EDITORIAL - The circus is back in town

The Senate investigation into the aborted $329-million NBN-ZTE deal has recommended the impeachment of President Arroyo and the prosecution of 11 others, including her husband Mike Arroyo and 11 others, among them Joey de Venecia and Jun Lozada.

This development has many peculiarities. While the proposed deal stinks just thinking of it, the fact of the matter is that it was actually aborted. In other words no crime has been committed even if the intent may have been there. Murderous thoughts bring no one to jail.

Of course, to be righteously offended is to make it so easy for any salesman to make a sale. Revulsion is a powerful intoxicant and can occlude vision to peripheral common sense.

The timing of the recommendation could not have been more precise and propitious — right on the doormat of the 2010 election. Just as the aborted NBN-ZTE deal had been mind-boggling, so is the announcement of the recommendation happening at the time that it did.

And Joey de Venecia and Jun Lozada included in the cast of prospective defendants? But of course, since they were in on the deal, if only things did not go wrong and they got sideswept by subsequent developments. But then again, including them is like monosodium glutamate.

There, too, is the Senate itself, finding probable cause to sue somebody on whom it will eventually sit in judgment in case the impeachment rap it is recommending gets to go on trial. It is kind of a little sticky, if we may say.

The problem with this country is that there are too many official shenanigans to go by that the national consciousness can handle but that the measures adopted to address them cannot themselves pass careful scrutiny for fairness and decency.

Without a real, honest and incorruptible process by which wrongs can be righted, the nation instead undergoes a series of ill-disguised shakedowns that get perpetuated as government passes from one administration to the next.

What this nation passes off as dispensation of justice is actually a ladling out, in alternating fashion, of largesse and vendetta. You charge as much as the traffic would bear and then dig in for the storm after the calm.