Now you've seen Susan. Will she make a good president?

As a grieving widow who believes her husband, the late movie actor Fernando Poe, was cheated of the presidency by Gloria Arroyo, we can take the screaming display by actress Susan Roces on nationwide tv last Wednesday.

Her calling the president a liar and a thief, we can charge to freedom of expression stretched to its most extreme limits. Her assertion of the presidency being stolen from her husband, we can charge to ignorance of the facts and gullibility for wrong information.

But her offering of her own self as replacement for Arroyo we find most preposterous. There she was, almost frothing in the mouth, yet finding the gall to say, in the same breath, that she wants to be president?

She should have limited her emotional outburst on nationwide tv to just castigating Arroyo. After all, as we said, that we can take. Certainly we could not expect anything else from an angry woman.

But there is a whale of a difference between an angry woman and an angry president. An angry woman can bitch in public. An angry president cannot. A president, no matter how angry, must maintain decorum at all times, but most especially in public.

Susan Roces cannot offer herself as a credible and viable replacement for Arroyo if she herself cannot rise above all the bad things she has just said about the woman she wants to replace as president.

Of course, her offer to replace Arroyo is not possible unless extra-constitutional means of succession is resorted to by a confused nation. But we just want to take her up on her offer, lest those who are looking for a horse to latch on to get any crazy illegal ideas.

Besides, Susan cannot forever anchor her grievances on the issue of immorality without looking like a hypocrite. Or maybe she just conveniently forgot the fact that her husband also cheated on her and their marriage.

And just in case Susan's political supporters quickly try to make distinctions between cheating in elections and cheating in marriage in order to establish different levels of culpability, let them be reminded of the impeachment case of then US president Bill Clinton.

The presidency of the greatest democracy in the world was just as shaken then by marital infidelity as is this our rapacious democracy now by allegations of poll cheating. In other words, morality as an issue cuts the same way however it may be invoked.

We are not trying to defend Arroyo here because, quite frankly, her position is very indefensible. Besides, it is very hard to defend someone you never liked. And from the very start we never liked Arroyo.

We remember that she already had presidential ambitions while still a senator and tried to jump the gun on everybody by naively campaigning early. This left her not only unduly exposed but also unduly exposed alone. She became the sole target of every conceivable brickbat.

Eventually, Arroyo was forced to settle for the vice presidency. But maybe she was really destined for the presidency, one third of a charmed triumverate of children of past presidents, the others being George W. Bush and Megawati Sukarnoputri, who rose to power at the same time.

Be that as it may, the rise of Arroyo, as mere replacement of Joseph Estrada upon his ouster, was not to her liking. It lacked the clear legitimacy of an electoral mandate. Her place in history was not as esteemed as she would have wanted it to be.

But Arroyo, for one reason or another, was getting increasingly unpopular. Yet, even then, she was not beyond going to any length, including lying, to save her own skin. So she lied to the nation, telling them she was not running again.

Well, she did run again, and so here we are, a nation again in flux because of her. Yet why do we seem to defend her? Because the ones trying to bring her down are simply no better. They have been at her since the moment she lied and, by running, ruined their own ambitions.

Besides, we cannot continue having officials elected by the entire nation replaced in midstream by a few thousand street-marching Metro Manilans. If we want uprisings to determine leadership, then let us do away with elections altogether. At least we save the country billions.