And So It Goes

And so we find the strongest political coalition before the 2010 elections reduced to a fractious faction who apparently will eagerly turn on each other at the drop of a hat.

Former political giant Lakas-Kampi-CMD this week lost one of the few members who actually did stuff: Albay Representative Edcel Lagman.

"Screw you guys. I'm going home."

Lagman stepped down weeks after declaring he still had the support of most of the 29 members of the minority bloc at the House of Representatives. The two Arroyo sons in Congress, who had earlier pledged loyalty to Lagman, have reportedly decided to back Suarez instead.

“I cannot continue serving a political aggrupation which deliberately refuses to recognize competent, militant and responsible leadership and would opt to follow blindly the importuning of former President Arroyo,” he added.

Lagman earlier accused Arroyo of planning his ouster after meeting with (Quezon Representative Danilo) Suarez and several of her close allies in her hospital suite at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center two weeks ago.

With Lagman–veteran debater, foil to the administration, and principal author of the Reproductive Health bill at the House–gone, the minority is left with Suarez, who does not have much of a record of objecting to things except in the issue of taxes owed to his province by an energy company. He was a staunch ally of then President Joseph Estrada before switching to the Arroyo team. We hazard that given a choice, he would gladly jump this ship and join the Aquino administration if it will have him.

Other erstwhile allies have either joined the administration Liberal Party directly or, through the new National Unity Party that is part of the House majority.

At any rate, Lakas-Kampi-CMD has little strength left, and even less allies. With just 28 members left, a number that may yet dwindle as the 2013 elections loom, there is little that the minority can do now except make ineffectual noise, if that.

Ferdinand Topacio: The Hit(ler)s Keep On Coming

The Littlest Nazi, lawyer Ferdinand Topacio, is still going on about how great Adolf Hitler was, apparently.

According to ABS-CBN:

“Walang nailabas na pagpapatibay na may official state policy ang Germany sa ilalim ng National Socialist regime na patayin ang mga Hudyo. Ang gusto lamang nila ay ilayo o i-segregate, o i-exile ang mga Hudyo (There is no proof that killing Jews was an official state policy. They only wanted to segregate or exile the Jews),” he said.

And that, according to Topacio,  is fine because 1. you can’t prove Hitler had anything to do with it (He was just the Leader) and 2. a little segregation never hurt anybody.

He goes on to say that if Pulse Asia, a survey firm, was around in World War II Germany, it would probably report that more than 90% of Germans would agree the Jews were treated fairly. “But was it right? You tell me.”

It was wrong, you fucking cunt. The deaths of millions of people, including Jews, gypsies, gays, lesbians, and other people generally considered not-Aryan, is wrong.  Invading other countries to get some “living space” is wrong.  Herding people into trains to bring them to concentration camps and their statistically-eventual death is wrong.

Not even Hitler can believe this shit.

Quick to rise (but actually too late) to the defense of Holocaust victims was lawyer Argee Guevarra, who called Topacio a “history buffoon” before conveniently using the deaths of millions to make a political point:

“I would like to believe that Atty. Ferdie Topacio’s idolatry of Adolf Hitler and his pro-Nazi sentiments  are motivated only by his zealous desire to defend even the indefensible, such as his client, former President Gloria Macapagal Arrovo, este, Arroyo,” he said in a statement. [emphasis supplied]

Two things: Bad as Arroyo was, she was not Hitler. She was not even Marcos, come to that. Throwing away lines like that is lazy and disrespectful of people who actually suffered under either Hitler or Marcos.

Plus that whole “este (err)” thing? That only works in Enteng Kabisote movies, and only when delivered by Enteng Kabisote. It was funny in the 1990s, when it was used as a device to tell the audience what a character really thought of someone else.  (Ex. monster-in-law, este, mother-in-law.) It does not work in a press statement that was presumably edited before being printed and sent out to the press.

foto from foodmayhem.com

Attorney Argee Guevarra

And Guevarra is no less a “history buffoon” than Topacio, apparently:

Guevarra said he wishes Topacio well in his “campaign against the Aquino administration’s Final Solution to the Arroyo Question.” He also offered his legal services in case Topacio becomes the subject of a lawsuit of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

He added that many lawyers will support Topacio if he decides to ask a local court to allow Mrs. Arroyo to be detained in a gas chamber in the former concentration camp in Auschwitz. “I will even donate my entire savings from my law practice in 2011 to pay for GMA’s travel to Poland,” he said.

