Friday, April 18, 2008 Seares: This stomach thing By Pachico A. Seares News Sense
CORRUPTION still enrages people. If what people say against President Arroyo were bullets and daggers, a police crime scene unit would be looking at a body ripped, mangled, and torn.
Her popularly rating has hit the bottom. Guess where else the chart line could go beyond the floor.
But she has survived, "the lucky bitch," a critic said. Why this diminutive woman is still standing defies political logic and history and yet isn't hard to explain.
We just aren't dazzled anymore by people's revolt, which we have found to be a waste and utter sham.
People power violates the law and the Constitution. It is udemocratic: A few thousand people massed at a stretch of highway called Edsa, goaded by self-proclaimed civilian leaders and disgruntled military officers, with no authority from millions of Filipinos outside Metro Manila, decide an entire nation's fate.
A revolt throws the country to the gutter, where it must pick the pieces and rebuild. Leaders from past discredited regimes are recycled to take over and commit same ineptness and worse graft.
Smug
Malacañang may have become smug, thinking that people power is already obsolete. So despite the scandal from the aborted multimillion-peso ZTE broadband network deal, the Palace doesn't think it can be shaken by a nation angered by enormous greed.
Not till now, when a severe food crisis grips the country and hits the Filipino where it hurts most: the stomach.
The stomach doesn't listen to debate or heed propaganda crap. It doesn't think or justify.
This stomach thing might succeed where gross corruption failed: throw out a super-lucky bitch.
