President Benigno S Aquino is not just becoming a lameduck president. He has just shown to us that he is not just lame; he is also a duck.
The son of a president who took over after evicting a dictator, Aquino should have all the time needed to conveniently and permanently scuttle the dream of the Marcoses.
After all, in totality, he and his mother have a combined rule of nearly 12 years, and within that time succeeded in burning the house to scoot out the rats.
Then President Corazon Aquino, mother of this lame duck president, took the helm of power and enjoyed the push of the wind of change in her sails. It should have been that easy.
But when she immediately set her prow to go after the ousted leader and his family, including erasing what was left of their memory because of what she said is grave plunder of government, she only managed to tilt the Marcoses head.
At least, Cory Aquino, whom historians wanted to project as a saint, lightly pressured the judiciary to hand her the Marcoses’ head. But she could not do that even if she wielded all the power.
Not only was she a failure in mustering the government assets to force the Marcoses to return their alleged loot, she also failed in permanently shutting the door for their return to power.
Aquino’s cannons for the Marcoses spewed nothing but smoke grenades when the big guns could do sufficient damage. The smoke of vilification and demonization were shots fired across the Marcoses bow, it did stop one Marcos dead on his track.
And then like a deadly virus, the Marcoses developed a certain kind of immunity that even the harshest of the Aquino’s barrage using the Martial Law had no effect.
The campaign against the Marcoses however, did not stall the family’s cruise to return to power and expose the Aquino government’s hypocrisy.
Aside from Imelda, the wife of the strongman winning a seat of power, daughter Aimee and son Bongbong tauntingly managed to grab key seats in the Aquino government.
Now that Bongbong runs the risk of winning the country’s second highest seat, and racking in on this government’s inutility, the dirty campaign took the young Marcos’in stride.
But the bombardment soon sounded as laughable: either Pinoys found it a bore or took it as a parody against this government.
In the recent surveys, we saw how those opposed to Senator Bongbong are unleashing their deadly arsenal of hate campaign and bashing which borders the toilet kind.
Instead of burying the man’s dream for good, this government watered it instead, the seed of hate grew and grew in to pile heaps of support for the strongman’s son in survey approval ratings.
Why? What has happened?
When this government hoisted Martial Law and the worst of the Marcoses to fool the millennials, they did come with dirtier hands.
With a reign seen as more diabolical than the repressive Martial Law, with the horde of salivating cabinet more known for their characteristic ineptness supporting a three-day president, when the country is sailing into rough waters, there is the rub.
For the older generations, they still see the Marcos years as a country sacrificing to get the infrastructure that pitted the country among the best.
For a lame duck administration whose political endorsement is a kiss of death because all it could boast of, are accomplishments better remembered as monuments of stupidity, would one ever wonder why a vote for Marcos is better?