Grading Duterte

It’s that time of the year again. Heard how some people have come out to give grades to the Rodrigo Duterte presidency? It’s because tomorrow he will be one year in office and we mechanically look back and assess his governance within that span. But don’t believe in those confident enough to give grades. Here’s why:

--If they are politicians, chances are the grade-givers are either in the Duterte camp or in the opposition. They therefore are wearing colored glasses, probably one of them green, the other yellow. I mean, they can’t be objective.

--If they are not politicians, chances are the grade-givers are either supporters of the Duterte administration or are its critics. The supporters are even called “tards” because they see nothing but good in the way their idol is running the government and are prone to cursing those who contradict them. On the net, they are called “trolls.” As for the critics, the “tards” also call them “tards” because they also see nothing good in the Duterte administration. It’s like the pot calling the kettle black. How can there be objectivity in that?

--The middle? The experts? The problem is that there is actually no unified criteria upon which the assessment of the Duterte administration, or any government for that matter, could be based. So even the analysis of experts could become disjointed and therefore subjective.

So consider hearing or reading those grades issued as entertainment.

For example, have you heard of the assessment by Senate President Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III of the first year of the Duterte administration? He gave it an almost perfect grade of 8.5 to 9 (with 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest). His argument? “We’ve felt so many changes...The world believes that we have an independent foreign policy. We are no longer being dictated by other countries. We determine our own course in international affairs,” he said.

As we Cebuanos would say, “Iyaha sad na.” But here’s the thing. Pimentel may be the son of the “honorable” Aquilino Pimentel Jr., the former Senate president and human rights lawyer who made his mark in the fight against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, but in his case the apple seems to have fallen far from the tree. Koko inherited the party his father built and promptly purged it of its ideological mooring. By riding on Duterte’s popularity, the PDP-Laban is now the ruling party.

So it’s like Pimentel is standing in front of the mirror and noting how handsome is the face of the man he sees there.

By the way, have you gotten the partial list of fake news websites released by the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP)? One member of the academe got angry because most of the websites are pro-Duterte. Not only did he expose where his bias lay, he failed to consider that the number of fake news websites increased considerably when Duterte ran last year and since he became president. A link can be had somewhere there.

But that is not my point. I am more interested in what kind of fake news these websites would churn on the matter of assessing the first year of the Duterte presidency. That’s where the creativity of the websites’ admin would be shown.