Baste’d

Baste’d | Daily Tribune

Sebastian Duterte, mayor of the second-richest Philippine city, was subpoenaed as a hostile witness. Of course, the Presiding Officer of the impeachment court would assent. After all, being the brother of the Vice President who is on trial, “Baste” would be the textbook definition of a hostile witness: someone who favors the other side or has a conflict of interest with the party calling him.

Strange thus it was that Atty. Teddy Te, one of the very few lawyers in the entire world shorter than I am (thus the occasional moniker “maliit na T. Te”), would still try to qualify Baste’s being a hostile witness by confronting him with a statement criticizing the impeachment court. Superfluous and unneeded, if you ask me.

But then, I shouldn’t be so presumptuous as to think I know better than a lawyer with two notable firsts under his belt: he was counsel for both the first person in the country to be executed by lethal injection (Leo Echegarray) and the first person to be convicted under the Cyberlibel Law (Maria Ressa).

As I have said, those who were expecting Mayor Baste to be roasted were roundly disappointed. Hizzoner was calm and collected, answering every question spontaneously, politely but firmly. Striking his father’s legendary signature pose, he gazed at the prosecutor who undertook his direct examination and each senator-judge who interpellated him coolly and collectedly.

Even those senator-judges who have, time and again, shown their bias by being hostile judges to witnesses, hostile or not, were suddenly not so unfriendly or unkind. Many people were actually bewildered by the reasons therefor.

Could it be that they were deterred because Baste has such a genuinely strong personality that they opted not to antagonize him, or perhaps at the back of their minds they felt they could be looking at the next president (should he truly be the opposition’s Plan B)?

After all, their goal is only to stop Sara; they didn’t sign up to tangle with a Rudy Duterte clone.

But at the end of the day, it was night-time; and after all was said and done, little was said and nothing was done. The entire stunt — which I, as PDP Laban spokesperson, stated to media was a mere publicity ploy to drum up interest in a trial that held a diminishing interest for the people — blew up in the prosecution’s face (which, in Terry Ridon’s case, is truly disastrous).

The prosecutors got nothing they could use against either Sara or Baste. All they succeeded in doing was giving Baste another chance to project himself on national media as a worthy successor to his father in terms of quick-thinking and charisma, a most viable rallying point for the opposition come 2028.

In short, the prosecution was busted by Baste.