Just for laughs
The government has always been a joke and the president has made that so obvious.
The gulf between what President Rodrigo Duterte says and what he does is raising already dangerous levels of cynicism about government and governance even among those who supported him in the 2016 presidential elections.
But he doesn’t seem to be aware of it.
Even if he were, it’s doubtful if he would at all be concerned, secure as he is in the conviction that his loyalists will continue to support him, anyway.
One can nevertheless sense the rising tides of doubt and uncertainty in the desperate attempts to keep alive their hopes for a better future among those who sincerely believed — these do not include the regime’s boughtandpaid- for trolls and media mercenaries — that he would bring about the changes he promised. But they’re having a difficult time holding on to those hopes in the context of Mr. Duterte’s backtracking on, and even contradicting, his pre- and post-election promises.
Imagine his more discerning partisans’ discomfort over his declaration that he means only two out of every five statements he makes, apparently including those he dispensed so freely during the 2016 campaign. He said precisely that in Manila, during the 115th anniversary of the corruption- ridden Bureau of Customs last year.
“Out of five statements I make, only two are serious; the others are pure nonsense,” he said then in Filipino, and proceeded to blame the media for believing that he means everything he says. Most of his statements, he continued, are just jokes to make his audience and himself laugh.
Apparently it was also for laughs, and he didn’t mean it either, when he said he would end labor contracting ( endo) once elected to the presidency, despite assurances from his office this year that he would issue an executive order to that effect by May 1.
He has instead left it to Congress, from which he is so confident of enough support that he urged the House of Representatives to rush the impeachment of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, after repeatedly denying that he was orchestrating that process. Despite the House majority’s being his personal rubber stamp, he stopped short of ordering his collaborators to end endo through legislation.
He didn’t mean it, and he indeed said so, when he promised the Filipino electorate in 2016 that he would take a jet ski to the West Philippine Sea to plant the Philippine flag on the islands China has occupied and the manmade ones it has built military bases on.
Few if any citizens expected him to literally do what he said. But many believed that he would defend and uphold Philippine sovereignty over its exclusive economic zone and territorial waters. Instead he has done exactly the opposite by allowing China free rein over what is undoubtedly Philippine territory, while he laughed at those who believed him.
Neither did he mean it when he said in 2016 that the US-Philippines military exercise in September that year would be “the last.” The exercise was nevertheless held again in May 2017. He reiterated the same thing early this year. But “Balikatan” is still going to be held this May.
The inevitable consequence of Mr. Duterte’s saying one thing and doing another, and his treating the responsibility of his office to inform the citizenry on what the government is planning and doing as one big joke, is to erode his credibility, question his capacity to lead this country to anything