Mary Grace, show yourself
Bongbong doesn’t ring fake to you; it sounds impossible. Yet this country elected Bongbong. Twice the bong.
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Daily TribuneBongbong doesn’t ring fake to you; it sounds impossible. Yet this country elected Bongbong. Twice the bong.
The prosecution made an amazing discovery. Mary Grace Piattos had no birth certificate.
Government investigators searched the civil registry and found no baby named Mary Grace Piattos had entered the world.
Nothing. No parents, hospital, baptism, marriage; therefore, Mary Grace Piattos must be fake.
One small problem. She was supposedly an alias. Aliases are generally fake names. That is the point.
In fact, an alias with a birth certificate would be stranger. Alice Guo. You’re welcome.
Still: “Mary Grace Piattos?” “Milky Secuya!?” Ridiculous!
Ridiculous is not illegal. The government has funded worse names with much larger budgets.
And if the legal argument is that a funny name proves fraud, we’d like to introduce Bongbong.
Bongbong doesn’t ring fake to you; it sounds impossible. Yet this country elected Bongbong. Twice the bong, not one bong, one Bong would have been modest, respectable: Senator Bong, we have one of those already.
But Bongbong? That is ambition. A dynasty looking at a baby, saying, “One Bong will never be enough for this boy.”
Yet this is being treated as a breakthrough. We understand the excitement.
De Lima says confidentiality is not a license to invent people. Absolutely. “Confidential” does not mean “Go ahead, steal.” But let it not perform a second miracle. A fake name proves a fake name, not a fake human. Proving the mask is fake is not the same as proving nobody was behind it.
“OK, then show us the real person!”
Huh?
You are the prosecution. The one saying there was no real person. Your allegation, your burden.
You cannot reach the hardest part of your case, stop, look for Sara Duterte, then, “Would the defense please finish this for us?”
Beautiful prosecution. Bring your own pencil.
Perhaps the solution is painfully simple. CoA already inspected the confidential records. CoA went inside, looked around, found problems.
So why are we now pretending the entire country must rebuild the audit from gym bags, LandBank withdrawals, names?
Put the auditors on the stand. Ask why the expenses were disallowed. Then ask the only question that can remove a Vice President: What proves that Sara Duterte personally caused it?
Where is she in the act? The instruction, approval, knowledge? Where is the lie that belongs to her? Not the staff, the office, not whatever misdeed tied to her tenure at Deped.
CoA found the problem. Now find VP Sara Duterte inside it.
And if finding her requires examining material that cannot safely or lawfully be dumped on TV, examine it under protection. Behind closed doors, if necessary. Not to hide the evidence but to test it.
Because the alternative is the magnificent system we now have: standing before the cameras and demanding to know why secret things insist on behaving secretly.
“Open the vault!”
“I cannot.”
“Aha! Suspicious!”
“No. It is a vault.”
Incredible. Every answer is guilty.
Reveal the source, you destroy the source. Protect the source, the source never existed. Explain the operation, it is no longer confidential. Beautiful system. Impossible to satisfy.
Everybody performs. The prosecution performs certainty. The defense performs rage.
The only thing refusing to perform is confidentiality.
