Dispute becomes economic

Solid as our territorial claims against China are, we could lose these areas if President Aquino keeps making colossal blunders on this front.

Blunder No. 1:  The biggest, and the damage done probably irreparable until we get somebody else to represent our nation: Mr. Aquino deployed a warship, the BRP Gregorio del Pilar, to Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal to confront the Chinese fishermen, with naval soldiers even boarding their vessels.

IT WILL be an episode studied in law schools and social science departments by many generations of Filipinos to come:

How President Aquino used the House of Representatives as well as his allies in the Senate, the enormous resources of the executive branch, and even a witting or unwitting mainstream media to coerce the Supreme Court by attacking its head, to subvert the agrarian reform program, and to hand over P10 billion to his Cojuangco clan as payment for its hacienda.

It’s the most startling feature of the biblical account of Christianity’s defining event. It wasn’t the High Priest Caiaphas nor Pontius Pilate, nor any powerful man or elite who condemned Jesus of Nazareth to crucifixion.

The people did. The Gospel writers’ use of the Greek words   “laos” and “iodaios,” both of which were terms for people of the area (i.e., Judea), incontrovertibly means they weren’t referring to a lynch mob or curious bystanders roused to a rabble, but to  “people” as in “We, The People.”

Not contented with mainstream media sympathetic to its master, President Aquino’s camp has been faking letters to the editor to vilify those critical of his actions and policies, sources disclosed to this writer. Such bogus letters, many oozing with uncivilized venom, have especially targeted, ever since the impeachment trial started in December, Chief Justice Renato Corona.

Anyone who has actually watched and listened to the 34 impeachment trial sessions, and therefore spared himself from the yellow filters of a partisan press, can only but conclude:  The impeachment case against Chief Justice Renato Corona has all but collapsed.

This has become obvious even as his defense has just warmed up. President Aquino would have to exhaust his resources to bribe or threaten senator-judges to undertake intellectual and ethical contortions to vote Corona guilty.

As expected, when the accusations against Chief Justice Renato Corona are collapsing under the weight of facts, President Aquino’s forces deploy what has proven in the past to be one of their most potent, yet vilest propaganda weapon: Pulse Asia with its polls.

Unfortunately, mainstream media have allowed themselves to be used in this stratagem, and run similar screaming banner headlines: “47% in poll say CJ guilty.”  The more objective headline which this newspaper’s online version and another major newspaper used: “43% of Filipinos uncertain about Corona’s guilt.”

“It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”

That famous quote from the late US President Ronald Reagan can’t be more appropriate for the House of Representatives, which has become or been forced to become a body providing, with the appropriate fee, not only extra service to, but going all the way for, President Aquino and his consuming project to take out Chief Justice Renato Corona.