WHAT TERRIBLE choices the Filipinos have come elections!
Recent front-runner Rodrigo Duterte has the gaucheness that puts Attila the Hun to shame! He has no problem bad-mouthing Pope Francis. How will he deal with foreign dignitaries visiting our shores? He finishes almost every sentence that comes out of his mouth with “p—– i–”!
First runner-up in the surveys is Grace Poe. She is a weakling, a greenhorn with only textbook ideas about how to run a government. And the way she has pandered to the Iglesia ni Cristo, girl, was that a deal-breaker or what!? There is no doubt she will become putty in the hands of INC ministers. Whatever little hope we tried to pin on her, if only because of her “clean record,” went pfft!
Second runner-up is the notorious Jejomar Binay with strings of corruption and plunder charges hanging around his neck. The allegations against him suggest how easy it is for a poor boy (whose mother died for lack of money to buy her medicines) to become a multibillionaire through “public service”!
Trailing him is Mar Roxas. Pundits say he has the best credentials “on paper.” But performance-wise, he is just as inept as a sloth. As interior secretary for many years, he could have done much as head honcho of police institutions; but who can argue against the fact that criminality in this country has gone unabated and criminals have become bolder? Alas, Duterte’s appeal comes mainly from Roxas’ and the current administration’s miserable failure to enforce law and order.
At the tail-end is Miriam Defensor Santiago whose one-digit rating is even too far below the percentage of “undecided” voters! Seeing her on TV lumbering on with an aide holding her up is sadly pathetic! What would make her drop out already?
Isn’t there no one else? Heaven help us!
—GABRIELLE MICHELLE AGUILLERA, gamma.reyna@gmail.com