What is happening to our country? We were battered by a series of devastating typhoons and all we got is the perception that the leadership cannot do anything about it.
Except for Vice President Sara Duterte, I have yet to see any of the characters that comprise the House Quad Committee (Quadcomm) and Speaker Martin Romualdez showing up at the scenes of destruction to appraise the extent of the damage.
In the case of President Bongbong Marcos, we see him inside the comfort of a chopper surveying from above the devastation and the grim statistics only learned from the foreign media.
The victims of nature’s wrath are left to their own resources, assuming they have anything left. No matter how severe the killer typhoons were, the Quadcomm never ceased its task of demonizing private citizen Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter, VP Inday Sara Duterte.
The objective was encapsulated and articulated succinctly by Sen. Risa Hontiveros who, by sheer garrulity, exposed the plot against VP Sara when she warned her colleagues in the upper and lower chambers that “while Vice President Sara Duterte is in power, the threat of a full-blown Duterte comeback is still a very real and present danger.”
Let’s face it, if VP Sara is incontestably a preferred presidential candidate in 2028, her father, past president Rodrigo R. Duterte, remains the top persuasive endorser come the midterm polls in May and the regular elections in 2028.
Thus the attack is two-pronged. Both father and daughter are the subjects of endless congressional investigations — President Duterte on his alleged role in extrajudicial killings related to his campaign against drugs from the time he was mayor of Davao City to when he was president.
In the case of VP Sara, the House of Romualdez created a special body of inquisition called the Quadcomm composed of the Committees on Dangerous Drugs, Public Order and Safety, Human Rights, and Public Accounts to look into how the Office of the Vice President spent the P125-million confidential and intelligence fund the Office of the President transferred to the OVP.
Both accusations are moronic as well as absurd. In the case of the EJKs, which stemmed from the charges filed by then Human Rights Commission chairperson turned secretary of Justice turned senator Leila de Lima in 2009 against the elder Duterte, she and her witnesses have yet to produce a single piece of evidence to date. This despite her allegation that more than 2,000 EJK victims were buried in an abandoned quarry in Davao City.
QuadComm member France Castro, a convict out-on-bail, had the gall to cite OVP chief of staff Lyka Lopez in contempt for “undue interference.”
The Quezon City Trial League, which of late questioned and condemned the high handedness of the QuadComm in citing Lyka Lopez in contempt and having her detained and then transferred to a jail, says it all.
Congressman and former Speaker Pantaleon “Bebot” Alvarez chided the Quadcomm for abusing its authority by ordering the transfer of Lyka to a correctional facility.
What the Quadcomm stooges wanted from the OVP chief of staff was to tell them how the confidential fund was spent and who were the recipients.
My mother-in-law has a riposte for such idiocy: “Ano ka, hilo?” (Literally, “What are you, dizzy?). This Tagalog slang actually means: “Are you out of your freaking mind?”