Walkout

Nene Pimentel was edgier than usual last Tuesday. He lost his usual finesse when asked by reporters about the rumored walkout from the national canvass by pro-FPJ personalities.

I can sympathize with Nene. The national canvass – or more precisely, the vain effort to stall it – has taken a heavy toll on everyone. But the toll is heaviest among those in the frontline, or more precisely the rearguard, of the effort because they have to constantly contrive excuses for delay.

That long, graceless filibuster last week must have taken its toll on Pimentel’s energies. It must have taken an even larger toll on his equanimity.

Watching the canvass is exhausting. Participating in it is a hundred-fold more exhausting. Trying to delay it while at the same time attempting to generate mass upheaval must be a thousand-fold exhausting.

Add to that the strain of having to neither confirm nor deny plans of a walkout before an inquisitive media. That strain could lead, as it did in the case of Pimentel last Tuesday, to a total loss of graciousness.

As I write this, the walkout has not happened yet. But rumors are rife. If the opposition is to pull its stunt, it is preferable that this happen during this window of opportunity when FPJ is momentarily ahead in the canvass. When the votes from Iloilo and then Cebu plus Pampanga come in, he will be eating dust to the end of the canvass.

Initial reports from my KNP sources indicated that the Big Bang was to happen after the votes from Nueva Ecija, where FPJ won by a large margin, were taken in. The original date set was June 12. That was thrown off course when the canvass turned out to be slower than expected, thanks to a large part to Pimentel’s own filibuster last week.

The Big Bang, or whatever the conspirators of this ugly plot want to call it, has been having timetable problems. The June 12 schedule was moved back to June 15 or 16. It seems, from my latest check with my sources that this is again being moved back towards the weekend.

Maybe it will never happen at all. Or even if it does, in haste or in great tentativeness, the conspirators are in danger of producing a public comedy instead of an insurrection.

Bits and pieces of the plot have been falling off uncontrollably. The entire conspiracy is leaking like a sieve.

In a truly pathetic media stunt, KNP lawyer Rufus Rodriguez presented 10 hooded men who were supposed to be witnesses to electoral fraud committed in Cebu. The entire set-up was everything a public relations manual warns as not to do. The witnesses, in hoods, seemed like Abu Sayyaf suspects in the TV clips rather than as genuine crusaders for truth.

Justly, it turns out to be.

Later, the KNP claimed its "witnesses" were kidnapped by the NBI. The man who eventually turned up at the NBI proved to be a witness against the KNP stunt. He spilled the beans on the 10 hooded men, claiming they were shabu addicts paid P4,000 apiece to pose as witnesses to substantiate the KNP’s shaky claims. I suspect we shall never see these 10 men ever again.

In a word, that stunt backfired – much like Pimentel’s filibuster backfired days before. They generated not public sympathy but contempt for the opposition’s floundering cause.

The most definitive indication that the no-proclamation effort is still active is Fernando Poe Jr.’s appearance in the Malabon-Navotas area. In this area, there has been active mobilization of the urban poor for a repeat of the tragic "Edsa 3" riot.

Here he was acting in an agitprop mode. But he overdid himself, accusing the congressional canvass of counting fake COCs!

That stunt backfired as well.

Angara aide Demaree Raval, lawyer for candidate Loren Legarda at the canvass, behaved to insolently last Tuesday that he aggrieved the members of the joint committee. I believed he earned by his arrogance the disdain of all TV viewers as well.

If the whole effort is intended to win public sympathy, the KNP should have put more sympathetic personalities on its frontline. This is a crucial detail. And, as they say, the devil is in the details.

As I write this to catch my deadline, the information flowing in is becoming more frantic.

Ready or not, healthy or otherwise, it is increasingly apparent that the more desperate sections of the FPJ camp are beginning to move to launch their unholy adventure.

It does not matter to them if this is wise or unwise. It does not matter to them if they have credibility or not. It does not matter to them if this whole vain effort produces yet another tragedy for the nation.

The more radical sections of the FPJ camp are obsessed with throwing an infantile political tantrum.

They are an angry and frustrated lot. They are egged on, and financed, by people who do not have the nation’s best interest in their minds.

In a word, they are not in the best condition to properly appraise the serious consequences of this wild plot. They are agitated and they are discombobulated.

Worse of all, they are led by people seriously unable to think like statesmen.

This, I think, is the single most important factor that makes a political tragedy inevitable. There is not enough character, not enough intelligence and not enough compassion for the state of the nation among those capable of stopping this infantile political tantrum.

What we have are vain, ambitious and feeble-minded personalities who have proven utterly incapable of letting reason restrain their wildest propensities.

Which is the saddest part, I think. This band infected our politics with baseness rather than loftiness. Their agitation is self-inflicted.

And now, that infection is ready to run amuck.