Faced with certain defeat in the voting, the pro-impeachment mob filled the gallery, nevertheless. There they heckled and jeered the congressmen of the majority bloc. They cheered the incoherence of their idols of the moment.
It was clear this mob wanted a carnival – even if it meant they were themselves to be the clowns.
Despite the din and the dilatory tactics, the House Justice Committee brought the impeachment debate to a vote Wednesday night. The outcome surprised no one.
After the vote was done, and a lousy impeachment complaint justly disposed of, the mob of mainly leftist militants congregated at the Batasan lobby in a vain attempt to mount a rally. As they usually do, they pumped their fists in the air like robots and chanted repeatedly like members of some ancient cult.
They rather resembled the hooligans of some defeated World Cup team, milling around, awaiting an excuse to vent their most primitive rage by rampaging destructively. Although in the case of the chanting leftists at the Batasan lobby last Wednesday, they were clearly angling for the photo opportunity. That is evident in the way their main personalities constantly clustered together to keep within camera range.
When the camera crews grew weary of the act and shut down their klieg lights, the furious mob quietly brought down their fists and slithered out into the night.
The day before the entirely predictable vote, leftist spokesmen were all over the place, threatening a launch of civil disobedience campaigns that would oust this government should the impeachment complaint be junked. When pressed by journalists about the methods of the civil disobedience outbreak, Fr. Joe Dizon of Bayan Muna said that everyone should refuse to take receipts for things they buy.
Dizon went on and on, recounting how he demanded receipts whenever he bought gasoline from outlets of the big three oil companies and did not do so when he bought the product from outlets of the smaller oil players. That could not have been the best example of a potent civil disobedience campaign forthcoming. Oil is the most intensively documented commodity from importation to retail.
Well, what can we say: the old radical priest is in dire need of a course on public finance.
The empty threat intimidated no one. The proceedings were disturbed only by the ranting of the leftist mob positioned in the gallery.
But the utterances and the posturing of the leftists provide us a truly revealing glimpse into their state of mind – and the pathetic quality of their thinking. By the force of habit – as well as by the inertia of intellectual indolence – they take past events and expect these to repeat themselves.
The leftists positioned their organized forces at the Batasan gallery to control a central position in the event a repeat of the "second envelope" happened. Although it was a long shot the emotional explosion of January 2001 would happen again, the leftist groups convinced themselves it might be more imminent.
That is a desperate thought. But it is the only chance for this rapidly aging leftist movement to finally lead an upheaval – no matter how useless that upheaval might be or how damaging it will be to our nation.
The voting came and went. The clenched-fist crowd did their clowning. Nothing happened.
The urban middle class, the true vanguards of revolution in our political history, was simply not interested. They are not interested for two reasons: first, there is not enough cause for yet another costly upheaval; and, second, they hate being led by the Left.
The leftists have not realized that yet. That is why they do all these funny things. That is why they so easily allow themselves to be used by those who are in the impeachment business to further their electoral ambitions.
They nurse expectations that outpace their competence. In their anxiousness to finally lead an upheaval, they have behaved more opportunistically than usual the past few years.
Like the young trapos manning the doomed impeachment effort, they lulled themselves into thinking that it was sufficient to put in some trash of an impeachment complaint for hell to break loose. All of them were so anxious the rug, and the limelight, might be pulled from under them by Oliver Lozano that they kept on filing the same trashy complaint over and over again.
They just thought history would simply do a re-run, forgetting Hegel’s famous injunction: that when history seems to repeat itself, the first time it is a tragedy, the second time it is a farce.
This re-run of an impeachment process is pure farce. It has turned out to be so because the advocates of impeachment forgot that in politics, timing is of the essence.
If they were not so anxious to hog the limelight, they might have waited for a better time, kept the powder dry and waited for things to gel. Because that second, trashy complaint has been junked, the opposition has closed its options for another year.
Nothing is so scary than a bullet still in the chamber; nothing so laughable as a bullet than has been fired.
The impeachment bullet has been wasted. No other thing the opposition could have done might have made the administration forces happier.
Remember that in 2000, Joseph Estrada lost the impeachment battle because he listened to the lawyers rather than behaved according to the political pulse. This time around, it is the impeachment advocates who lost because they listened too much to the lawyers, especially the ones with funny wigs.
The majority in the House junked the impeachment complaint in a most ministerial manner, almost with disdain, because there was not enough intellectual nor political challenge in this round. The young brats in the House just wanted some TV face time to set up for elections next May. The leftists were simply politically incompetent.
Junking the impeachment had nearly enough drama as burying roadkill.