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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Lying Leni

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I wonder where Vice President Leni Robredo got the idea that she is “losing the propaganda war,” as she complained in a recent interview. Perhaps she found it in the same store where she discovered that she was really in favor of a recount of the contested votes for vice president in the elections last May.

After less than a year in office, Robredo can already lie as well and as often as Noynoy Aquino. And she has the straight face and the even tone of voice down pat, as well—until you realize that she’s just lying through her teeth.

I honestly don’t know where Robredo, the darling of the foreign and local mainstream media, found the temerity to say that she is losing the propaganda battle. That may be true on social media, where I think that Robredo has already become the most hated opposition figure in the land, grabbing that title from the mad-dog ex-putschist Senator Antonio Trillanes and his incarcerated colleague, Leila de Lima.

But as far as traditional media is concerned, Robredo is venerated like the second coming of Cory Aquino. In nearly every newspaper and television and radio news broadcast, Robredo’s every move and speech is covered, every day, like she actually has a job.

She only has to fix her googly-eyed gaze on a camera or read a pre-written sentence into a microphone and she can command front-page, prime-time treatment that no vice president in my memory can get. Even if she invents new “palit-ulo” schemes or cites discredited statistics on the number of drug suspects killed.

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And Robredo doesn’t have to talk or even smile to get the sort of coverage that Trillanes and De Lima, to cite just two other politicians, would have to froth in the mouth to get. All she has to do is to wait for a bus in a place where no vehicle never stops, go down a back stairway or walk barefoot in a rice field and get the kind of media “play” that any of her fellow pols would die for.

If the wall-to-wall favorable coverage that Robredo gets on a daily basis means she is losing the propaganda war, then Noynoy is truly the greatest president of all time, as the Yellows have always believed. And anyone who says an occasional bad word about Robredo is a Marcos loyalist, a Dutertard or some other lower political life form.

That is just the first lie that Robredo told us this week, by the way. The second one is a doozy, as well.

* * *

According to Robredo, she is in favor of a recount of the contested votes in the last elections, in order to remove, in her own words in an interview last Tuesday, “the shroud of legitimacy” over her victory. (Let’s not quibble over grammar here: What she meant is that cloud of doubt over her head, of course, which has been throwing shade on her supposed win over former Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for the longest time.)

But the latest move by Robredo and her lawyers before the Supreme Court, which is hearing the election protest of Marcos at the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, is just another delaying tactic. Robredo asked the PET to reconsider its earlier decision—rendered in an unusually glacial pace, many months after the protest was filed—finding form and substance to Marcos’ complaint.

If Robredo really wanted to once and for all settle the dispute, she would direct her lawyers to stop setting roadblocks to the actual recount demanded by Marcos. And before anyone gets any ideas that this is going to be a very long and exhaustive process, bear in mind that Marcos is not contesting all the votes cast for vice president but only those in key places where he got very little votes or none at all.

These includes those precincts in Lamitan, Basilan, for instance, where despite a sizable membership of the bloc-voting Iglesia Ni Cristo (which has not just one but several chapels in the municipality) Marcos got big fat zeros in the final tally. This, despite the endorsement by the INC leadership of Marcos’ vice presidential bid—something that netted him not a single vote.

If all the precincts where Marcos has questioned the final balloting just put him even-steven with Robredo, he would easily overhaul her 200,000 or so lead in the final national tally. And that is not something you will ever hear Robredo say.

No wonder Robredo’s and her lawyers’ strategy is to keep delaying the recount, in the hope that is will be able to complete her six-year term before an actual revisiting of the ballots is even started. Forget about shrouds of legitimacy—this is all about delaying the game with every trick known to that veteran election lawyer who represents her in the PET.

The truth is, Robredo just lies with utmost confidence, secure perhaps in the belief that her awesome propaganda machinery will be able to convince the public that she is actually propounding the gospel truth. (When Robredo isn’t out-and-out lying, she’s doing some jesuitic jiu-jitsu with the truth, like claiming that she never said that 7,000 people were killed extra-judicially, only that the same number were summarily executed; you figure that one out.)

In one respect, the people who say that President Rodrigo Duterte is like his American counterpart, Donald Trump, are just dead wrong. In the lying department, at least, Trump and Robredo are practically indistinguishable.

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