s initial findings were turned over to a joint panel of Justice department prosecutors and the Ombudsman for further inquiries and the filing of appropriate cases. 

Vida, also present at the Tuesday briefing but who didn’t indicate that he had immensely enjoyed the virtual shredding of Cayetano’s bloated ego, described the evidence as “very compelling.”

Still, if there was anything that Cayetano and the other drama queens could nurse their losses with, it was Remulla’s careful assertion that investigators could not yet conclude if the shooting was “staged” to create a distraction to allow Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa to “escape.”

This despite the serious allegation that Senator Robin Padilla surreptitiously drove off with ICC “fugitive” Dela Rosa in the dead of night. 

Padilla also defended suspended Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Mao Aplasca, insisting that Aplasca saved lives when he fired a warning shot at “ghosts.”

A fact that was confirmed by Remulla who wryly said, “Mind you, there was nobody there (in the Senate corridor where the shooting occurred). There were no shots being fired at them (Aplasca and his men).” 

Padilla’s dismantled defense suggested a classic case of hewing closely to the Duterte camp’s looking-glass world where up is down, black is white and idiocy is intelligence.

Cayetano did the same thing, maintaining that Dela Rosa was “free” to leave the Senate at any time since there was no local arrest warrant out for him.

Dela Rosa’s staunchest defenders were also similarly gaslighting, including his lawyers in their TRO plea before the Supreme Court. 

But the Court denied the request, giving credence to Solicitor General Darlene Marie Berberabe’s masterful 78-page brief explicitly explaining why Dela Rosa “must be deemed a fugitive from justice.”