Carvajal: On the button

A SMILE began growing in my face the moment PRRD (President Rodrigo Roa Duterte) finally, after more than an hour’s delay, started his SONA. It kept growing until, when he finished, I imagined it (since I’m no selfie bug) to have gone as wide as the Pacific.

Not only did PRRD ride a proper train in delivering his SONA, he also made the right station-stops. His negative critics could only mutter “expletive-free.” I prefer the more positive burst of “presidential” and right “on the button.”

Admittedly there have been and there will be bumps on the road but these are the right priorities a President has to address in the country today: the war against drugs and corruption, ease-of-doing business, “tariffication” of rice imports to stabilize supply and prices (with a stern warning to rice-hoarders), independent and sovereign but friendly foreign policy, environmental integrity (with a no-nonsense warning to strip miners and resort owners), the Bangsamoro Organic Law, charter change, etc.

He tried to scuttle the ugly rumor that he is bent on perpetuating himself in power but I don’t think his critics believed him there, anyway. They cannot want to believe him because otherwise they will have no other bone to pick with him, now that the expletives are gone.

Vice-President Leni Robredo must have been terribly disappointed that PRRD did not bite on her bait for an insult because then she could no longer come out with the (I’m-sure) cute retort she came prepared with. But Sen. Risa Hontiveros did manage a farfetched attribution of the chaotic transfer of power in the House of Representatives to PRRD’s incompetence.

The two ladies’ Liberal Party is silent because it is functioning as a wrecking crew and not as a platform for launching strategic alternatives.

Trillanes as expected reacted negatively but remains as an enigma. One has really to wonder what dark physical (it cannot be spiritual) force drives him to wrestle a popular President down like it’s the last item in his bucket list. The protesters outside might number 40,000 by his estimate but how does that compare with the 80 percent of Filipinos who approve of PRRD’s ways?

Besides, these Reyes-Casiño-led protesters are, for the record, against all past presidents so far regardless of what the latter did. Slaves to a dead leftist ideology they are dictated to stop protesting only when a government is installed whose controls are in the hands of ideologues like them.

PRRD’s “presidential” Sona has stunned the opposition into immediate silence. They now need to look for other bones to pick with PRRD. His Sona was not only without the expected expletives (that they would have wanted to pounce on) it was also right “on the button.”

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