Dear GRP Insiders,
The circus is still in town and is indicative of the sort of Showbiz Government that will likely come back with a vengeance if any one of the Opposition candidates seize power (legally or illegally) this year.
Abangan ang susunod na kabanata.
Regards,
benign0
In review and in prospect
Again, an interesting week not because there was any event there that is likely to result in a significant change in the trajectory of these year’s elections. It was mainly for the sheer noise created that, in the end, did not contribute much substance to the national debate. A show organised by GMA Network’s multi-awarded veteran TV journalist Jessica Soho to interview the “major” presidential candidates fell flat after administration candidate Bongbong Marcos respectfully declined. Much as the Yellow Camp would like everyone to believe that Marcos is a “coward” for steering clear of what is evidently a circus he has not much to gain from, it remains to be seen if the mutual high fives members of the Opposition are exchanging amongst themselves will translate to an actual “whittling away” (as the Noted One, Manuel L Quezon III, put it) of Marcos’s lead.
Observations thus far point to a dynamic that will likely persist over the next several weeks at the very least barring any game-changing event — a continued competition amongst Opposition candidates for second place and Team Marcos - Sara Duterte holding fast to their vast committed voter base. As far as conversions where it matters go — between Admin Camp and Opposition (as a bloc) — the Opposition are competing for a small set of “soft” administration supporters whose minds could be changed. This puts into perspective the time the Opposition presidential candidates are wasting competing among themselves.
At this point, there is scant evidence that any of the Opposition bets are doing anything differently to effect a significant change in their political fortunes. Yellow Camp candidate Leni Robredo being the presumptive “leader” of the Opposition attracts the most scrutiny in this regard. Her campaign continues to mirror that of the ill-fated Otso Diretso coalition of eight opposition senator candidates which she backed in the lead up to the May 2019 election. Otso Diretso suffered a catastrophic loss in those elections after mounting a campaign focused primarily on demonising the administration of President Rodrigo, mongering fear over a “return to authoritarianism”, and using social media engagement statistics to delude themselves into thinking they enjoyed broad public approval. We called the imminent loss of Otso Diretso as early as March 2019…
As a coalition, Otso Diretso has so far failed to make a compelling pitch to the broader base of Filipino voters. What it has, instead, achieved is merely ratchet up the inbred rabidness of its small cliquish community of constituents. It did this by continuing to drum in the dogma of the liberal orthodoxy into its followers’ heads. The uppity notions of “human rights”, “gender equality”, “gay rights” — long rendered irrelevant to a public grown weary of no-results abstractions — continue to serve as fodder for the ineffectual campaign of Otso Diretso.
The latter two, gender equality and gay rights, in particular were manufactured “issues”. Homosexual people have long been an accepted and included group in Philippine society. At a time when flamboyant homosexuality was greeted with curious contempt in many even more advanced liberal societies, characters portrayed by comedy greats like Roderick Paulate and the King of Comedy himself, Dolphy, were hits in the mainstream. The Philippines also for so long led the region in gender equality, long before this snowflake term was coined. Indeed, female workers fuel the engines of much of what props up the Philippine economy — the “informal” and overseas employment components of it that benefit the masses.
The Opposition are, in essence, insulting the intelligence of Filipino voters in presuming to lecture them on “gender equality” and “gay rights”. Filipinos have long lived and breathed these concepts. All the Opposition did was package them into dishonest slogans and doctrines that they now use to grease their election winning machines and, worse, their attempts at sedition.
But the worst and most dishonest ideas the Opposition are propagating today involve painting the current Philippine government as one that is “tyrannical” and the judiciary as hopelessly dysfunctional. It is really bad because they do this not to build upon but to tear down. They would rather see a Philippines set back to achieve their ends rather than craft a platform or strategy to build upon what is working and what’s been progressed. We can see this destructive attitude in the way they would run to and get in bed with foreign powers to undermine the Philippines from the outside — a perverse sort of reverse colonialism.
It is easy to see that Robredo’s campaign is thematically identical to that of Otso Diretso and is a textbook case of a campaign set up to fail from the very start. Building a campaign platform on a foundation of manufactured issues is dishonest because it is designed to create unnecessary anxiety in the public and exploit that anxiety for political gain. The 2019 elections provide clear evidence that this no longer works and, by all accounts, the 2022 campaign is exhibiting a similar clueyness in the electorate that holds promise.
Last week’s blog posts
Politics
January 23, 2022 by benign0
"Ultimately it is Bongbong Marcos and his running mate Sara Duterte versus all the rest. There is no Leni, no Isko, no Pacman, no Ping. There is only The Opposition versus the Marcos-Duterte tandem."
January 22, 2022 by benign0
"This is effectively a reverse of roles now. Marcos could be the first Filipino politician who’s succeeded at beating Big Corporate Media at their own game. All this while the Yellowtards are left desperately trying to fashion Jessica Soho as a pambansang HR manager..."
Leaked report commissioned by Leni Robredo camp reveals extent of her campaign team’s INCOMPETENCE
January 17, 2022 by benign0
"The research shows that the majority of the work the Yellowtards need to do over the remaining campaign period is to undo and correct the damage caused by their own work. Can they do this in the less than five months before Election Day?"
Society
Mandatory military service will cure the Philippines’ sissy culture
January 20, 2022 by benign0
"Soldiers fight for their country. They don’t just 'die for country'. They fight at risk of death. This is fundamentally different from the Yellowtard notion of simply 'dying for country'..."
Environment
Answering the threats of natural calamities in the Philippines
January 18, 2022 by The Unpopular Opinion
"Reality presents to us that self-help is something that the Philippines can only rely on. It is really only Filipinos who are in a position to help themselves."