Jinggoy Estrada has no right to cry “unfair” when the only reason he’s still in the Senate is because this country let his family slide.
Yet he is demanding amnesia from a nation still living with the cost of their scandals.
“It is unfair to me to dig into my past. Tapos na ’yon. Abswelto na ako sa lahat ng kaso,” he fumed after a DPWH engineer implicated him in the ongoing flood scam probe. Earlier, he had visibly bristled at Senator Marcoleta’s joke, “Safe ka na.”
The room roared. The joke was heard on TV and hit the internet. Jinggoy seethed; how dare anyone suggest he belonged in the same sentence as plunder?
This face, Jinggoy. Unbelievable. Mug like he had just lost a fight with the taumbayan, then came back for a rematch.
Or maybe it’s an allergy; maybe it’s what happens when you close your eyes every night and you see Janet Lim Napoles! Waaaaaahh, que horror!
When you run for senator, and you win after being accused of plunder, bribery, ghost projects, after your father crashed the country and got pardoned, you don’t get to stroll in acting proud like a total winner with a clean slate. Nobody buys it. You drag that record everywhere.
And if Filipinos truly remembered the mugshots, the jueteng, the pork barrel, and plunder, he’d be unelectable; his career exists only because we had supposedly forgotten.
Stop looking backward? Why, Jinggoy? Does what’s back there still burn?
After all the shame, the least your family could have given the country is a lifetime of quiet humility.
Yet he became a senator again, strutting, chest out, faking tough: “May senador ba?” on live TV like a man daring ghosts to haunt him.
It rather came off as a signal to fellow senators: “We’re in this together, no one breaks ranks.”
Jinggoy is the Senate’s “designated clown.” His shamelessness protects everyone else. the guy who eats the shame so the whole Senate doesn’t choke on it.
The rub is not that Jinggoy is accused, but that he still thinks he’s aggrieved. Ask us to forget, and you reveal the hollowness of your acquittal.
“Tapos na ’yon.” It’s not tapos, Jinggoy. The Filipino people are still paying for it. It doesn’t erase the fact that the father Erap was convicted of plunder in 2007. That’s a judicial fact. The pardon never erased the conviction. He remains the only Philippine president ever convicted of plunder.
The nation remembers because it must; the plea to forget is proof Jinggoy still fears judgment.
You cannot command memory, Jinggoy. To try is the purest form of impunity.