Jueteng in vain

I might as well remove the "a better Philippines" post from my wishlist. It's never going to happen anyway.

I caught the late night news on ABS-CBN a while ago, where GMA said that the jueteng scandal implicating her husband and her son are the worn out tactics of the opposition.

Hmmm....am I the only one who notices this trend? Whenever there are negative charges against the President, or any of her relatives for that matter, they are almost always immediately classified by the administration as: A. destabilization plots or B. tactics of the opposition to divide the country.

On tv, she begged her detractors to help her unify our country. Somehow, her pleas for a unified country, to me, is just plain crap. What she's asking for is for the people to stop criticizing her administration altogether. What she's asking for, is for media to present the Philippines as a shangri-la of some sort, with a booming economy and a peace and order situation we can be proud of. Har har har. What a big joke. And we're supposedly a democratic country.

Public figures are called public figures for a reason. She will be under close scrutiny, both by her followers and detractors ALL THE TIME. Every wrong move she makes, every meal she takes, they will be reported on the news. In her world, the cliche "where there's smoke, there's fire" should be taken very seriously. She will have to hide the smoke, or put out the fire ASAP. In this jueteng case, she did neither.

I have to admit, I am not familiar with jueteng operations. But a few days after the jueteng scandal broke out, a number of people, all claiming to be former jueteng operators, came out on tv, saying that they lost their source of income because of the sudden orders to halt jueteng operations. And they're from Pampanga. GMA hails from Pampanga. Could she not have known about these activities? Okay, given that she'a really busy person, could her son, the big congressman from Pampanga, not have known about this as well? If both of them were unaware, then shouldn't we be very afraid? What other illegal activities does the President not know? What are our local government officials busy with, really?

What I don't understand is this -- where are all the people who started Edsa dos? It's almost like history repeating itself anyway -- the President involved in a jueteng scandal, with witnesses coming out to prove it. The big difference is that there are no people staging another Edsa. Maybe, like GMA, they believe that the country can be unified by silence. If that's the case, then democracy is really dead. No sense wishing for a better Philippines anymore.