Defense mash-up

Sara Duterte’s impeachment proceedings are well underway, and we the peanut gallery have been treated to entertainment galore. Not just from the actual actors up there on the Senate stage, but also from minor characters, memes, reaction videos, playbacks, and desperate influencers seeking to monetize from the fracas. Let’s not even mention the Facebook live streaming that seems to be all the rage --honestly, who has the time to listen to unstructured rants?

Consider. There are the self-important senators and their counsels, grandstanding to their normal audience. There are the pundits, busy cheerleading or quarter-backing. And of course, there are the haters, busy with shredding their perceived enemies. There’s so much content to choose from, one can’t keep up.

Add to this mix the necessary ingredient of lawyers. We are treated to the sight of counsel, smug with their diplomas from the best Law schools and a license to practice, trying to explain away Vice President Duterte’s meltdown on camera. One dark evening, or was it early morning, she shrieked at her running mate Bongbong Marcos and announced to the world that she had contracted with a specialist to take him, his wife, and sundry other family members in case something happens to her (by take them, I mean, you know).

As if that were not enough injury to our senses, we are asked as taxpayers to foot the bill for these lawyers’ catered meals. Oh, why don’t you ask us to pay for their outfits and make-up as well while you’re at it? That’s the best way to maximize our contributions to this government.

Congress has determined Sara committed an impeachable offense. The Senate is now trying the charge. Naturally, her advocates are deploying various strategies designed to make us think this is a big fuss over nothing.

Take the case of counsel Paolo Panelo, who is reported by media as characterizing her statements as “a bluster”, and not a true threat. We have to credit Panelo with teaching his side of the fence how to utilize “bluster” in a sentence. This is a future litmus test we shall deploy.

In any case, in the same breath, Panelo asks us to consider the outburst as self-defense. “Considering that there was an ongoing threat to her life… it was justifiable, understandable, perfectly reasonable for her to resort to something like that, which is to utter something to deter the threat against her life.”

This alternative that is supplied, however, is confusing. If it is mere bluster, then I guess that should be it? End of the discussion? That’s the simple explanation, and we should take it for what it is presented as. We can move forward and dissect the statements to see if they are really just that --bluster. Yet, apparently, we are also asked to consider it as not just bluster, but as a deterrent. So the question arises, how can mere bluster also function as a deterrent? If it is not real, how can it deter?

Will whoever was menacing the vice president be effectively deterred if it was bluster? Or it was effective when it was uttered, and now it has deflated to mere bluster?

Hold on. Defense counsel Mark Vinluan has also suggested, at some point during the proceedings, that her statements were made in jest. Haha. They were meant to be funny. So funny, that they could deter whoever was targeting the vice president? They must have been such awful jokes then.

Mark Vinluan also asks us to believe they were “a mere response to a question and answer.” So in that alternate world, there is a question posed, then an answer is given, followed by a subsequent response --which can consist of ranting about someone killing the president and his wife? Okay, perhaps that was pedantic. But the contortions we are treated to.

What is a jest is also bluster and likewise a deterrent, but ultimately a response. Or, it was a deterrent, that was a response to a question, but that response was meant to be funny and blustery.

I can’t make sense of it. Help.