Impeachment Trial: The mountain laboring? / Ahoy, the military - HERE'S THE SCORE by Teodoro C. Benigno

Oh, yes, like everybody else I was riveted to that TV screen. And yet for all its ritual solemnity, for all the "So help me Gods" intoned with a sepulchral tremolo by each senator, for all the robes in black, hands on the Bible, signatures writ, the silent spiral of historic moment supposed to clutch you at the throat – excuse me, I was not overly impressed. It was not Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, but a loose-pants Philippine rendering of an American presidential impeachment proceedings. Hell, it was Hollywoodian. It was the scent of a rose impressed upon the scales of a python. Not even Kit Tatad’s supposed volte face had my eyes moist.

Listen. All of us 75 million Filipinos are being asked to hang on as though our very lives – that of our progeny and their progeny – depended on what would happen in that Senate chamber in the next few weeks or months. I beg to disagree. I don’t agree at all, for instance, that the hand of God was around to touch their shoulders when Senators Tessie Aquino-Oreta and John Osmeña took their oath. There are other names but we won’t mention them anymore. God fled when another lady senator raised her right hand.

God very presumably disappeared into the wormwood when the others (you know who they are) laid their hands on the Bible.

Yes, I am very cynical when it comes to these things. I have seen our leaders gather countless times in the face of crisis to hold hands, pray together, make look like Brother Wilde Almeda in a trance, shed tears, even spread the holy water on their foreheads was though this meant all the difference in the world. Enough said. If by any strange and arcane alchemy, 15 senators can be found to convict President Joseph Estrada, then I’ll be damned. Truly and really damned. I’ll be even more candid. If anytime during the impeachment process, the president gets the feeling the ground under his feet is dissolving, he’ll resign faster than four in the morning.

He won’t allow himself to be convicted. He’ll hit the exits before that.

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Until then, I prefer to quote Phaedrus in full in his Fables: "A mountain was in labor, sending forth dreadful groans, and there was in the region the highest expectation. After all, it brought forth a mouse."

The "Erap, Resign!" movement in the streets is a hurricane that has gathered. And is on the move. Daily, it increases in velocity, spreads like spit-flame, acquires more converts, and nothing the impeachment process can do or cannot do can save the presidency from the hurricane’s wrath. Why? Elementary, my dear Watson. The citizenry no longer needs an impeachment trial to know, to feel, to judge that the president is guilty. Only sanctimonious advisers of the president like finance secretary Titoy Pardo believe or pretend otherwise.

Where before the president could conceal or at best ill conceal his many sins and trespasses against Christian or civic morality, everything is now out in the open – like a mud swamp.

His many mistresses are now on public and opulent display, raked over the coals. And he can no longer deny their proclivity for luxurious mansions by the dozen, costing the nations hundreds of millions, if not billions. Whither Erap para sa mahirap? Where does the money come from? Friends and cronies, he says. Even the marines won’t buy that. What makes it even more revolting is that Chinese-Filipinos of questionable repute act as dummies, and hang on to him like bristles on a skunk. All this is out. And they’re not even registered on his Assets and Liabilities record.

The man has been reckless, too reckless. When Governor Luis ‘Chavit’ Singson came out with his exposé October 3, really, it didn’t come as a shock. It just furnished the answers to where the President got all that money, where the skeletons were hidden, where the closets were located. Singson was buddy-buddy. He allowed that the president gambled in the millions, womanized in many houses, emitted his ardor as no president of the Philippines emitted it before. No wonder he had no time to govern.

Now let me get to something that adds up all the nuts and bolts of impeachment.

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They talk about Bill Clinton’s impeachment. As though it had any relevance. Mr. Clinton was guilty of only one thing. He loved blow jobs. Monica Lewinsky provided this with her ample mouth, and if fault there was, it was done in the Oval Room of the White House. Just this. Clinton did not steal. He did not gamble. He did not scatter his progeny. He did not carouse nights. He bought no mansions for his demoiselles of the nocturne. But for that one trespass, a hankering for blow-jobs with a White House intern, he was almost blown out of the White House. Compare? Nothing to compare. Bill’s was kid stuff. What happened and is happening here is a cesspool that brings morality to the guillotine.

Talk about Richard Nixon’s near-impeachment. What was Tricky Dick guilty of, anyway? If he did not resign, he would have been impeached by the US Senate and probably convicted. Compare? Nothing really. President Nixon simply ordered the bugging of Watergate where Democrats would have their convention. Bugs? All my telephones are bugged. And so are those of thousands of others, considered enemies of the state. The Philippine National Police’s bugging operations are presumably nationwide.

And yet when Nixon, he with the Five O’Clock Shadow, had Watergate glued to his ears electronically, alarms rang all over the US as though an invasion was imminent. Why? Because America cares for its democracy. Because espionage is dirty as all get out, swamp dirty, sinkhole dirty, latrine dirty. Above all, the citizen’s freedom is priceless, and only foreign enemies can be bugged. Ergo, Nixon’s guilt was comparable to treason. Nixon was faithful to his wife Patricia. He never engaged in any liaison dangereuse, never stole, never gambled. The only mansion he ever lived in was the White House.

And yet Richard Milhaus Nixon resigned.

That’s why I look at the impeachment process in the Senate like I look at a stacked deck, a three-dollar bill, a bingo joint where the winning number will be supplied by Malacañang. Whatever for? Whenever Ernie Maceda is around, this time as the president’s crisis manager, I see the Florentine with aces rigged up and down his pantaloons. And wild Jacks streaming out of his fly. Maceda can sell a flashlight to a bat.

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Now let me tell you another thing. You know this already. But it can stand a repeat. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were guilty of this. As the floodwaters entered Malacañang in 1985-86 prior to EDSA, the fuse broke and they got out of touch with reality. Cuckoo. The dictator saw enemies in every bush, looked at Makati like a Pearl Harbor pointed in his direction, even imagined the CIA had bugged Malacañang and so – careful, careful. Imelda drew up figures on a blackboard where illumination lay, where darkness lay, where what was true, good and beautiful met in dead center if you followed her numerological logic. Once, even the foreign correspondents were her audience. It was a gas.

Now, with Mr. Estrada under tightening siege, the once Happy Warrior face, florid with populist optimism, is close to getting haggard. The eyes flee reality and in doing so, it has a certain gaseousness, a misty vapor to it. The mind goes linear and in only one direction – the businessmen of Makati. Insulares, peninsulares. Marcos said that, too, and especially Imelda. Listen to Erap: "They were the ones who brought down our economy. They are the ones organizing the rallies. They have no conscience and no pity for our countrymen, especially our poor people."

It is Hamlet clinging to the razor’s edge, setting up his own demons and striking them down.

No, sir, this is not only the Makati-based businessmen. This is the entire nation now, no matter what Fr. Ted Bacani, your not-so-recondite confessor will tell you. Earlier, business did not want to touch the left or the groups and organizations of the left. That last Welga ng Bayan occurred because finally the captains of industry linked up with them, agreed to help financially.

Now look at the ground under your feet. It’s cracking. I have just read a fullpage advertisement in a major daily signed by "Concerned Senior Officers of the AFP." Read it. It sounds like the last nail on the presidential coffin. In one paragraph, it says: "We will not allow the AFP to be used as an instrument of repression against the People. We learned that lesson well during the EDSA revolution. We did not fire on the crowd at EDSA then, and we will not do so now."

Something was askew in the military. And we felt it. They rebelled against being used by President Estrada in his recent TV speech where their TV image was that of the Gestapo subliminally saluting Sig Heil to Herr Josephus Estrada.

Now, the president is really isolated.