Thursday, December 06, 2007 Wenceslao: Issues in coup try By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
WHAT rocked the country last Nov. 29 was Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV and Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim walking out of a hearing and holing up inside a Makati hotel while calling on President Arroyo to step down and give way to a caretaker government. But a funny thing happened on the way to the people’s full appreciation of that power play.Government troops erred in arresting media people who covered the event. That act succeeded in deflecting the focus of the coverage away from the core event, the power grab try, and into the peripheral, the arrest ruckus. In chess, you call that a blunder. It placed Malacañang on the defensive and gave the political opposition a chance to attack.
While the Arroyo administration was still reeling from criticisms by media, the Senate is poised to conduct another investigation “in aid of legislation” not on the Trillanes caper but on the peripherals: the arrest of media people and the government’s subsequent imposition of curfew hours after the Peninsula hotel standoff was resolved.
Incidentally opposition senators, who now control the Senate, are cool to the move of Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago to investigate Trillanes for acts unbecoming of a senator. Santiago would have wanted Trillanes either suspended or expelled from the Senate. But Trillanes is with the opposition, though he still has to attend a Senate session.
What we are seeing is proof of the kind of politics we have, or of the kind of mindset our politicians possess. In a way, everything has become predictable: the Arroyo administration always seeking an advantage and the political opposition grabbing at every chance to make the Arroyo administration look bad. The in thing: politicking.
Thus, while in previous times power grab attempts would become a national issue and at times were subjected to in-depth probe through the formation of commissions, the Trillanes caper seems to have concerned only the Arroyo administration while her critics are only interested in the supposed mistakes Malacañang made in handling the standoff.
BLOG COMMENT. This one is from my Rebelmind blog, a comment from “Must Be that Girl” to my column yesterday on some media outlets’ actuation during the Peninsula hotel standoff: “Media in Manila these past few years have forgotten they are covering news and not the shooting of a telenovela. That is why I hate watching national news programs these days. Makalagot!”
