Lacson on the lam? Why GMA changed her mind

Unless my instincts betray me, the Hon. Panfilo Lacson, senator of the realm, will vamoose from public view these days. It is not far-fetched that he plans to flee the country and by the time this column sees print, he may already have flown the coop – or about to. Simple really, the way I see it. I cannot imagine Ping Lacson – former all powerful PNP chief – surrendering voluntarily to the cops, his wrists in manacles, then being marched to prison, thence to trial in humiliating prison garb as the suspected principal in the Kuratong Baleleng massacre.

The senator’s Achilles heel – presidential candidate though he might be – is that the Establishment will not lift a finger to ease his plight. So-called polite society, civil society, the educated gentry have never respected him. They fear him. It is largely the masa layer of Joseph Estrada that has sustained Ping Lacson, although a tiny fraction of the bourgeoisie sees the man as a needed force for order and discipline in a nation torn helplessly apart by turbulent disunity and strife.

Even the Senate which afforded him sanctuary held Lacson quietly and politely at arm’s length. No senator rose to render him homage. No political party opened its gates to offer him the presidential nomination. Ping Lacson could never really banish and bury his past as a top policeman "with an attitude". There, it is said, the quiet ruthlessness of his eyes matched hands that roared the violence and vengeance of the law rather than its justice and wisdom. Maybe that was it. The times made Lacson what he was. The bad men had to go – fast, quick, laid out in rows of rigor mortis. if this was the law of the jungle, so be it. Shoot first, and ask questions afterward.

It so happened that his political godfather was Erap Estrada, who earned his reputation firing hero’s guns in the movies, in the make-believe he could do this as a politician and get away with it. He couldn’t. And when he couldn’t, the Establishment and civil society too got Estrada by the neck, had him imprisoned and tried. If they could get Estrada, a sitting president, then maybe they could also get Ping through other means. And this is also what the beleaguered senator fears. The Iceman cometh.

Ping Lacson broke establishment rules with his Incredible Hulk series where he brutalized the First Gentleman – many say below the belt – and in so doing, stripped the President – also below the equator – when he linked Mike Arroyo to Victoria Toh in liaison that outdid Bill Clinton’s Oval Room hi-hi-de-ho with Monica Lewinsky.

Under Estrada, Lacson rose in the police ranks like a lodestar. And this proved to be his undoing. Records and the evidence claim that Lacson got into the Kuratong Baleleng massacre, very likely as a principal. The Lacson signature, the prosecution claims, was very evident. They bore three tell-tale marks. First, the ruthlessness where each victim was hogtied and shot in the head. Second, the seizure of about P50 million in Kuratong Baleleng bank loot reportedly by Lacson’s boys, and nobody knows where that loot ever went. Third, witnesses to the massacre were hounded, threatened, their families pistoled in cold sweat against the wall.

Senator Lacson’s Pidal exposé gave him no advantage. While indeed he was the bull in the china shop of the Arroyos, and smashed her ratings, politically he did not benefit at all. This was considered by the establishment and many civil society as unnecessary and unpardonable boorishness, a vulgar and revolting peephole. This man, many said, does not deserve to be president. He is too crude, too tasteless, too crass. Estrada at least had some pretenses to humility and civility.

And if indeed, Lacson flies the coop?

Well, that leaves the opposition with Eduardo (Danding) Cojuangco and Fernando Poe Jr. Judging by the surveys, any survey, Cojuangco can’t win. Single digit gets him nowhere. He is a non-entity to the huge majority of voters. And if Danding runs and loses, he’ll be dead meat. All that he has built up as Bossman of San Miguel will be reduced to a plugged nickel. And if he runs, he will be forced to throw darts, arrows and knives at GMA, something he cannot afford, particularly if La Gloria wins. He will become a pathetic political refugee where before he was Don Eduardo, the Boss, the kingmaker, the power behind the throne.

