Everyone knows that Leila de Lima was Noynoy Aquino’s “sweetie,” at least as far as pursuing his personal and political vendettas was concerned. Now Leila is proving that Noynoy’s love for her is not unrequited, because she’s begun aping his attitude of always blaming somebody else when he gets into trouble.
De Lima has apparently tired of playing the gender card to explain her victimhood. Her latest version of why she is being pursued by the Duterte administration is because—drum roll, please—Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said so.
According to De Lima, President Rodrigo Duterte has allied himself with Arroyo, some senators involved in the pork barrel scandal and various other enemies of hers. These people, she said, have convinced Duterte to undermine her because she “stepped on their toes” even if she was just doing her job as justice secretary.
This latest explanation from De Lima is problematic on several levels. The first being that Duterte, who has known and clashed with De Lima even before she became Aquino’s all-powerful legal attack dog, doesn’t need anyone to convince him to go after the senator.
Duterte, by his own and frequent admission, has been feuding with De Lima ever since she was working for Arroyo as chairman of the Commission on Human Rights. And while it’s true that Duterte has accused De Lima of “kidnapping” Arroyo at the Manila airport in 2011 in defiance of a Supreme Court order, he really needed no further prodding than the senator’s ill-prepared investigation into extrajudicial killings under the new president.
If Duterte can launch repeated verbal attacks on the US, the United Nations and the European Union because he feels they have treated him unfairly in their own assessments of his anti-drug campaign, I’m sure he has enough motivation to threaten that De Lima will “rot in jail” for inflicting Edgar Matobato on the nation. Blaming Arroyo for her troubles with Duterte is like, as the English would say, bringing coals to Newcastle.
To my mind, the only involvement of Arroyo in the long-running Duterte-De Lima war is the former president’s appointment of a little-known election lawyer from Iriga City to the top post at the CHR. And if De Lima was unable to prove Duterte’s links to the so-called Davao Death Squad back then, when it was her main job to do so, it should surprise no one that she is still unable to do so now, as a senator.
Blaming Arroyo is so last administration. And no one needs to be reminded that De Lima is working under the assumption that Aquino is still in Malacañang, the way she’s been making accusations that she can hardly prove.
But what’s really bothersome to me is that, apart from making blanket denials about her alleged involvement in the illegal drug trade inside the New Bilibid Prison and blaming outside agencies for her problems, De Lima has never really confronted the charges against her directly. And many people still remember how she dared her accusers in the House to make high-profile inmate Jaybee Sebastian testify so that she may be exonerated—only to witness Sebastian hurl the same (and even worse) accusations against her when he did.
Instead of blaming Gloria or posing on her knees at mass, I think De Lima would be better off refuting the serious charges thrown at her with evidence of her own to the contrary. Unless, like Gloria, she intends to spend the rest of the incumbent president’s term in jail.
Given that those charges have now been properly filed before the same DoJ that she once led, instead of merely in the House, that possibility seems to have become deliciously and ironically inevitable. Sic transit Leila mundi.
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They say you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. That seems to be the new strategy of both China and Japan as far as the Philippines and its new leader is concerned.
An article in Forbes magazine written by Ralph Jennings predicts that Japan will go into a bidding war to become President Rodrigo Duterte’s and the Philippines’ new BFF. According to the article, Japan will not allow China to be Duterte’s only favored neighbor because it “wants to keep up ties with the fellow democratic Asian country and traditional US ally [as] a measure to resist Chinese expansion” in the region.
After securing pledges worth $24 billion from China involving $9 billion in soft loans and $15 billion in economic deals, Jennings wrote, “Duterte is on a diplomacy roll and maybe a bank roll, too.” Japan, which Duterte visited shortly after going to China, is expected to follow suit.
“But can Tokyo match Beijing’s aid and economic development offer to the largely impoverished Southeast Asian country? The answer is yes and probably exceed it. Japan already helps economically through a diverse slew of channels, from aquaculture to patrol ships. It shows all signs of continuing to support the Philippines just as it does with much of developing Southeast Asia. That support effectively counters China’s efforts to win favor with the same countries through its own brand of economic aid.”
It’s certainly good to be wanted and pursued, especially after being taken for granted as a mere American vassal by our neighbors. And those who warned that turning away from the US would spell disaster must certainly be crying into their Spam right now.