“THE OMBUDSMAN is out to destroy me,” Vice President Jejomar Binay reportedly said as he blasted the Ombudsman’s recent recommendation to charge him in connection with the allegedly overpriced Makati Parking Building. Lately, he’s been asserting that, “the Ombudsman is part of the conspiracy to ruin him because he’s a candidate for president” and that he expects to be arrested soon. He definitely sounds nervous and worried that his run for the presidency in the coming elections might get derailed.
Yet as a lawyer, the Vice President knows that only a guilty person has reason to really worry about such suits. The problem is, he continuously refuses to face his accusers and directly answer the charges. Instead, he remains evasive, saying that these are nothing more than plain “political persecution,” thus leading the public to believe that he is hiding something.
The Vice President should just relax and keep his cool because he still has a lot of die-hard followers out there—recipients of his past generosities. And they don’t care much whether or not the country ends up in good hands after election; all they care about are the freebies they got. They might as well be singing these lines from an old song: “Who cares what people say of you, who cares what picture they paint, all that we know is that we love you—saint or sinner, sinner or saint”!
—JUANITO T. FUERTE, jtfuerte@comcast.net