Bewitched, bothered and bewildered. This sums up the state of the administration’s detractors days after President Duterte’s third State of the Nation Address which officially started his third year in office.
They are bewitched by the manner he delivered his third Sona. They could not believe themselves that in his almost an hour of delivery he can be composed and straightforward in summing up what in his view is where the country is at and where he wants us to go from here. They could not imagine a situation where nary a cuss word was uttered or a perceived Duterte detractor, local or foreign, was not called out.
They could hardly come to terms with a President Duterte making sense with what’s happening to the economy, about jobs, about Boracay and mining, about the armed conflicts in the land, about our relations with other countries, about drugs, criminality and corruption—the very foundation of his run for the presidency in 2106.
Indeed, about matters which many of them out of sheer conceit could not simply believe him even mentioning. Not to mention remembering anything of any significance to the life of this nation at all since some of these groups’ social media political assassins had already sentenced him as unfit and unwell.
But the President did. And they were flabbergasted no end. They were bewitched.
These critics are now bothered. Having witnessed a new Duterte, if we may call it such, they are now in a quandary what he will and can do next now that he has shown he can keep his emotions in check and his gutter utterances to himself. What’s up his sleeves? Is he launching a crackdown, perhaps? Having promised to keep the drug war going and to its chilling conclusion is he now prepared to unleash the dogs of war, this time after the heads of the cartels and their enablers, whether these ride in motorcycles or in their fleet of luxury cars. Or whether these wear shorts or are in Brooks Brothers suits.
These detractors are so unhinged they have gone to town belittling the administration’s achievements insisting, despite the facts, that the economy is far from growing. Of course, they are also hyperventilating over the war on drugs, corruption and criminality again advising that the country remains mired in these triple evils. In sum, they are so outrageously believing their own propaganda that this administration has failed and is failing big time in moving us to a fresh future.
But the President seems unperturbed. He is moving at his own pace and in his own ways and is getting the country to move with him no matter what. His trust and approval ratings have steadied well above average.
The detractors are truly bewildered. President Duterte has been fortunate in his friends. After that ruckus in the House prior to his delivering his third Sona, that body has rebooted itself under a new and, as even the critics admit, more focused, more prepared and better disciplined leadership. What some sectors had earlier described as a bullying leadership has been replaced by a more sensitive yet firmer one.
Now the House can truly be a deliberative body without any hidden or sudden agenda changes. Now the House can be looked up to deliver not just on the administration’s agenda but better still on the country’s pressing needs and its requirements for the future. So, even as the critics have cried out loud about what they said was an embarrassing House ruckus, the legislative mill has moved on. The Bangsamoro Organic Law has been ratified. The much needed TRAIN 2 fiscal package is being debated upon and the 2019 budget about to be looked into. The President’s allies are uniting and delivering without being side tracked by extraneous concerns and unwarranted pronouncements.
But President Duterte is even more fortunate in his enemies. Whatever one thinks about his third Sona and his assessment of the country’s state of affairs, his critics unabated, seriously flawed carping about the “human rights situation” and the West Philippine Sea-cum-China issue is, without doubt, helping him in ways the critics never imagined. On the “human rights situation,” the oft-repeated claim that close to 20,000 have been killed over the last two years of the ‘ war on drugs’ has been dismissed as fake. On the other hand, raising the China/WPS issue has gained no serious traction at all forcing the critics to resort to gimmickry (Remember Philippines: Province of China?) To no avail, of course.
So the President and the country move on, leaving the critics baying by their lonesome by the road, bewildered no end by their inability to rouse the citizenry to do their bidding.