Weekly Brief
National "debate" confused as politicians stray from party ideologies and back into mere election winning posturing.
In review and in prospect
The support base of what was once the “Unity Team” is fracturing and it is not only because of the petty politicking of traditional politicians and their respective cabals of shrill “influencers”. We may lend some credit, perhaps, to Filipinos seeing inconsistencies in the manner with which the administration of President Bongbong Marcos is steering his country in the context of his framing around what he stood for in the campaign leadup to the 2022 elections as well as the inept manner with which the Duterte father and daughter team manage the shaky election winning machine they had built around themselves.
Marcos together with running mate, now Vice President, Sara Duterte won on the back of public backlash against the “woke” liberalism espoused by Opposition “leader” and former “vice president” Leni Robredo. This was a backlash that manifested its infancy in the plurality win in 2016 of Rodrigo Duterte, snowballed during his administration, and came to head in the 2022 election that saw the Marcos-Duterte tandem obliterate the Opposition.
The catastrophic routing of Robredo’s Opposition in 2022 can be interpreted as a thumbs up given by the Filipino people to the right-wing leadership of Duterte and that which voters perhaps assumed a Second Marcos presidency would carry on. Marcos, after all, is the son of the late strongman and former President Ferdinand E. Marcos who ruled the Philippines with an iron fist and who, with the help of US government intervention, was ousted in a coup d'état spun as a “people power revolution” in 1986. Not that the son is necessarily like the father, but the aim at the time of the 2022 campaign was to drive the final nail into the political coffin of the liberal and left-leaning Yellowtard-Communist Axis camp that “led” the Opposition and the hand it had in turning the Philippines into a wannabe nanny state beyond its means.
Marcos, however, went on to ally himself with the US government and pivot Philippine foreign policy back to the country's former colonial master and away from an embrace of China cultivated by the Duterte administration. Marcos did not just a pivot back to America but cosied up to the Democrat (liberal) government of its current president Joe Biden.
On that ideological landscape buckled by a confused national rhetoric lies today's intellectually-bankrupt political “debate” engaged in by a motley community of discredited “thought leaders” and greedy “bloggers” and social media “influencers” bickering over idiotic non-issues. For now, it's the usual abangan ang susunod na kabanata position over a bucket of popcorn that serves the average observer best.
Last week’s blog posts
Marcostards or Dutertards could become the next Yellowtards. So don’t be a tard.
November 23, 2023 by benign0
"The Yellowtards dropped the ball because they became a cult of personality that worshipped dead personalities, made statues of them and worshipped those statues. Somewhere along the way they left their brains — which cost entire family fortunes to fill with textbook stuff — in Katipunan."
Yellowtard-Communist Axis out for revenge against former President Rodrigo Duterte
November 23, 2023 by benign0
"...even if it means getting into a mutual back-scratching alliance with the 'evil' Marcos dynasty. The be-all-end-all objective here is to acquire (in the case of the Yellowtards, reacquire) power and glory."
November 21, 2023 by benign0
"To prop the jeepney up alongside historic public transport icons of other countries and leave out the one that actually holds a stronger claim to that pedestal attests to the selective 'thinking' that Filipino 'thought leaders' apply to their work."