Lightning strikes

I got the call an hour before the event. A friend of mine was asking if I had heard anything about the press conference defense was about to spring on the public. I said no, I didn’t even know there was one. My friend said defense was announcing it all over the place. They had hastily called for a press conference to drop a bomb.

That pricked my curiosity and had me waiting for it. Well, the bomb turned out to be supot.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. That had got to be the most pathetic display of trying to turn defense into offense. The text messages I got were right. Defense had gotten pretty desperate. It was enough to convince me Serafin Cuevas is one very crafty guy: He wasn’t there.

The press conference sucked in every respect.

One, they tagged the wrong president. If that press conference did anything, it was only to remind the public how things were during Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s time. Nothing moved without the fuel of money from Malacañang. Arroyo so raised the bar on bribery she even managed to corrupt the seemingly incorruptible, people who once fought Marcos. We ought to thank defense for reminding us this impeachment is not really about Corona, it is about Arroyo. Unintentionally, their press conference shone the searchlight on her, a prisoner trying to escape.

Frankly, I don’t know who thought of it. The notion of turning the tables on P-Noy and showing him to be the one who’s really corrupt was either absolutely inspired or absolutely idiotic. The irate responses defense got from the senators last Monday showed which. Before then, Arroyo’s camp’s tack had been to accuse P-Noy of being too one-track in fighting corruption he’d forgotten the economy. Or being too obsessed with fighting corruption he’d thrown due process out the window. What were they saying last Sunday, P-Noy had gotten so obsessed about fighting corruption he would even corrupt people to do it? The sudden shift showed desperation: “Let’s try anything, what have we got to lose?”

Ironically, it was completely unnecessary. The majority of senator-judges voted not to open Corona’s dollar accounts anyway.

Two, in fact, the party defense dissed last Sunday was not really P-Noy but the senators themselves. Defense painted them as a bunch of bribable people. However Jose Roy III twisted and turned last Monday – defense had no intention of disparaging the bribees, only the bribers, he said – he could not ditch that implication. No wonder Jinggoy Estrada and Alan Peter Cayetano said they were fit to be tied and took turns crucifying them. At that they got off lightly.

Indeed, far more ironically, since the majority of the senators voted to go by the Supreme Court’s TRO anyway, what did that suggest? To go by the logic of the defense, P-Noy did not do the bribing, Corona did. Or Arroyo did. Defense got the wrong president in more ways than one. But then, Arroyo was never really a president, not after 2004 anyway.

Three, it was an even bigger sign of desperation that defense went against the very things it stood for, or insisted upon, from the start. Warning against “trial by publicity” was one of them. They began by fulminating against the prosecution for bringing their case about Corona’s houses before the public. The proper forum for those revelations, they said, was not the media, it was the impeachment court. Their allies in the Senate even proposed at one point banning TV from the proceedings. Then suddenly, this.

Even more mind-boggling-ly, defense didn’t just resort to trial by publicity, it resorted to trial by publicity of the worst sort. The kind that rested its case on merely asserting, “Believe us when we say this.” At least the prosecution bothered to show some proof in the form of documents and photographs about Corona’s houses, notably his Bellagio condominium unit. This one was pure allegation with nothing to back it up but the word of unidentified sources. All this time, Cuevas has been earning an almost endearing notoriety by raising all sorts of objections to everything prosecution and its witnesses have to say: irrelevant, hearsay, rushing to conclusions. I don’t know that Cuevas had a hand in what happened last Sunday night. I could picture him in my mind wincing at every turn at the spectacle. Assuming he watched it, he probably had better things to do.

Four, Roy claimed defense could not reveal its sources for much the same reason the media could not reveal theirs—for the protection of those sources. Well, there’s a difference, a gigantic one.

Media are a disinterested party. Their very credibility rests upon it. That is the reason it’s the hardest thing to win a libel case against reporters, because you have to prove there’s malice in their stories. Because you have to prove the reporter knows the parties in his story, stands to benefit from the slant of his story, or personally dislikes the subject of his story. That’s the reason media are allowed to not name their sources. They are presumed to be doing what they are doing in the pursuit of truth.

Defense is about as disinterested in this trial as Mike and Gloria are as disinterested in wealth and power. In lieu of revealing their sources or indeed offering some shred of evidence, all the characters in last Sunday’s press conference said their revelations were coming from the bottom of their hearts. “Do you think,” Ramon Esguerra cried passionately, “we would roust you up on a Sunday evening, when you are resting, just to lie to you?”

Yes.

Five, Esguerra added, “Let lightning strike us if we are telling a lie.” Well, it would have helped his cause if they had held their “gig” in the open air. As it is, the howls that followed in its wake must have something to say to them.

That is the sound of lightning striking.