President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday said the Catholic Church is full of shit and accused a bishop of having two wives (and of being a monkey) but that was not the worst thing that a politician said that day.

Sycophant Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, failed vice-presidential candidate and absentee lawmaker of the Senate of the 17th Congress, spoke before the relatives of Special Action Force commandos killed in a covert mission in Maguindanao province two years ago to tell them that their loved ones did not die in vain.

The SAF 44 — the name given to the troopers who died in a badly-planned operation against a terrorist bomb maker– let us be clear, did not die in vain.

This much was already said two years ago by the head of the Philippine National Police, the man who actually had the standing and the experience to say that.

“I declare that Marwan is dead. Mission Accomplished,” PNP Officer-in-Charge Deputy Director General Leonardo Espina said in April 2015.

Cayetano, who pretended during Senate hearings in 2015 that he was an expert on tactics because he has seen many war movies, should know that for many of those in uniform: Mission comes first.

Here, for example, is a quote from the movie Jarhead:

Troy: Fuck politics. We’re here. All the rest is bullshit.
All Marines: Yeah.

But, of course, since Cayetano is who he is, he consoled the SAF 44 families by saying the deaths were glorious.

“It is also glorious because it has produced a man, President Rodrigo Duterte, that understands both peace and war, that understands the barrel of the gun, but also understands how to put together people in peace,” Cayetano said, because his life can rally only be divided into the time before Duterte and the time after.

He is, in many ways, like a Crossfitter except without being strong or fit. He is basically an annoying asshole who never shuts up about this one thing, is what I mean.

But this is par for the course for Cayetano. Tuesday was just the latest instance that he showed he was willing to use the corpses of others for political points.

He did it in 2015 when the bodies of the SAF 44 were still being buried and he did it in 2016 when a farmers’ protest in Kidapawan City ended in a bloody dispersal.

He did it as well to the thousands of people who were tortured, killed and disappeared during the Marcos regime. He spoke out well against the abuses when it suited him — during the vice presidential debate with then Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — but kept silent about it when Duterte allowed the remains of the elder Marcos to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

“I haven’t kept quiet. Everyone has [his or her] role. And it is not my role at this point in time to be in the streets and rallying. My role, at this point in time, is helping the president in the capacity that he feels I can help him,” he said in December after people started referring to him as “Quietano”.