What do we do now? - DEMAND AND SUPPLY by Boo Chanco

Naonse ang bayan. But I wasn’t surprised the 11 senators who voted to withhold the truth did what they did. I only found it incredibly stupid of them to show their true colors that soon. They could have waited when it would be too late for the prosecutors to walk out in disgust and not look like sore losers. But this premature show of force deprives the President the credibility of a Senate acquittal, if at all possible.

Now, with the hearings in suspended animation, they will realize that they won a meaningless victory. Worse, they have outmaneuvered themselves. At best, they can only claim a technical acquittal for Erap, made possible because a key piece of evidence, which the whole country already knew, was refused judicial notice by the impeachment court.

I immediately called one of the heroic senators who voted to open the envelope and urged him to convince the nine others to stop attending the hearings because it has become useless. They should deny the impeachment court the respectability it needs to make their acquittal judgment credible.

But we should not give up the struggle to introduce a high sense of moral order in our government. Street action is one way to do that. By showing Erap that the people will no longer stand for the manner by which he has debased his office, he may yet realize that the only way out is to resign.

We should also not give up on making sure that Erap and his cronies are denied access to the bank accounts and other assets presumed to be fruits of rampant corruption that were discovered in the course of the trial. I asked Executive Secretary Ed Angara during the La Dolce Fontana forum last Wednesday what could be done.

Will Erap reclaim the Jose Velarde accounts and the Boracay and other mansions after the puppet impeachment tribunal clears him? Angara said any citizen could file a case to have these assets forfeited in favor of government. He skipped an answer to the question of whether Erap will in fact try to reclaim the Jose Velarde accounts and the mansions. Shameless as they are, I guess they will try to withdraw these funds now, if they hadn’t already done that.

In fact, someone should file suit to have these assets sequestered immediately just in case they aren’t withdrawn yet. But the problem is, where will such a suit be filed? PCGG is not only corrupt, incompetent and has through the years not proven useful at all; it is also led by the President’s legal adviser. That would have been the logical agency to file such a complaint.

The Ombudsman is another agency that could act on it. But I am sure the current Ombudsman will say the President is beyond his mandate. I wonder if we can file the case directly with the Sandiganbayan.

It grieves me to think that we may have to wait until October to file the next impeachment case against Erap. By then, his lawyers would have learned how to hide things better. Note that Ed Angara is now there and it was his law office that expertly helped Marcos and his cronies. They were so good at it that up to now, we haven’t heard of a single Marcos crony, nor anyone in the Marcos family, who have been asked to surrender a centavo of ill-gotten wealth.

Whatever we do in the next few days, let us make sure we are not precipitate. Let us not do things we will regret later. Let us learn from the original Edsa. If we waited a little while before we crowded Edsa to protect Juan Ponce Enrile from the might of the Marcos army, we probably wouldn’t have that awful pain in the ass we have right now. And that goes for his loyal lapdog, Gringo.

Sworn testimony

Watching the parade of witnesses in the Impeachment hearing and in the Blue Ribbon before it, and all those lawyers (notably from the defense) and the 11 senators, makes me wonder if we might somehow get the wrath of God soon. People routinely swore on the Bible. At the very least, I think a person should first be asked if he believed in God and in Divine Justice before he is allowed to swear on God’s Word.

But I also remember a passage in the Bible, in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, where we were instructed by God not to swear on anything as sacred as God’s Word. All we have to do is to say the truth. Anything else "is from the evil one." Something tells me, all that swearing in public, including the time when Erap placed his hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution, are gross violations of God’s instructions and there will be hell to pay.

Anyway, I was complaining about this and someone (I think it was Jesse Paredes) who said we need not use the Bible to swear on the truth. I don’t know Latin so I don’t know if what he said next is true, he was most likely just joking.

He said that the word "testify" comes from the word "testis" and we all know what testis is. He said in olden times, they swore by their balls that what they were saying was true.

I guess they put their left hand on their balls and raised their right hand. I suppose that if they were proven to be liars, they didn’t get cited for perjury, but got their balls cut off. In that matter of balls being cut off, we are all believers, even those who are theologically agnostics and atheists. Unless of course, you are JoAnn!

Perhaps, that is also why President Erap is now so afraid to testify, even when only he can dispute damaging allegations made by witnesses thus far. Erap has either lost his balls or is afraid of surely losing them.

But, that’s a good idea. . I’m afraid there is no more fear of God or fear of suffering eternal damnation. Let them testify on their balls and suffer the consequences of being caught lying. If that does not get us the truth, specially from a guy like Erap who values his testes above all else, nothing else will.

Truth

Instead of a joke, let’s have some food for thought from reader Corazon Gomez. My sense of humor is temporarily incapacitated by recent events. Here it is and it is dedicated to my friend, the supposedly uprightly moral Kit, the man who wants us to believe he is holy enough to become Pope. He has given many a sanctimonious sermon on what is right and wrong, but seems to be strangely afraid of confronting the whole truth.

The devil went for a walk with a friend. They saw a man ahead of them stoop down and pick up something from the ground. "What did that man find?" asked the friend.

"A piece of Truth," said the devil.

"Doesn’t that disturb you?" asked the friend.

"No," said the devil, "I shall let him make a belief out of it."

Incidentally, I want my money back on Kit’s book we launched last Saturday. At P400 and given that it is well written (since Kit had been endowed by God with a talent for words), it should normally be a fair price to pay. But books like that aren’t just exercises in wordsmithing. Given Kit’s real life behavior last Tuesday evening, the book has become meaningless. It is nothing more than a bunch of bound paper I can’t even use for scrap. I should send it to the San Mateo landfill where it belongs.

(Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected])