It is bad enough that Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo should blame the unwilling recipients of his—to put it very, very kindly—utterly tasteless humor for failing to discern what, to him anyway, passes for wit.
But to actually accuse Swiss National Public Radio and Television’s Karin Wenger and Ana Santos of having interpreted what he insists was a joke “wrongly to suit your anti-administration sentiment,” and of sweeping aside the content of the interview on issues raised against the Duterte presidency to “highlight a joke you didn’t even understand to put me in a bad light, as well as the President” are, to our mind, as deluded as his appreciation of his comic talents.
Let us grant Panelo the benefit of the doubt and parse his joke.
Maybe he did, indeed, say, “I pack my clothes… because I travel a lot,” and, hypothetically, mispronounced, wittingly or otherwise, the “p” in pack as “f” in “f*ck,” as not a few Filipinos are known to do.
How then can he explain this in the context of his being “better in bed?” Because he “packs like an 18-year-old?” How does that even begin to make sense?
So, yes, Panelo, you are right in saying Wenger and Santos didn’t get the joke. Neither do we.
And we stand with our two colleagues in denouncing your crass display of lechery and misogyny.
But perhaps we really cannot expect all that much by way of truth and decency from a lawyer who once represented the Ampatuans, the alleged masterminds of the Maguindanao massacre in November 2009.
JO CLEMENTE, acting chair, DABET PANELO, secretary general, National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, nujphil@gmail.com