Laughing on the outside

There is more than meets the eye to the Malacanang zarzuela which featured Press Secretary Toting Bunye admitting that he acted prematurely in acknowledging that one of the voices on the controversial taped conversation with an alleged Commission on Elections official belonged to President GMA.

Toting appeared contrite but puzzlingly jocular when he appeared before Malacanang reporters to say he had come to a very hard decision to submit his letter of... reimbursement. That elicited raucous laughter from the hard-nosed denizens of the Palace corridors. On reflection, though, while most didn’t want to add to the Secretary’s evident inner anguish, despite a happy exterior, the reporters were tempted to ask the obvious questions.

Reimbursement? Meaning, perhaps, a payback? Of what and to whom? Was this public contrition meant to atone for his supposed sin of "acting on his own"? If you really think about it, considering the brouhaha that has attended the tale of the tape, a faux pas as grievous as acting without authorization to start a political firestorm by pre-empting an alleged opposition plot to publicly disclose the tape should merit an immediate and ignominious boot out of one’s office.

If you factor in the astoundingly irresponsible act of supposedly subjecting no less than the President of the country to impeachment by admitting her possible participation in a blatant act of stealing an election, the question arises: Would such a performance elicit lusty cheers or an angry order from the top honcho to pack your bags and quit the premises pronto before she sends in the gendarmes?

Having done all that putative damage, how could one be so bold as to claim, with a straight face, that he retains the "trust and confidence" of the boss? No sir, this whole thing stinks. I thought so from the moment the Executive Secretary declared that the Press Secretary acted on his own.

It is obvious the latter is being made a scapegoat of some kind by some strategists within the Palace gates who have taken over. These latter-day geniuses have decided that the crisis demands a new creative approach, one that starts with a "plausible denial" of the publicly accepted line that GMA was the lady in that allegedly dubious conversation.

Thus, the story must be re-written, as it were, and the purveyors of the old story written off. Like useless characters in a bad soap opera with rapidly declining ratings, they must be relegated to the background, be seen less often and eventually killed off.

The fact is, Press Secretaries and Presidential Spokesmen do not go merrily along causing national crises all by their lonesome. As an alter ego of the President, they do not deliberately precipitate direct confrontations with the political opposition without considerable reflection, lengthy soul-searching, and minute planning, usually by a large group of multi-sectoral advisers.

No appointive Cabinet official, no matter how brilliant or influential he may be with the President is reckless or foolhardy enough to believe that he alone has the power to bring down on an administration all the consequences, predictable or unintended, of his unilateral action.

Toting Bunye’s record on the job shows he is neither reckless nor foolhardy nor filled with self-importance. Occasionally, he may be uninformed and cause the Malacanang Press Corps to go bananas, with their home desks yelling about another "koryente." But that is not his fault. Rather, it is the work of those usual suspects in the Palace snake-pit who horde vital information to prove that they are "in the loop" and other officials, even those who are entitled to the information, aren’t.

This latest flip-flop – it can’t be called anything else – far from making the boss look better, makes her look bad. It comes across as a belated attempt to construct a more palatable story that the public can swallow hook, line and sinker.

Since Bunye’s pre-emptive move last Sunday, there have been a couple of developments which could buttress the argument that a perfectly normal conversation between an electoral candidate and her political field operative might have been illegally tapped and then expertly doctored to depict an incumbent President ordering a compliant election official to "massage" the results of a tight contest to ensure her victory.

To begin with, there didn’t seem to be any question that it was GMA’s voice. Not only did Secretary Bunye say so, it seemed to be confirmed by the National Bureau of Investigation finding that although both versions of the tape had been tampered with, the female voice on those tapes all belonged to one person. To be sure, the NBI didn’t quite say that it was GMA’s voice. But unless it was the comedian Ate Glo in an award-winning performance, it certainly sounded like the original.

Then Edgar "Bong" Ruado materialized to state in an affidavit before the NBI that the other voice on the tape "sounded" like him. He didn’t quite admit it was him, explaining that he had only heard a portion of the tape on radio. But if it was him, he said, it would have been a perfectly normal conversation between a candidate and her field operative. He was, he claims, GMA’s Regional Political Officer, with authority over other such officers throughout the country, including Mindanao which was the area discussed in the tape.

In other words, a lot of toothpaste is out of the tube. The current effort, in a nutshell, consists of not only putting the toothpaste back in the tube, but also producing other tubes. But the focus, it seems to me, ought not to be on devising the best story that can be sold to the public, but on getting at the truth. That process is not helped by changing stories in mid-stream and, in effect, leaving people to sweat it out by themselves.

That’s the way it looks at this point, whatever the truth may be. The story of Toting Bunye’s role, which many suspect is an arguably heroic one, still has to unfold. That story wasn’t ended by his recent public apologia.