Month: March 2018

Branded

Martin Andanar
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Communications Secretary Martin Andanar announced last weekend that his office will soon launch a “big project.” He was referring to a program to promote the country as a tourist destination and encourage foreign investments.

By “big,” however, he also meant it will be heavily-funded, which should further warm the hearts of his already overpaid, skills-challenged fellow top bureaucrats in the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) who’re daily trying to prettify the regime they’re serving while demonizing its critics and anyone else who doesn’t agree with it.

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Blaming the victim

Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno
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They said they weren’t pressured — nor, presumably, bought and paid-for, promised any favors or gifts, or intimidated — to make it. But the call by some judges, lawyers and Supreme Court employees for Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno to resign so obviously blames the victim for the decline of public respect for the Supreme Court rather than the desperadoes responsible for it that one can’t help but wonder how credible that claim is.

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Warning to power

Rodrigo Duterte
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The International Criminal Court (ICC) isn’t as useless as President Rodrigo Duterte described it when he learned it was looking into the possibility of prosecuting him for crimes against humanity. But the ICC record over the last 16 years since it was established hasn’t been spectacular either.

The Court is mandated to prosecute political leaders who have committed the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. But in a world rife with racist tyrants, neo-Nazi and fascist dictators, and other vermin who use state power to torture and murder, since 2002 it has managed to convict only a relatively few of those guilty of the crimes mentioned, most of them from the African continent. It has ordered the arrest of 33 others, however, and twenty-three trials are ongoing.
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Decline and fall

EDSA 2018 protest vs Duterte
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President Rodrigo Duterte described the civilian-military mutiny known as the “People Power Revolution” that overthrew the Marcos terror regime 32 years ago as among “the most crucial and trying (of) times” for the Philippines. But his communication people apparently don’t think so, and neither do their trolls, his followers, and his allies in the Marcos family.

Presidential Communication Operations Office (PCOO) Assistant Secretary Mocha Uson, for example, sneered at the nuns’ facing the guns and tanks of the Marcos military then as a “drama,” or just for show, and even suggested that the ouster of the Marcos dictatorship was driven by “fake news.”

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