The late executive editor of Washington Post, Benjamin C. Bradlee, immortalized in the world of journalism for bringing down Richard Nixon’s presidency, once said: “Reporters and editors are in business to tell the truth, and not in the business of giving people free passage.”
We will not mince words here.
No self-respecting newsroom, democratic institution, or courtroom must allow Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio to have a free pass for her contemptible behavior in the last few days and weeks.
There is neither coherence nor logic in her barrage of blitzkrieg against her erstwhile allies, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and House Speaker Martin Romualdez. Since the Marcos-Duterte rift cracked open, her camp went for the jugular in their chorus of verbal assaults against their political opponents.
She first hinted that the UniTeam was a mere convenient political marriage to win the 2022 elections. Next, she mused out in the open about wanting to “cut off” Marcos Jr’s head. Then she called him “unfit” to govern.
Now, she hurls an immutable threat to assassinate Marcos Jr, the first lady, and Romualdez—if she dies.
She refused to spare even the dead. Duterte earlier invoked the idea of exhuming the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. from Libingan ng mga Bayani and throwing him off the West Philippine Sea. She now evokes the memory of the tyrant’s archnemesis, Benigno S. Aquino Jr, in a distorted attempt to parallel her farcical theatrics with the slain opposition leader’s moral crusade against the dictatorship, as if six years of her father’s regime were not expended in building a disinformation machine trivializing Aquino’s memory.
Duterte’s loyalists, spin masters, and propagandists could try to defend the indefensible.
Yet her language was unmistakably depraved; it was appalling.
She incited violence in public against her enemies, inasmuch as Donald J. Trump incited his legion of followers to ransack Capitol Hill in a desperate attempt to overturn the elections he lost.
Remember how Rodrigo Duterte’s henchmen made the life of Ronnel Mas miserable for his extreme Facebook rant. He had no P50 million to dispense for the elder Duterte’s life. It is different when the second highest elected official of the land, with a whole “security” force behind her, makes the threat.
How does one make sense of Duterte’s imbecilic meltdown? No one can. A whole plethora of words meant to define shamelessness and overstretch—from preposterous to outrageous, from fiendish to vile—will not suffice to append to her odious public performances. These are, quite simply, unfathomable in its debauchery.
Much has been said about Duterte’s apparent violation of the Revised Penal Code, but her flagrant transgressions are more explicit under Republic Act 11479. Maybe for a change, this government must give the daughter of Rodrigo Duterte a brutal taste of her father’s own “anti-terror” medicine.
If Vice President Duterte gets away with this as much as his father continues to go scot-free despite the blood of tens of thousands of tokhang victims dripping from his hands, imagine if she stages a Trump-like comeback in 2028.
She’s not yet standing before the presidential podium, yet she feels emboldened enough to threaten the lives of her political opponents. She’s not yet a presidential candidate, but she now exudes an extremist lexicon much worse than any Abu Sayyaf commander could muster. She’s not yet the Philippine president, but she struts around Congress, parades herself in front of the cameras, and presents herself to her flock of irrational defenders as if she’s the most powerful warlord in this country.
If she clinches the presidency unscathed, without being held to account for her rascality, the retribution will not end with the Marcos and Romualdez clans.
She would go after lawyers, lawmakers, activists, the old yellow and pink vanguards poking at her recklessness, and the independent Philippine press—anybody who dares to defy her whimsical orders.
Imagine if she becomes president, during which presidential immunity will allow her to do away with the national budget—and with more galloping confidential funds—as she pleases. No questions can be asked, or else.
Hypothetical as these scenarios appear, the arrogance and hubris that the Duterte daughter exhibits in public makes the best argument for the plausibility of tragedy under a second Duterte presidency. If the country’s democratic foundation still fails to assert itself by not punishing the vice president for her illicit and immoral attitude toward public scrutiny, imagine if she takes it one notch higher once she becomes president.
Duterte acts as if she’s the swaggering totalitarian leader in town, emblematic of an old tradition of the world’s most wicked autocrats. The paradox, however, is this: Behind the braggadocio, the deflections, the menacing shibboleth, the vice president is afraid of being unmasked as a Janus-faced public official who might have betrayed constitutional tenets of public trust. She cannot even explain how her offices used (or misused?) their funds without resorting to mischievous indignation, if not coercion.
This is no different from the incoming 47th chief executive of the United States. Trump and Duterte were cut from the same populist and autocratic cloth. Both thrive upon the aggravation of hatred, division, and vitriol to whip up their crowds and turn the people against each other, whitewashing their conceit under a false pretense of “unity” and a bloodied banner of obedience to the Great Leader.
Washington saw this during the January 6 insurrection. It sounds hauntingly similar to the hollow calls from Duterte’s legions to stage their “people power,” albeit theirs is a perverted version of the idea.
After all, both are merely steered by a repulsive desire to reclaim power—and consolidate it to their favor.
Sara Duterte is clutching at straws using the classic fascist’s playbook. She is unraveling her true despotic roots, in a woebegone bid to salvage her political future.
At this historic threshold, to conclude that Duterte is a clear and present danger to the Filipino people has become a moral obligation. To be neutral about the stakes of her political, emotional, and moral breakdown is an abdication of journalism’s duty to be a check against abusive power and to tell the truth, as Mr. Bradlee said.
If this administration does not rise to the occasion, it will pave the way for the ascension of another fascist ruler in Malacañang.
The president does not know how to run the government, the vice president once said. Probably, she is correct. But Sara Duterte is far worse, because she can only grasp the basic principles of inhumanity.