For three days last week, CNN International focused its headline stories on the President’s war on drugs. What should have been a one-day story about the usual-by-now presidential pronouncements on killing drug pushers kept popping into the monitor, treated in the much the same way as the continuing tragedy in Aleppo.
The trigger, of course was the “hyperbolic” admission from our president that as mayor of Davao, he would go hunting criminals himself in the dead of night, just to show the police that if he could do it, why could they not?
And then, in an interview, Senator Leila de Lima condemned the President’s statement before the business community, and claims that such an admission constituted grounds for impeachment, as a violation of our Constitution and a betrayal of public trust.
Whew!
As a long sidebar feature, CNN’s reporter sent to Manila had a story about a father (a confessed addict, “but not a pusher,” said the widow) and his six-year-old son being shot by “vigilantes” inside their own hovel. The story, as seen on TV, was quite poignant, the kind that would not just raise eyebrows but tug at the heart.
In Cambodia, where President Duterte was on a state visit, Prime Minister Hun Sen did not raise any issues about human rights, even if his people had been methodically decimated by the millions decades ago by Pol Pot. Neither did Singaporean PM Lee Hsien Loong.
Here in Taiwan, a deputy mayor told this writer that he agreed with our president’s tough stance against drugs and crime. “Peace and order is always the paramount concern,” said he.
In a diplomatic reception where I sat with the representatives of South Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Mongolia, everyone was nodding when the Mongolian representative said in a booming voice, “I admire your new president for his toughness and his always speaking out his mind.”
One of the diplomats said, “countries have to go through phases in their development, be it on the security or the economic spheres.”
But the western press is relentless. It has an agenda to pursue, or so I submit.
It is the same American media that saw egg splattered all over their faces when their candidate Hillary was nosed out by Donald. Instead of eating crow, they snipe at the cabinet-designates of Trump, questioning their credentials, minutely examining their past positions on issues, or even their “close” relations with Putin. This early, they seem to be appropriating the Senate vetting function to themselves.
And because the POTUS-to-be Trump did not “castigate” Rodrigo Duterte on his war against drugs, then in the “defeated” American media mind, they had to pick on the Philippines. Their idol Obama and his Hillary, after all, were quite forthright against Duterte’s anti-drug methods.
But there is another angle that titillates my mind, and that is, the curious hyping of Senadora Leila, who is about to deliver a speech on whatever else but “human rights” in Berlin soon.
Despite the objections of some, our government put up no obstacle upon her freedom to travel to wherever. She is, after all, just an accused, neither charged in court nor convicted of allegations that she was on the take from drug lords.
The CNN report curiously pictured her as about the only consistent critic of the Duterte drug war in a country where the public is seen as accepting, even applauding Duterte’s high-handed actions.
And then the cop-out: many who object to Duterte could see themselves in danger of being eliminated.
Are they laying the predicate for the senadora’s applying for political asylum?
Are unseen hands using their connections for this to be done while Obama is still POTUS? Is Doña Loida Nicolas Lewis pulling some strings in Capitol Hill?
Just playing a possible story in my mind. Maybe I am wrong