We had no idea Jocelyn Bolante’s stomach was high up in his chest. He kept clutching the vicinity of his heart when whisked from airport to hospital, but now his doctors tell us his problem is an ulcer. Will someone please ask doctors and patients to refer to the same script?

But seriously now, there is something seriously wrong with the kind of example officials past and present are giving their fellow citizens. Bolante’s family and Palace-connected lawyers have stormed the courts, petitioning the Supreme Court to declare as illegal the warrant of arrest and asking the Court of Appeals to say the same thing and permanently disqualify the Senate from arresting recalcitrant witnesses besides. Even a marginal legal brain knows this is out-and-out forum shopping.

Meanwhile, police officials involved in the embarrassing seizure of funds from now-retired Director Eliseo de la Paz in Moscow, quietly tried to dodge legal bullets by returning their travel allowances. Obviously, this is yet another manifestation of law enforcers trying to evade the enforcement of the law, in the process betraying their attitude towards the law as more a matter of public relations than justice. For if they were entitled to those allowances, they have nothing to fear and nothing to hide; and if the allowances were improperly given, they shouldn’t be able to escape accountability—and that includes their bosses who authorized those allowances.

Evasion is the name of the game. Bolante fled the Philippines to evade the Senate. He returned only because American authorities evicted him from their country. His vow to face his accusers proved as much a case of playacting as his coronary discomfort at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. And his resolve to tell all lasted only as long as the time it took for his administration-associated lawyers to start forum shopping and for the Office of the Ombudsman to finally inch toward a tug-of-war with the Senate on which forum Bolante should face. Bolante’s shenanigans preceded those of Romulo Neri, but it was Neri’s dodging the Senate, too, with a little help from fellow administration official Budget Secretary Rolando Andaya Jr. and administration ally Sen. Joker Arroyo, that laid the legal groundwork for the invocation of executive privilege that will surely be Bolante’s last line of defense, as well.

There is a long list of administration officials who have enjoyed the luxury of picking and choosing from the administration’s legal arsenal, while foot-dragging to buy time—until such time, for example, as President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo provides a civilian job for military and police officials who have to leave the service and thus run the risk of being called to testify before the Senate. The President’s Cabinet and subordinate offices are filled with a galaxy of former star-rank officials who have found refuge in the Palace, the latest of them being former Philippine National Police director-general Avelino Razon.

To be fair, the President and her people are able to act with such impunity because zeroing in on their behavior raises equally embarrassing questions about the people tasked with exercising oversight over presidents and their people. It would be unwise, because potentially self-incriminating, for congressmen and senators to delve into the whole system of travel and other allowances, and expenditures abroad, when they themselves have perfected the art of appropriating for themselves slush fund sand essentially unaccountable official allowances.

To one extent or another, all these questions involve the disbursement and use of public funds and the policies that regulate the use of those funds and the officers who authorize their disbursement. All the questions focus on whether officials follow rules that are clear, transparent, in conformity with the law, and whether they are actually accountable for the decisions they make and the spending they undertake.

Every official response to these questions has been designed to confuse the issue, to drag it out in as many venues as possible, to avoid having to give a straight answer and avail of every legal and administrative shield to escape scrutiny and a definitive verdict, either in the courts of law or of public opinion. In other words, the sum total of the President and her people’s conduct has been to exercise power without responsibility.