Friday, September 02, 2005
Lee: We gotta
By Kelvin Lester Lee
Babble On
I HAVE no idea how many ridiculous debates there have been in Congress or how many arguments and counter arguments have been thrown around in columns and opinion pages like this one, or even how many rallies there have been in Edsa, Makati, Davao or Cebu.
I don't know, nor really care at this point, how many congressmen are pro-impeachment or anti-impeachment. I don't really care either that they've practically thrown the impeachment complaint out the windows of Congress.
What I do know is this: She's the President.
I supported President GMA before and still do support her now as President. Because like it or not, under the Constitution, under our law, she is the duly-elected president of the Philippines. And she stays that way until either she is impeached or she chooses to step down.
We don't know if she has cheated or not in the last elections, or at least we are not absolutely sure of that. We don't know how much of what the noisy "Hyatt 10" have been saying is true or not. We don't even know who is telling the truth anymore, or whose witness we should believe in (is that Zuce guy still even talking?).
What is clear in this current situation is that she is the President. The leader of the country. And I say that, no matter how tired we are of this mess, or how tired we are of the President and her increasingly tiring voice, she is still the Grand dame of the country, with the power and responsibility to either lift the nation out of the doldrums we are in or sink it even lower.
Either way, we gotta respect that at least. She's the president. And we have to live with that for now. Because to consider the alternative; street rallies, another Edsa, the chaos and blood it could possibly bring, is something that would may be too painful for the country to bear. We can't afford another Edsa. We can't afford using extra-constitutional means again and become the unstable laughingstock of Asia.
We gotta respect the presidency, and we gotta respect the law. She is president until the political process of impeachment says otherwise. She is the president until she resigns or dies (and I do hope that does not give anyone any ideas).
She is the president because she has been held to be such under the law, and until the law says otherwise, well... that's it.
She's the president. We gotta respect that, and no amount of legal wrangling or impeachment dodging or even name-calling will change that unless the opposition will get their act together and either follow or accept what the law has provided.
So until then, we gotta remember, she's the president. For now, at least.
Email me at babbleoncolumn@yahoo.com
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (September 2, 2005 issue)
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