AKBAYAN Representative Risa Hontiveros said President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo spent more than six times the annual pork barrel allocation per congressman for the second district of Pampanga alone in 2009.
The second district is where Arroyo has filed a certificate of candidacy to run for Congress representative.
Infrastructure projects were poured into the six towns of the second district, Hontiveros said, for a total of P459-million.
Unimaginable? Definitely not.
At least under the excesses, self-interests, and political maneuverings that have been manifested by this administration and its lapdogs, nothing is unimaginable anymore.
We never even imagined that a president will ever run again as congressman just because she has not had enough of public service yet.
Before the plunder case against President Joseph Ejercito Estrada that preceded Arroyo's rise in power, a lot of things were unimaginable. Like plunder, midnight cabinets meetings over bottles and bottles of Johnny Walker Blue and casino chips, in-your-face corruption, election-related massacre, a bankrupt government, and yes, preachers and priests running for office.
This short list cannot even enumerate everything unimaginable that we have been made to witness, and yet this short list is already more than mind-boggling. As mind-boggling as seeing preachers and priests running for office.
We're not against priests running for office, nor are we campaigning against it. They're still citizens and are not convicts, so lawfully they can run. But if one were brought up in a Catholic community, one would know that priests are there for spiritual guidance, to show us how Christ would have wanted us to live our lives, at the pulpit, around the chapel, in the parsonage, and just about everywhere where every encounter would be preceded by a "mano". Making "mano" to a governor or a president just doesn't sit well with being a Filipino Catholic.
For preachers and priests to run points to a level of desperation that has already breached the capacity and ability to teach. That's assuming that the preachers and priests are well-intentioned. Ill-intentioned preachers and priests deserve another editorial.
Back to pork barrel poured into the second district of Pampanga... we repeat what we have been saying over and over here: Let us never forget all these as we inch closer to elections. And if by some not so unimaginable circumstance we are denied our right to vote on May 10, let us remember these too and rise up as one voice.