Impeachment: Random jottings / Butz Aquino, reflections - HERE'S THE SCORE by Teodoro C. Benigno

I have all the respect for the prosecutors, the chair Rep. Feliciano Belmonte and Rep. Joker Arroyo particularly. I am in awe of their evidence, an almost endless row of buckets to the brim fetched from the deep, dark, dank waters of presidential misrule and misbehavior. Under ordinary circumstances, they would fasten a noose around the neck of President Joseph Estrada – and he would dangle. But I stick to my basic premise. All this is theater. All this is vaudeville, a pretentious hunk from the cake of make-believe. In the end, Erap Estrada will either be acquitted early – and the powderkeg will explode – or the trial will be overtaken by events.

If you want proof, just look at the president these days. He’s having a ball, just laughing off all the charges against him, unconcerned, plunging gaily into the crowds of the booboisie and the illiterati, kissing and being kissed. The moustache is still very much in place, the smile and the face still beery and bouffe as though plucked from a circus poster, the appetite still huge and hearty. There’s no sign at all that he is sorry for all the misdeeds he has committed, misdeeds that have lit the nation afire, angered and outraged every decent Filipino.

There is no sign he has been into prayer, into any kind of communion with God, the Virgin Mary and the saints.

Some of the ancient popes and high men of office and of the robe – when caught sinning and exposed to public obloquy – jumped into sackcloth and repined in public, face to the heavens seeking mercy from God in disconsolate sobs. Imelda Marcos at least did something like that, grovelling on her knees while treading the church aisle. Nobody was aware of what she was communicating, or whether the Lord was listening and if He was, how He had given up in utter frustration.

No, sirs and mesdames. Hear Mr. Joseph Estrada. He says he has committed no sin. Not a single member of his family, or families, is guilty of any crime. All those charges against him formalized at the impeachment trial are false. He is as innocent as the day he was born. And those at fault are the rich. I heard a previous president talk like that before, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. He was a congenital liar, I can tell you, and he lied with a straight face, saying like Erap Estrada today he never stole, never violated human rights.

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There was a difference, though. A womanizer, Marcos hid his boudoir peccadilloes from Imelda and the public, had a sense of proportion and delicadeza. His sizzling, steamy affair with Dovie Beams was sub rosa or supposed to be. And they met in a lot of secret places. But although Mr. Marcos spoiled her, he never gifted Dovie Beams with a mansion or luxury cars or bestowed on her riches like corporate wealth. Ferdinand was an Ilocano. And Erap Estrada, well, has the generosity of the ancient Mongol emperors, each concubine dwelling in a palazetto.

But to the impeachment trial.

The person who fascinated me most was defense counsel Estelito Mendoza. He wore his bouffant black hair like the wig of a Whig, a smile permanently pasted on his face to emit the cheery confidence of a Cardinal Richelieu. To many in that court, he was expelling wit, wisdom and erudition. And so he held forth with obvious relish, yes in Tagalog, knowing the entire nation was watching. Sen. Robert Jaworski, among other senators – reportedly already mortgaged to the president – listened in beatific rapture. He was like a gamin seeing his first circus.

To me and to those who know him from way, way back to martial rule, Mr. Mendoza was expelling a lot of hot hoosh. Smart, silken lawyering is his job with a lot of baloney thrown in. And to those who may not know or who have forgotten, Estelito Mendoza was Marcos’ top lawyer. Arguing the dictator’s case all over the archipelago. You know what that kind of lawyering means. He spread stardust on the head and frame of Ferdinand Marcos when others would have sprayed spit and slime and soot.

I got a good laugh when Mr. Mendoza narrated that story how his mother gave him ten centavos for ice cream and how he gambled and lost it in cara y cruz. And how his mother reproached him for telling a lie and how from then on, this little tyke of an Estelito learned the supreme value of truth. Hah! Marcos and the truth were planets apart. And so was Mendoza. Is the latter telling me, is he telling us he lawyered for Mr. Marcos with truth and principle and conviction glued to his breast? That was a white, prancing steed and not a black, smothering smoke-belching stallion from the Augean stables of the dictator? C’mon, Mr. Mendoza.