And FPJ? We all don’t know; we’re all still guessing. And does that narrow the choice to Noli de Castro? God help this country. When we need Superman, Spiderman or Batman, we get Singer midgets. Maybe we have to take another look at Raul Roco, who promises he will rise from the deadly quiet cave of Lazarus, and pour it on like a pile-driver. We’ll see.

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The Palace by the river better gag the likes of Deputy Presidential Spokesman Ricardo Saludo. In prose lamentable and logic deplorable, he states GMA broke her pledge not to run in 2004 because the opposition drove her to it with "rampant politicking". This is pastrami, as it is also flapdoodle, as it is baloney and buncombe. An opposition never existed that was not guilty of "rampant politicking". Not even when the fiery Manuel Quezon beat the presidential drums and the humble Ramon Magsaysay gave the opposition no cause for a rain of bile and brickbats. Even Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, exemplary presidents they, were vilified daily, and wrestled to the mud.

GMA on Dec. 30, 2002 pledged she would not run in 2004 because at that time, she had had it. Buffeted on all sides, pounded from brow to beltline, called every name in the book, and down on the deck with the lowest popularity ratings, she figured this was it. Why jump into a river riddled with man-eating crocodiles, when she had no chance of winning at all? So probably, GMA realized glory was to be had by sacrificing her presidential ambition, while earning her the plaudits of history and the citizenry.

So why did she change her mind?

Never mind all the cheap and tawdry excuses that a woman is entitled to change her mind. Never mind everything that she rattled off Saturday in Clark Field, Pampanga like the primacy of service to nation, the obsession to reform and reconcile, make the nation great again (a line she snitched from Ferdinand Marcos), still the winds of political turbulence. I will sacrifice, she said, I will defer the pleasures of rest and retirement to a later day. Baloney.

She changed her mind because the Great White Father whistled the songs of the Delphic muses into her ears. Uncle Sam told GMA she no longer belonged to the Philippines but to history, that she had a major role to play in America’s war against international terror. President George W. Bush, ever the Great Seducer, told GMA he couldn’t trust anybody else in the Philippines to become president in 2004, since she and she alone could do the job. Dubya, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were convinced GMA was just as American as apple pie, Barbie, McDonald burgers. And wasn’t she a pedigreed economist, who studied at Georgetown University, whose classmate was Bill Clinton?

And so before, during and after that White House reception, the US leadership plied GMA with praises.

Now, look, as I write these words, I am dead serious. At that time, and more so at this time, America is in urgent even desperate need of reliable allies. The invasion of and the war on Iraq saw America split with the Atlantic Alliance. Washington’s policy of "pre-emptive war" led to a breakoff with the United Nations, principally the Security Council. After Iraq, the US would deal with North Korea, the second member of America’s Axis of Evil. North Korea is fast building a nuclear arsenal, and threatens to use this not just against the US, but South Korea and even Japan.

Already, the US is preparing for possible war against North Korea, an invasion maybe, heavy bombing for sure, the destruction of Yongbyon, North Korea’s nuclear center, where already 8,000 spent fuel rods have been reprocessed into plutonium. In less than a year, these could result in four or five more nuclear missiles. Iraq had no such missile and yet it was invaded. Kim Jong-il, he of the pompadoured hair, is considered even more dangerous than Saddam Hussein.

America’s Second Infantry Division of about 40,000 troops is preparing to evacuate the Korean Peninsula just south of the Demilitarized Zone. As they move out, many will very presumably be relocated to the Philippines. Here with no permanent bases, they will be mobile, not sitting ducks for North Korea’s medium-range missiles. Here, more US troops and equipment will gather in a formidable war contingent that can strike with lightning speed against North Korea, against "terror" wherever this terror will lurk. The US is out to tear the intestines out of Jemaah Islamiyah, whose top bomb-maker al- Ghozi escaped from Philippine custody just months ago.

It is the opinion of this writer America will be needing the Philippines for years, and more particularly, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo at the helm. In this America, the world’s only superpower, will leave nothing to chance. The Philippines is a major pawn in its military chessboard, GMA an indispensable ally.