Archive - Commentary

Fr. Flavie Villanueva: In the name of justice that was denied to thousands of families who lost their loved ones due to former President Rodrigo Duterte’s state policy of “kill, kill, kill”, I make this P123 mocking deposit. The “Na 1-2-3” deposit is also a call for vigilance: That’s also a “Na 1-2-3” ni Digong at Sara ang Bayan noon at hanggang ngayon!

The Dutertes are marshalling all their forces to block the impeachment trial. Their battle strategy is not to gather enough votes to block the conviction of the vice president but to PREVENT the convening of the impeachment court and the holding of the trial.

Integrity is not one of Chiz’s talents. We can make him know there is a price to it.

For sure, the vice president and her camp would use all antics in the book to block the impeachment trial. The time for her to answer the accusations won't come. She may be able to go scot-free on technicalities, but she'd be missing the opportunity to clear her name.

In truth, between the Duterte arrest in March, across the 2025 campaign, and through to the present, a content bucket that has constantly been filled is that one that speaks of Duterte as the Pinoy every man, the Juan dela Cruz, who became President. This is further dispersed across smaller content buckets, each one filled deliberately and strategically, and then mass dropped on Tiktok accounts that grow almost by the week.

Go’s transfer to Lupon, Davao Oriental is seen as his break from the Duterte children and their heirs, now numbering five in political power. With Go’s higher ambitions, his chances of having the city as his baluarte are dim. It will always be in the hands of the Duterte children, who see him as belonging to the opposing Honeylet Avanceña side of the broken family.

The president needs to take more drastic action against erring or non-performing officials, not only those in the Cabinet but even in lower-level agencies and regulatory entities, particularly those involved in frontline government services.

The results of the May 12 polls gave the vice president's camp more ammunition for the almost simultaneous battle in Congress — the speakership in the House of Representatives and impeachment in the Senate — to discredit the Marcos administration and eventually wrest power by 2028.

Prominent lawyer Lorna Kapunan said last week’s election showed an enlightened electorate. The results were both an appeal and demand to current as well as aspiring political leaders for respect. It’s a notice as well to the senator-judges in the Duterte impeachment trial.

The Sara kiss of death was especially seen in the city of Manila and in Batangas. She deliberately made negative campaigning for the congressmen who were potential prosecutors in her forthcoming impeachment trial in the senate. These congressmen were among the most vocal in the House Quadcomm hearings. Representative Joel Chua (Manila, 3rd district) headed the House committee on good governance that conducted seven hearings on Sara’s red-flagged use of confidential funds.

If her “opposition” to her brother is simply an expression of sisterly concern, beyond the recently concluded elections, what will Imee do if helping the Dutertes greatly harms her brother, or her family’s reputation, which she has labored for decades to rehabilitate?

Elections give voters an opportunity every three years to reject non-performing, misbehaving, incompetent, corrupt and other types of bad leaders and replace them with aspirants suitable for the position. Every election presents a chance for improvement, not deterioration of the quality of the leaders we choose.

As a pope of the contemporary world, one issue he will address will be migration, a preferential apostolate of the Catholic Church. Migrants migrate to escape conditions of poverty, religious and political persecution, and wars. Migration is never a crime. What will his papacy do to embrace the humanity of migrants and refugees? As a son of migrants and of Afro-Creole culture, Leo XIV is a groundbreaking pope.

Cardinal Tagle’s former teacher: Tagle is not a risk-taker. He prefers to stay in the safety of his residence, dishing out platitudes rather than engaging in shaping the political discourse of the nation. He strives to be a friend of everybody and longs for their approval in return.

The words Imee used in the political ad to attack the Marcos administration officials could also apply to the Dutertes and their minions, who are facing the same criticisms and more serious allegations of corruption, drug trafficking and crimes against humanity.

These narrative shifts are only possible because the Dutertes are doing Tiktok content like it’s nobody’s business… Now there is barely any pro-Marcos content, and even Imee rarely appears unless she’s with VP Sara…Now, it is all the Dutertes. The For You Page shows it, and the surveys, too.

Gutter talk, name-calling and other forms of abusive behavior are resorted to only when one runs out of substantive arguments to shift focus from the issues.

Perhaps Imee and Sara deserve each other. Both failed to be amply rewarded for their contributions to Bongbong's election victory in 2022. In the midterms, the president and his allies have become their adversaries.

What could have gone wrong? With less than a month into the May 12 polls, can Imee still recover from her apparent missteps in the past months?

Imee Marcos, who had admitted to the torture and killing of Archimedes Trajano, was acquitted on a technicality, but not on her culpability for murder. She remains guilty in our public eyes.

The DDS have become clones of Duterte’s grandiose narcissism and congenital lying, a minority that is noisy, yet a minority nevertheless. They may not be a danger to immediate destabilization; they are a danger to truth telling. Kill the truth and the nation dies.

Roque will have to show more of his antics to the Duterte supporters, who still laugh at his clowning, to be relevant. But he will have a long difficult journey to redeem himself, if at all.

And if Marcos is indeed waging a “bloodless” drug war, how would he recognize the men and women in uniform who died in anti-illegal drugs operations?

Faced with tough challenges even before the trial begins, the Duterte camp is working to win the former president's case in the streets rather than through the legal channels, which they have long been trying to besmirch through black propaganda and other forms of disinformation.

Indeed, China couldn’t find a more useful and impactful set of proxies than the Dutertes in its geopolitical competition with the United States in the Asia Pacific in the same way that the Americans have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

If this was kidnapping, it was kidnapping in style. Convince the three ICC judges of Pre-Trial Chamber I that it was a crime.

What of irresponsible commentary? What of baseless opinion? There has to be a way to hold accountable those who live off political social media content yet feel little to no responsibility about the effects of their actions on their public.

The disinformation game plan now appears to have shifted to undermining the ICC, linking it to the leftist groups in the Philippines, and questioning its objectivity to destroy its credibility.

Duterte would rather see women as subjects of his male domination.The reality has changed overnight. As fate would have it, all three judges sitting for his pre-trial in the International Criminal Court are women.

COMMENTARY: But what if Duterte doesn’t get home and chooses to live the life of an exile in China?