Shameless in Manila October 23, 2006

RAUL GONZALEZ IS LIVID (WHAT ELSE IS new?). The Court of Appeals, he says, exceeded its authority when it ruled to lift Jejomar Binay off the hook. “The TRO was supposed to only suspend the suspension. But it also ordered that we should stop the investigation. Binay was only asking for a TRO to suspend the suspension.”

That statement comes from a justice secretary who thought he wasn’t exceeding the bounds of justice, not to speak of common decency, when he was practically lawyering for the accused Americans in the Nicole rape case. I myself will suspend judgment (in the spirit of suspensions) about that case, but I will not suspend judgment about the way Gonzalez comported himself in it, which was, to put it mildly, absolutely shameless. Indeed, the above statement comes from a justice secretary who continues to think, along with Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, that he is not exceeding his authority, or what passes for it, by agreeing to prevent public officials from appearing in the Senate notwithstanding that the Supreme Court has trashed EO 464.

Indeed that statement comes in the face of an initiative (to muscle out a duly elected public official) that goes past the bounds not just of decency but of sanity itself. I heard the exchange between Binay and Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno last Tuesday night, during the first day of Binay’s suspension, and nothing could be more damning for government. To say that Binay reduced Puno to fumbling inarticulateness is to say Gonzalez is not always in the full possession of his senses: It is the understatement of the year. After Binay repeatedly challenged Puno to show proof of a ghost employee under his watch, indeed after demanding to know what kind of investigation was conducted for Puno to conclude wrongdoing on Binay’s part, Puno tried to exculpate himself by blaming his bosses for the crime. He wasn’t the one who fired Binay, he said at length, Malacañang did.

This was after one public official after another had been reciting like a mantra that there was nothing “political” about the suspension of Binay. The dismissal of a local official signed by the executive secretary and not by the secretary of the DILG—an astonishing usurpation of authority—is not political? The attempt to dismiss a duly elected official who happens to be a thorn in Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s side by GMA herself—by Puno’s own suggestion—is not political?

In fact, all that is accomplished by Gonzalez et al.’s continuing effort to hound Binay notwithstanding the Court of Appeals’ rebuff is to etch the contrast between Binay’s and GMA’s cases even more sharply. The ease with which elected officials can be yanked out today for any offense, real or imagined, is matched only by the impossibility of doing the same thing to an unelected one, whose very “unelected-ness,” implying as it does the theft of vote, by itself constitutes treason. The zealousness with which public officials entrusted with enforcing law and justice try to see wrongdoing where there is none, or little, is matched only by the zealousness with which those institutions entrusted with safeguarding reason and morality undertake to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil where evil riots more savagely than the drunken istambays in the narrow alleys of this benighted metropolis.

What was Puno suggesting during that confrontation with Binay last Tuesday? Binay was being suspended prior to investigation to prevent him from signing checks as a precaution just in case he turned out to be guilty of paying off ghost employees. What happened during both times that this country tried to impeach GMA? Her allies in Congress said they could not suspend her from being President because the Garci tape was inadmissible as evidence—as though it was all right to allow a terrorist caught on tape planning to bomb churches and schoolhouses in Metro Manila to become the country’s national security chief because he was taped clandestinely.

In the first, there is a monstrous willingness to take utmost precaution against a threat that is at least negligible and at best has yet to be proven. In the second, there is an even more monstrous willingness to allow the country to be razed by a threat that is at least lethal and at most has been proven by words that come straight from the horse’s mouth—my profoundest apologies to horses.

I am glad Binay and company have defied the suspension for the iniquity that it is. I am glad the business community has not acted opportunistically to endorse an act that adds whole new dimensions to the meaning of opportunism. Who knows? Maybe the businessmen saw that, as with Marcos, absolute power corrupts absolutely: leaders who have absolute power do not only persecute their enemies, they persecute everyone.

I am glad the Court of Appeals has shown the public can still appeal to its sense of justice. I am glad that the NGOs, Church elements, the opposition and various personalities, not the least of them Cory Aquino and Susan Roces, and Eddie Villanueva, trekked to Makati to show their sympathy and support for Binay. You do not have to like Binay to do something like that, you need only to love fairness. I am glad the residents of Makati gathered around their mayor the way village folk flock around their pregnant women with burning torches during manananggal sightings to ward off evil. And I am glad the media and the public expressed their detestation of that foul deed. If they hadn’t, it truly would have been time to go abroad or to the hills—this country would no longer be capable of offering justice.

Gonzalez and company say this thing is by no means over. They are right. But, of course, this thing is by no means over:

This country has just begun to fight.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=28115