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Well, he did the same thing Friday for Erap Estrada. While Mendoza had Estrada bathing in light streaming through a cathedral, he belabored Governor Luis "Chavit" Singson all evening long. Singson was a baddie, had his footprints as a criminal all over the place, had committed serial villainy as long as your arm. And so how could anybody trust him? And wasn’t Singson the main source of all the impeachment charges against Estrada? You know what, Mr. Mendoza? For all your pyrotechnics, a huge bulk of people believe Chavit Singson is telling the truth when he charges the president with being the lord of gambling lords. Why do you think they want Estrada to resign? Yes, Singson is a wrongo. But in this case, he is perceived as a white sheathe of credible testimony.

Senate President Aquilino (Nene) Pimentel was also in my line of sight last Thursday. Whatever happened to this man? Once he was a hero of the streets, flying into EDSA in 1986 with the wings of Pegasus, incorruptible, impregnable, invincible. Now if he had the power, he would forbid street demonstrations, send all of us to the cleaners. He says the impeachment trial must proceed without any disturbance from the streets. And so last Thursday’s Jericho march to the Senate came a cropper because Nene Pimentel sicced the police on Jaime Cardinal Sin and Cory Aquino.

Nene, once upon a time, you were with us. I watched and heard you in a recent TV talk-show interview. And I almost had a conniption fit when I heard you say that President Estrada was not a bad man, in fact he was a good man. And this while you were and remain Senate president, now sitting beside Supreme Court chief justice Hilario Davide in the impeachment trial. And you say your conscience remains intact? That you have not sold yourself to anybody?

Yes, I also watched the balato twins. I wondered what was going on in their minds. Senators Tessie Aquino Oreta and John Sonny Osmeña must know they are two of the most reviled, despised, scorned politicians today. Where do they go from here? I watched Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago doodling, writing, or underscoring something in a book. Was she bored since she knew, rather she said in advance that Erap would be acquitted? The most pleasant and agreeable to look at was Senator Loren Legarda. She scored very high marks during the Senate Blue Ribbon hearings, surprising everybody with her probing, intelligent, incisive interrogation. Not just a pretty face. Now Loren looked almost impassively as the impeachment unfolded. Watch this girl. She will go far.

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Now let me leave impeachment and unburden on somebody else – Agapito (Butz) Aquino.

What’s happening to the Ninoy Aquino siblings? We had the worst of Tessie Aquino, the bunso, who sucked it to Erap like Madame de Pompadour did to Louis XV. I once had it out with her on another issue and before Erap became president. I told her and her brother Butz that they had deserted the honor and legacy of Ninoy when they were quoted as saying Ferdinand Marcos was no longer an issue. I stuck the blade even deeper by saying if Ninoy were around, he would side with me and not with them.

But to Butz Aquino. He says "Erap is only the mirror of the Filipino people. If we condemn him, we condemn ourselves. A move for his ouster should be aimed not merely at the physical man, but should be directed beyond him or his office into the rejection of all that is evil in us." Whaaaat? I am tempted to call Butz stupid outright. But let’s just say he is muddleheaded and the word cretin is just a few inches away. But Butz was never the bright Aquino. When Ninoy was assassinated, he was a trifle jealous of all the adulation heaped on his elder brother.

He told me and a few others there was one department where he beat Ninoy – and that was the conquest of women. Butz reveled in this role. He was God’s gift to women. All he had to do, we were made to understand, was cast a lustful look at a lady desired, and she would get pregnant.

Look, Butz, you may feel and believe that you and Erap Estrada are one, that you are both ardent disciples of Marquis de Sade, but leave the Filipino people aside. They are not wenchers like you, boozers like you, nocturnal adventurers and sinners like you, disgraceful and villainous and scandalous with the appetite of Brobdingnag, the lechery of Ivan the Terrible, and the lust of mating, salivating baboons.

You go your own way. We go ours.