MANILA, Philippines - “Lopezes, di saklaw ng batas?” (“The Lopezes are not covered by law?”) screamed a full-page ad in the Friday Inquirer. “Scream” is not an exaggeration. The words come in gigantic bold fonts, followed by a litany of indictment in equally huge fonts, the important points emphasized in bold letters as well.

The ad asks, after entering the various crimes (translated from the Tagalog): “Doesn’t this show double standards? What emboldens the Lopezes to display this brazen disregard for law? Is it that they have senators, congressmen, justices and so-called cause-oriented groups in their pockets? No one is above the law, not even the Lopezes!”

A group called Siglo claimed responsibility for the ad.

Before that, a couple of weeks ago, Naflu also came out with a full-page ad that also shouted out the message, “Walang maisaing, walang makain” (“Nothing to cook, nothing to eat”). It enumerated the Lopezes’ many sins, but not before showing how theft of this magnitude makes the nation hungry. Imagine, it said, if the P96.3 billion Meralco has ripped off from the consumers had gone to rice. P96.3 billion divided by P18.25, the price of a kilo of NFA rice, equals 5.28 billion kilos of rice. Divide 5.28 billion kilos by 4 million, the number of Meralco customers, and each customer could have had 1,320 kilos or 53 sacks of rice!

Indeed, a day before the Siglo ad came out, GSIS boss Winston Garcia strutted around like John Paul Jones—or so he probably thought—declaring while his ship burned that he had just begun to fight. Rebuffed at the stockholders’ meeting, he vowed to pursue the fight to the end, or until Meralco got rid of the Lopezes. He too went on to fulminate against their corruption.

Had Garcia bothered to look behind him, he would have seen that people weren’t applauding, they were laughing. While of course also gnashing their teeth at the sheer effrontery of his heroic posturing. The same might be said of the groups who put out the ads. Had they bothered to check, they would have seen that people didn’t want to pat them in the back, they wanted to whack them in the nape.

Their campaign isn’t inspiring, it is disgusting. That is so for a couple of reasons.

Not the least of it is the unadulterated, concentrated and venomous hypocrisy it parades. Frankly, I don’t know that Malacañang—that is the wellspring of all this, plain as day—really expects to shift the blame for this country’s mess to the Lopezes by demonizing them. I suspect it merely wants to cloud the issue and hopefully dilute or diffuse public anger when the rice crisis comes to bite in the lean months of July to September. Never mind that the public doesn’t completely redirect its rage at the Lopezes so long as it doesn’t focus it solely at Malacañang.

The virtue of that strategy is that the Lopezes do offer easy demonization, their horns and tails not exactly hidden from view. GMA should know, she tolerated their shenanigans—at the same time that they tolerated her ambitions—when they still called each other by their first names. As late as May 2004, the Lopezes were still with her, campaigning for her and keeping mum about her cheating. That is one “good deed” that truly should not go unpunished. They richly deserve each other.

But government’s tack also displays breathtaking cheekiness. I don’t recall that Marcos or his cohorts went around town calling other people dictatorial or corrupt. GMA, or her lackeys, clearly think nothing of it. Can you imagine Marcos demanding to know why we should allow anyone to be above the law? Yet this one does—the one person who has made being above the law her favorite sport.

For if the campaign to demonize the Lopezes has shown anything, it is the contrast between the ease with which anybody can be summoned and made to account for private transactions he made on behalf of stockholders and the impossibility of summoning GMA and making her account for public transactions she made in the name of the citizens. It is the ease with which Meralco officials can be made to answer for promoting a raw deal (the pass-on costs) and the impossibility of making GMA answer for promoting a truly rotten deal (the piss-on-the-people NBN).

Good question: Why should anyone be above the law?

As to the amount of rice the Lopezes’ rip-off could have procured, I’ve been saying again and again in this column that if the anti-corruption groups want to get their message across, they should translate the mind-boggling sums they’re accusing government of stealing into things the public can grasp—precisely like the amount of rice the loot could have bought. Unfortunately, only Malacañang seems to be listening to me. Can you imagine how much rice could feed the hungry from the bukol or tongpats in the NBN alone? Do the math, and put them out in graffiti or periodikits in walls, if not in expensive newspaper ads.

But in the end, what makes the ads by Siglo and Naflu and Garcia’s antics even more disgusting is that the Lopezes do deserve to be demonized. Except that GMA and company are the wrong people to do it. Right demons, wrong exorcist. Siglo’s questions about the legal process are laughable, but not so these ones: Why haven’t the Lopezes returned the P30-billion income tax Meralco passed on to us from 1994 to 2002? Why haven’t we seen one centavo of the P21.4-billion refund the Energy Regulatory Commission ordered Meralco to give back in 2004?

The problem here is not just that GMA wants to get off the hook by redirecting the blame to the Lopezes. It is also that that the Lopezes will get off the hook because they have her to do the fishing.

A pity, because no two groups of people more deserved hooking, frying and—in these truly hungry times—eating.