The plot has suddenly thickened. The game, it seems, is to eliminate all the rivals of an administration candidate named Manuel Araneta Roxas so that only one—he— remains the aspirant for the 2016 presidency. It is election by exclusion. It is MarRogeddon.
The first to fall is Senator Grace Poe, an independent presidential candidate. The three-member second division of the Commission on Elections has declared her lacking in the 10-year residency required of presidents and therefore, she has to be disqualified. She has three other disqualification cases in the first division of the Comelec, not to mention another case for disqualification before the Supreme Court. In each case of disqualification, there are two issues involved—the 10-year residency and her being not a natural born citizen of the Philippines. Poe may win in one but lose in the other. Or lose both.
Poe won in the Senate Electoral Tribunal which declared her a natural-born Filipino on account on her being a foundling.
However, the Comelec second division ruled she does not fulfill the 10-year residency. In the second division, the Comelec used her own admission when she ran for senator in 2013, that she had lived in the Philippines since November 2006, or six years and six months before the May 2013 senatorial elections. Now, the May 2016 presidential election is six months short of 10 years from November 2006.
The next victim perhaps will be long-time Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte. He is a substitute presidential candidate of PDP-Laban. But the guy who originally filed his candidacy on behalf of PDP-Laban, Martin Diño, listed mayor of Pasay as the position he was running for. Diño also listed his residence address as Quezon City. If Duterte is a substitute for Diño, then he should be running for Pasay mayor, not as president of the Philippines.
Duterte has a lackadaisical attitude about the possibility of his being disqualified. “I will not die,” he says, adding “it [being president] is not really my ambition.”
Comelec still has to call a hearing on whether Duterte is qualified to run. All seven Comelec commissioners, including the chairman, are appointees of President BS Aquino III, the patron and god of Mar Roxas.
Duterte has acquired the reputation of being a killer mayor, the punisher. That’s how he achieved peace and order in Davao, today dubbed as the fifth safest city in the world— through Death Squads looking for characters each night to eliminate from the face of the earth. The ranking was made by crowd-sourcing survey site Numbeo.com based purely on crime index.
After Poe and Duterte is an equally big fish—Vice President Jejomar Binay of the United Nationalist Alliance. The vice president is facing at least five plunder cases before the Office of the Ombudsman where the chief, Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales, is also a BS Aquino appointee.
Plunder is when a government official steals money worth at least P50 million. The accused is jailed, without bail, while on trial. Plunder is a subjective case, depending on how mean or malicious the Ombudsman is. Carpio-Morales is an aloof and menacing figure. I don’t think she is an admirer of Binay. She has shown that she can be very selective in the administration of justice. As Carpio-Morales’ fellow Ilocano, Ferdinand Marcos once said, “everything is yellow before a jaundiced eye.”
Justice Carpio-Morales loves colors. “Well, some cases against him [Binay] are still pending, some have already been resolved and there are pending motions for reconsideration,” she was quoted by GMA News yesterday at a painting event. She has already ousted Binay’s son, JunJun, as mayor of Makati, on graft findings.
Poe, Duterte, Binay. They have one common quality. Each has led the presidential race, at one time or another, by a wide margin over the Liberal Party’s Mar Roxas, according to polls.
Binay was the seemingly unbeatable frontrunner before the Senate Yellow Ribbon Anti-Graft Committee conducted two dozen hearings on alleged corruption by the Binays at Makati City Hall in 2014 to 2015.
When Binay fell behind, Poe assumed survey leadership in the race for much of 2015. After Poe’s nationality and residency were questioned, Duterte took the helm by yearend, leaving behind Binay, Poe and Roxas by a mile—38 percent versus 21 percent for both Binay and Poe, and 15 percent for Roxas, per a pro-Duterte private survey of 1,200 respondents conducted by the Social Weather Stations which happily has the habit of making findings favorable to the one who commissions the survey.
If someone with big money can commission SWS or for that matter Pulse Asia, to survey if indeed there are living things on Mars or on the Moon, I am sure these two pollsters can locate cooperative respondents happily responding to pre-determined questions.
When Binay wanted to know if he could win the presidency, SWS and Pulse Asia happily obliged, for the right reasons. Grace Poe also got positive results from the two agencies. As does Duterte now.
The only candidate who cannot do it (lead surveys) is Mar Roxas. He is that unpopular. Aquino III is that unpopular. SWS and Pulse Asia will probably close shop if one day, out of the blue, they find that Mar Roxas is the unbeatable frontrunner in their surveys.
Roxas topping surveys? Tell that to the marines marooned in the South China Sea and tossed by rough waters claimed by China. “P*tang ina!” the marines would shout.
What to do, then? Well, we have this unique BS Aquino III invention —election by exclusion. Exclude Mar’s rivals before they could participate in the May 2016 elections. How? By disqualifying them.
The other name for election by exclusion is MarRogeddon. It is the systematic shaming, humiliation, and elimination of the opposition from the May 2016 election.
In the Bible, Armageddon is the final battle between God and His enemies. It is a metaphor for someone pretending to be god and eliminating those who refuse to submit to his rule.
In the Philippines, the Invisible Presence has his yellow army and jaundice-infected minions at the lower courts, Comelec, Ombudsman and the Supreme Court.
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