No good faith from the start Noynoy

Noynoy Aquino cannot use "good faith" as an excuse to escape culpability in the monster of corruption that he helped create -- the Development Acceleration Program or DAP. And that is because he cannot feign ignorance about pork, by whatever guise, shape and name it may come, the DAP being one of them.

Noynoy may be unfit for the highest office in the land, but he is definitely not a moron. At the very least, having come from a political family and having been a politician of sorts before a strange twist of fate catapulted him to the presidency, he should know what pork means and what its true uses are.

When Noynoy affixed his signature in approval of the proposal by Budget Secretary Butch Abad to create the DAP, Noynoy knew exactly what was going on. If he claims otherwise, he and those who believe what he claims are the biggest liars and hypocrites in the universe.

The DAP is worse than its cousin the PDAF, or the Priority Development Assistance Fund -- the pork barrel of senators and congressmen. At least the PDAF is in a duly-passed, and therefore legitimate, piece of legislation called the annual budget, never mind that it is incarnated in items of varying stages of disguise.

The DAP, on the other hand, is clearly an outside-the- budget creation of just two people -- Noynoy and Abad -- who in light of what is going on we might as well call as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, respectively. The DAP being thus patently illegal at birth, no amount of good faith claimed in retrospect can make it legal.

Besides, Noynoy is incapable of good faith and has exhibited this incapability right from the very start. Before his mother Cory died, nobody in his right mind ever considered Noynoy a presidential timber. Not even the remotest and kindest of considerations shooed his name into any list of presidential prospects.

In other words, as far as his chances of becoming president were, his was zero, kaput, a complete nada. To this day, my challenge for anyone to stand up and say Noynoy was such a prospect in any list had remained unmet. But then Cory had to die. And when her legions turned up, the bright boys knew exactly what they had.

They had the most propitious confluence of events on their side. The country under Gloria Arroyo was rocked by scandal after scandal. Fairly or unfairly, everything wrong was seen as her doing. When Cory died, as when her husband Ninoy before her did, opposition forces outside the regime simply jelled and held.

All that was needed was a standard-bearer. And it was propitious too that the original self-anointed standard-bearer, Mar Roxas, saw the folly of insisting on his unwinnable self, never mind if, all else other than winning considered, he was way more qualified than Noynoy, whose only edge was that he was Cory's son.

But to the opposition, that was enough. In fact, that was everything. It did not matter that they would foist upon the land a man who has distinguished himself in inability and mediocrity. All that mattered was winning, never mind if the country went to the dogs. And there is no good faith in that.

Noynoy himself knew what was going on. As plain and ordinary as he was, he had to know he was being used. Certainly it must have dawned on him that he could not have possibly become a presidential timber overnight. Surely his new admirers must be up to something. His spiritual retreat must have enlightened him.

That he still went ahead and allowed the opportunists and power brokers to use and manipulate him despite knowing that they will be giving all Filipino voters naive enough to bite the bait the raw end of the deal cannot be a manifestation of moral ascendancy and forthrightness.

A person who knowingly dupes another is not a person who is acting in good faith. Noynoy knew fully well that he did not have what it took to be president. But since that was what the yellow mob wanted, and his family gets to benefit in the process, he went along with it. Now pray tell where is the good faith in that?

And now, fours years later, with the country faced with a looming power crisis, a runaway population, growing unemployment, rising crime, spreading drug use, soaring prices, China bullying -- all resulting from poor leadership at the helm -- we still want to give Noynoy the benefit of good faith over DAP?