“Final Solution,” of course, refers to the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” which in the Nazi context was (very simplistically): “What do we do with all these Jews?*” The apparent answer to that question was the systematic attempt to rid Europe of them. In contrast, the only Arroyo question, really, is “what is she not guilty of, and how do we prove that?”

Guevarra further belittles the Holocaust by offering to “donate my entire savings from my law practice in 2011 to pay for GMA’s travel to Poland” where he proposes the former President should then be shipped to Auschwitz. So, yeah, basically, the Jews sent there deserved it as much as Arroyo, he says.  And he is only correct in this sense: Nobody deserved to be sent there.

Next up, probably: Bataan Death March: Was It Really That Bad? It’s Like A Walking Tour of Luzon.

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*Properly, the Jewish Question predates the Nazis and referred to the question of Jewish identity in the context of the rise of nations in Europe.

An Expected Plot Twist

On a scale of 1 to 5, how crazy would you say the shit you say sounds?

The winds changed again last night when Elena Bautista-Horn, former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s spokesperson, bared a pretty bare bones plot to kill her boss.

The supposed assassination plot is backed up by a tip from an anonymous member of the Aquino administration and an opinion column by Mon Tulfo, that paragon of journalistic integrity who has quit profanity but still turns out shit.

“Alam rin po natin na lumabas sa column ni Mon Tulfo na sinabi daw po ni Secretary Butch Abad na kung pababa-biyahihen si Mrs. Arroyo eh mabuti na daw na barilin siya sa tarmac. So napagtatagpi-tagpi namin ang istorya na talagang parang may agenda na hindi maganda para sa dating pangulo, [As we know, a column by Mon Tulfo said Department of Budget Butch Abad said it would be better to shoot Mrs. Arroyo on the tarmac*]” she said in an example of constitutes quintiplemillion hearsay.  

Tulfo, whose column now features more asterisks than words, actually wrote:

What’s this I heard from the Malacañang grapevine about a bad joke made by a Cabinet official during a meeting that P-Noy had with his Cabinet over the showdown between his government and the Supreme Court?

Budget Secretary Butch Abad allegedly butted in during a discussion on why Gloria and her husband should not be allowed to leave the country: “Why don’t we just shoot her at the tarmac?”

If true, Abad’s joke was in bad taste, but to jump to the conclusion that this is proof of a laughably named Operation ‘Put The Little Girl To Sleep’ is such a leap that even Arroyo lawyer Raul Lambino, who has come up with a lot of whoppers himself, probably said “what the fuck?” before scrambling to come up with something even more outlandish. Like an alien plot to abduct Arroyo, maybe. Or that a team of time-travelling terminator robots have been sent from the future to take her out.

A few weeks ago, the nation sort of felt sympathy for Arroyo when she was kept from leaving the country even though the Supreme Court said she had. The supot stand off at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, where Arroyo arrived and left in a St. Luke’s ambulance/airport taxi service,  had Bautista-Horn, Lambino, and lawyer Ferdinand Topacio screaming about martial law and the death of democracy. And for a while, people actually bought it.

How dare the government prevent Arroyo from exercising her right to travel? She has hypoparathyroidism and a rare bone disease that could kill her if left untreated by foreign doctors who are much better than local doctors!

Until last week, when Arroyo’s doctors told a Pasay City court that their patient was actually doing okay. Until then, Arroyo’s people had been saying she needed to fly abroad for urgent treatment. If she couldn’t fly out, she should at least be granted hospital arrest.

With that cat out of the bag, Arroyo’s lawyers dropped the bid for hospital arrest and asked that she be allowed house arrest instead. Arroyo has since developed colitis, an incredibly rare and deadly disease that the rest of us call being poopy.

And since being a poopy pants isn’t really enough of a reason to not stay in jail while facing a case of electoral sabotage, her camp probably thought playing the “there is a plot to kill me” card would win them sympathy.

Except it’s not. Not when it’s based on two rumors and no proof. Not when you squandered away your credibility in nine years of saying one thing and doing another, saying “I’m sorry” for something that you never acknowledge doing again, and surrounding yourself with an increasingly shady inner circle of crooks.

With this latest claim of a kill plot against her, Arroyo’s camp is finally scraping the bottom of the barrel and has run out of halfway credible things to say. There is only one thing to say at this point, however incredible: Not guilty. And she should say it in court.

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 *Because, you see, this is Martial Law and she is the new Ninoy Aquino.