THE title was suggested by my grandson, from music I never learned to appreciate, King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard singing “Straws in the wind, is it all ending?”
Respectable Toby Tiangco, in trying to absolve the president from the slings and arrows of misfortune, recounted how the latter gave a dressing down of their cousin, the former Speaker, over the 2025 budget finalized by Congress.
“Ilan bang bahay sa Forbes…ilan bang eroplano…ilan bang Ferrari…gaano karaming caviar ang kaya nyong kainin? Gaano ba karaming pera ang gusto nyo?”, the president thundered on Nov. 24, 2024.
Yet it took months of agonizing before the president let go of SFMR. And he let Christmas pass before he sacked Zaldy Co as chair of appropriations in the HoR, that expendable parvenu they conveniently used.
At least he was given graceful exit for “medical reasons”.
But like straws in the wind, the sordid saga never of history’s most corrupt budget never signs off.
Besieged by massive floods a week before his fourth SONA, his “strategists,” whether of local or foreign provenance, such as data analytics expert Lucian Despoiu of Bucuresti, or David of Alameda County near the Bay, must have supplied the “bright idea” of “Mahiya naman kayo!” which got many crocodiles thundering in ovation and started the current mantra of “inumpisahan ni Pangulo.”
To follow through, another straw in the wind: Isumbong mo kay Pangulo, which triggered the Senate Blue Ribbon to expose ghosts and ghastly sub-standard flood control projects.
After a flurry of “true confessions” from the Discayas to Hernandez to Alcantara and then Bernardo, minus the “see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing” of the now resigned Bonoan, and the impugned testimony of Orly Guteza, the chair of the BRC concludes the president is not involved.
Another case of see nothing, hear nothing, know nothing?
But Toby says the president was furious at the Speaker in November last year, yet could not get himself to finally let go of his first cousin until September this year.
Now come the songs of Zaldy, Part One till Part Four and how many more only he knows, taped from only God knows where. The hunted discombobulates the hunters.
The prosecutors finally indict Zaldy, along with the Speaker. But on what basis?
The “sworn” statement of Orly Guteza which the Blue Ribbon and a Manila RTC judge impugned for being spuriously notarized.
Ano ba talaga, Kuya?
But in the latest episode, Zaldy implicates the princeling Sandro, who supposedly got 54 billion in almost identical tranches of 500 million each regardless of project description in the last three years.
Co is dismissed through an ad hominem response, labelled the “newly crowned champion of the DDS,” but no denial of the princely allocations.
A week before, 650,000 INC followers massed at the Luneta got another straw in the wind — the pained cri de coeur of the president’s Manang, which for all the telenovela-ish drama simply asks the question: “Is the president fit to govern?”
And only a week after did brother response, lamely disowning his sister, “she is not my sister (anymore).”
To which his Manang Imee quickly reacted, not in anger but in sadness: “patunayan mong mali ako — gusto kong mali ako.”
Law enforcement agents swooped down on empty houses and a few where the “sapsap” were caught, with their faces un-blurred as privacy demands. Kasi nga, sapsap lang kayo.
Straws in the wind, in the full glare of media, for optics’ sake. No, it’s not all ending, yet.
So now the vice-chair of the Blue Ribbon, Erwin Tulfo of Leyte, Palawan, Ilocos, Davao and somewhere in the US of A, proclaims they are winding down their investigation “in aid of legislation,” because the ball is now in the hands of the ICI and the Ombudsman.
I did not know the voluble Ping needed a spokesman in Erich/Erwin.
“Mission” accomplished already?
Besides which, silver bells are ringing, though in muted tones, with shopping so slow and the malls used by the public only to experience air-conditioned comfort.
Our president calls on us “to remember what is nice, what is good, what is happy, what is joyous in Christmas”.
Shades of mommy Imelda’s “the true, the good and the beautiful”.
Pasko na, mga sinta ko, kalimutan na ang gulo, while his DPWH secretary says, “sabi ni Pangulo, tigilan muna ang pagnanakaw.”
Still, the new Ombudsman vows: fiat justitia, ruat coeli (let justice be done, though the heavens fall!)
Straws in the wind, is it really all ending?
