WHEN it became obvious that Jocelyn Bolante would come home, and that public interest in him had not waned, every trick in the book was used to buy time. The time-honored strategy of the Palace and its friends is to buy time, relying on the notoriously short attention span of the public and the media. And so Bolante was whisked away from the prying eyes of the media and the public to the comfortable confines of St. Luke’s hospital, where Bolante was put through the rigmarole of an executive checkup, and where the sum total of his medical condition can be summarized in the medicine his doctors administered: Benadryl, a mild sedative and an antihistamine.

While his doctors wouldn’t perjure themselves, neither would they risk alienating other prominent patients by saying, outright, that their patient was malingering. But beyond a day or two the whole confinement would be, quite obviously, more of a hotel than a hospital stay.

And so the tag-teaming for President Macapagal-Arroyo (and Bolante) began.

Sen. Edgardo Angara, while every bit as bland in personality as former Sen. Ramon Magsaysay Jr. (the previous chair of the agriculture committee Angara now heads), decided he’s more suited to being a Pontius Pilate than a Sherlock Holmes. And so he issued a statement saying there’s nothing more for him to do, that he believes the Senate has already reached so many politically-inconvenient findings that it would be better to drop all the hot potatoes into the heat-proof lap of the Ombudsman.

Sen. Miguel Zubiri piped up in favor of Angara’s call for non-action and pointedly reminded his reelectionist colleagues that investigating Bolante might delay the 2009 campaign budget. Why dig up the past when there’s a need to start investing in everyone’s political future? Why antagonize the very President whose Department of Budget and Management, Department of Public Works and Highways and Department of Education will all be the disbursing agents of the goodies in the election-oriented budgets of 2008 and 2009?

Why, indeed? Even Senate President Manuel Villar agonized over whether or not to focus attention on Bolante, and it took the combined behind-the-scenes and in-public efforts of former Senators Sergio Osmeña III, Franklin Drilon and Magsaysay Jr. to shake him out of his Hamlet-like indecision. In the hard-nosed, pragmatic politics of the current Senate chief, his former colleagues may be making noise in aid of reelection, while he has his sights on the presidency and on wooing the ruling coalition.

But there, precisely, lies the political dilemma as far as the old, unresolved issues leveled against the administration are concerned. They still excite, politically; and they are still attractive, politically. Whatever the instincts of today’s incumbents—and those instincts are far from idealistic and utterly pragmatic—simply attracting members of the President’s coalition for the 2010 campaign isn’t enough. The public wants closure, and it simply doesn’t like the President or her minions. Which means time and again politicians, high and low, will end up reaching the conclusion Villar reached in the wake of Bolante’s return.

Like it or not, the public wants a showdown with every suspicious character in the President’s circle of acolytes and advisers. Some presidential allies, like Angara, can risk some electoral goodwill by playing the loyal stooge; others, already in power and not up for reelection in 2010, like Zubiri, can also play the grateful stooge. But for all their pandering to the President, it doesn’t get that other stooge, Bolante, off the hook.

Enter the Ombudsman who, after years of inaction, hastened to start tag-teaming for the President, too. Weakly asserting that it has taken the agency two years to “collate” evidence, there will now take place a three-month investigation. Like all the other investigations, it will at a bare minimum, divide the public’s attention between whatever takes place in the Senate and whatever transpires in the Ombudsman’s offices. At worst, it will result in one report by the Ombudsman and another by the Senate. At the same time, by saying it was drawing up a list of officials implicated in the fertilizer scam, but refusing to release their names, the Ombudsman also sent the signal for officials throughout the country to hold their peace or get dragged into the mess.

In other words, by barely doing anything, the Ombudsman has laid the basis for achieving nothing.